Review: Pirates
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 19, 2013
Avast, me bucko! Arrrr! No, it isn't Talk Like a Pirate Day, but "Black Flag" put me in the mood. The latest Taskforce story is about ... you guessed it ... pirates. Unlikely though it seems, Knuckles commits his team members to help search for Blackbeard's treasure. Of course, the treasure hunters who want to hire the business that the Taskforce uses as a cover are not your ordinary adventurers who spend their time diving for doubloons.It's become increasingly common for publishers and writers to market a short story a month or two before a new series novel appears, packaging the story with a sample chapter of the novel to spark interest in the novel while generating extra income from the story sales. The stories are usually unremarkable. Brad Taylor's short stories have steadily improved, and "Black Flag" is the most imaginative of the ones he's produced. There isn't much that's new here in terms of character development, but that's to be expected in a between-novels story. There is, however, plenty of action, the pirate theme lends itself to some tongue-in-cheek fun, and (as is typical of Taylor) the story is smart and fast-moving.(This review is of the story, not the sample chapter. Since I don't need a sample chapter to induce me to read the next novel in the series, I'll just wait for the novel to come out and read it all at once.)