Review: mediocre at best
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 14, 2012
ETA 1-6-13The author left a comment complaining about spoilers, so consider this a SPOILER ALERT.A freebie I got back in late March. I finally finished it today.Six reviews - all 5-star. A highly suspicious thing in itself normally. I took a closer look at the reviews. Nothing I can put my finger on, although the way the first 5-star review is written makes me wonder if it was written by the author or his PR flack. that and this particular review was posted only two days after the publish date. barely time to read the book."Kenneth Wash is to the Global War on Terrorism what Tom Clancy was to the Cold War era. "The Final Defense" is a carefully researched, gripping story that interweaves America's foreign conflicts of the past 10 years and gives the reader a glimpse into the mind of a terrorist mastermind intent on revenge. Fresh and relevant, you will not be able to put this book down!"The book starts out with a description of a 2007 US raid on an Iraqi terrorist (Masri) that results in the terrorist's family being killed. Somehow the terrorist manages to grab the name tag of the Captain (Ramsey) leading the assault. The terrorist manages to escape, vowing to kill Ramsey. I was unimpressed with the prologue. Did not seem realistic that a USA Captain would personally lead a raid like this, and letting the terrorists jump out the window and not having the windows covered, did not seem especially bright either. Do US military personnel wear name tags on raids like this? Not a real good beginning. So, I didn't read anymore for awhile until I resolved in early June to either finish reading the books I had started, or decide not to finish them and write a 1-star review for them.Chapter 1 fast forwards to modern day Moscow where Masri arranges to buy a Russian nuke and have the Russians smuggle it into the US.A suborned airman turns over classified Blackhawk helicopter parts including a transponder to a Russian agent. The airman is than murdered.The Russians use the transponder installed in a Russian helicopter to drop off the terrorist and the nuke in TX. The Coast Guard notices something fishy about the RADAR return and sends out a couple of US helicopters that destroy the Russian choppers out in the Gulf of Mexico after they make their delivery. Not getting any more believable.A border patrol unit engages the terrorists that have been dropped off in TX and kills some of them but the nuke gets away.We learn Ramsey is now working for the CIA, having been medically separated from the army due to wounds he suffered in the raid.The story goes on. Masri gets the nuke to St. Louis where he enlists the help of an Iraqi ex-pat (Ahmed) who is an ER doctor and agrees to create a diversion. By random chance Ahmed's son is going to a zoo the next day on a field trip so Ahmed makes up bomb and puts it in his lunch box. A bully steals the kid's lunch and opens it up and is blown up, along with a bunch of other people, but Ahmed's kid is in the bathroom and survives.Then there is a long series of very improbable events that transpires, including Ramsey deciding to partner up with a CIA contract security guard in lieu of a competent agent. in fact, Ramsey is depicted as an analyst but suddenly becomes a CIA field operative, gun and all, and goes after the terrorist. At some points I was wondering what goofiness the author would dream up next.The book started out pretty good, but it got less and less plausible as it went on. It was almost as if the author was trying to top himself over and over again. I have to have some level of believability in a story to really enjoy it. This one lost me on that point. Nothing after the first 5 or 6 chapters was really believable.It was kind of fun for a while, but in the end, I just wanted it to finish. It is better then the books that I have given 2 stars to, but not by all that much. What aggravates me most about it is that had the author chosen to write a more serious version of this story, it could have been a very good book. Instead, it devolved into a series of events that were never believable.To compare this to Clancy at his best is pathetic. This is nowhere near Clancy. Clancy had the rare ability to weave a story with believable characters doing believable things, even if objectively things just are not the way his books portray them. This author does not have that skill, although he did pull it off here and there.As for "carefully researched", maybe he went to a comic book store and did his research there. There is just one thing after another that tells me his research was very limited. I can deal with a few things here and there that are out there a ways - it is fiction after all. But for me, the package as a whole just had way too many of those kind of things in it.I gave it three stars, and barely that. I have no idea what book the 5 star reviewers read. A 5 star thriller would not take me this long to get through it. I would want to come back to it to finish it up because it was so well done.