G.I. JOE - ABOVE & BEYOND

A Del Rey Mass Market Original

Written by Max Allan Collins

Copyright © 2009 by Hasbro Inc.
Copyright © 2009 Paramount Pictures

All Rights Reserved.



In the prequel to the movie G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the book Above & Beyond deals with the G.I. Joe team - an elite United Nations Special Operations Force - on a parallel mission with Lieutenant Duke Hauser's elite American covert insertion team, in secret support for Hauser's team as both teams search for advanced weapons that are being sold by weapons dealers.

In this book, you get to know a little bit more about the individual Joes, including Cover Girl - who did not last very long in the movie. I actually grew to like Cover Girl in the book and felt rather sad knowing her ultimate fate in the movie G.I. JOE: The Rise of the Cobra. There are two missions, the first mission dealing with the sophisticated weapons that the weapons dealers are dealing with. The final mission is the one that is mentioned in the movie and deals with super soldiers - along with Duke's doctor brother-in-law. This second final mission leads into the movie and the terrorist organization that they will deal with. I felt the pain of Duke, whose pain was a consequence of that last mission. This prequel book is a little more believable to me than what the movie had portrayed.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

UP COUNTRY

WARNER BOOKS EDITION

Written by Nelson DeMille

Copyright © 2002 by Nelson DeMille

Cover design by Jackie Merri Meyer
Cover illustration by Stanislaw Fernandez
Hand lettering by Tony Russo



In Up Country, a sequel to Nelson DeMille's The General's Daughter, Paul Brenner, who resigned from the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division, is called back into service in Washington D.C. by his former commanding officer - who wants Brenner to conduct an investigation into a homicide that occurred 30 years ago during the Vietnam War. Vietnam veteran Brenner reluctantly returns to Vietnam in the middle of the Tet new year celebration - and meets ex patriot Susan Weber, a possible CIA agent. Brenner and Susan then journey through Vietnam searching for the witness to this 30 year-old mystery.

While there is the story of the homicide investigation, most of the book seems like an autobiography of Demille's experience as a U.S. Army lieutenant during the Vietnam War. Brenner revisits his former battle sites and bases in the country as the country celebrates the week-long Tet celebration. Brenner tells Susan of his experiences at these sites to her, the horror of the fighting of the U.S. troops and the Viet Cong, as Brenner searches for a witness who used to be an enemy. You see the contrast of Brenner's and the Americans western influence on Vietnam as a new market, despite the holiday frame of mind of Tet. You also see the conservative Asian Vietnamese culture and the politics as evidenced by the repeated investigated interviews by the Vietnamese cop Colonel Mang against Brenner - who resents the American involvement that resulted from the Cold War military conflict, so Brenner suffers from Mang's resentment. Even if the country prospers from the western tourism of Vietnam, Mang is quite resentful. While the ending of the book was not exactly satisfying to me, the ending does reflect the political attitude of the end of the conflict back in 1975.

Brenner's relationship with Susan is interesting, because you are never really sure if Susan is really interested in Brenner as a lover - or if she is ready to betray him and kill Brenner as part of Susan being a CIA operative. Certainly Brenner is ambivalent to Susan as he is always wondering about Susan's feelings, as well as wondering about his relationship with his girlfriend who is still back in the States.

Paramount Pictures had bought the rights to Up Country with John Travolta reprising his role as Paul Brenner. We will see if the movie will go into production and come out.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

Written by Ian Fleming

Copyright © 1956 by Glidrose Productions Ltd.

Paperback
Publisher: Berkley (May, 1982)
Language: English

ISBN-0-425-05364-4



In Diamonds are Forever, part of the James Bond series by Ian Fleming, Britain' secret service agent Bond is sent to America to search for diamond smugglers in order to defend the national security and economic well-being of the United Kingdom. Bond once again teams up with his American agent friend and counterpart Felix Leiter and meets the hot, mysterious Miss Tiffany Case as he uses her to go up against the mob.

As Bond tries to infiltrate the mob, it is just a little too unbelievable to me that a stranger from England is able to get into the mob that easily. Granted there was some initial suspicion from the mob, but there was not enough suspicion for me to totally believe that he could get accepted with them even at a low level. It would seem criminals would be very cliquish and paranoid against strangers. There is a little action involved in the book, but not as action-packed as compared to today's media like the James Bond movies. Considering the title Diamonds are Forever, diamonds are hardly mentioned in the book - even if diamonds was the reason Bond was on the case. When you consider the high value of diamonds as a highly traded precious stone commodity, this is a most noticeable lack of use in the book - as diamonds have been the driving violent force behind using slave and child labor, especially in Africa, to fund the blood diamonds by dictators and revolutionary entities. I do not recall any mention of these issues being touched on in the book. It would have been interesting to see if the cliquish criminals had attatched some of the supposed supernatural lore of diamonds to their diamonds when they were dealing with them.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

Wild Fire

Vision
Hachette Book Group USA

Written by Nelson DeMille

Copyright © 2006 by Nelson DeMille



In Wild Fire, part of the John Corey series, Detective John Corey investigates the death of a fellow Anti-Terrorist Task Force agent who was investigating the Custer Hill Club in the middle of the woods - and finds out a horrible Mid-Eastern American plot concerning nuclear weapons just after 9/11.

This is a typical smart ass John Corey thriller - where the running gag in this book is about bears, especially since Cory is a city person. The stakes get higher and higher as John and his FBI agent wife Kate discover more and more about the sinister plot with the nuclear weapons - and America's automatic response to a domestic nuclear strike called "Wild Fire." Wild Fire is based on a rumored actual Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) retaliation response of the U.S. military's nuclear arsenal concerning a hostile first strike use of weapons of mass destruction against America, the result of which would basically mean the annihilation of both sides if it happens. The plot all originates from a mountain hunting lodge club - a club whose members include high-level members of the U.S. government.

When they first describe the nuclear threat to John and Kate, I kept thinking they would explain something like the wargame scene in the movie Wargames, where all the nuclear missiles from the various nuclear pacts launched at each other. That was a scary scene, just thinking about the implications. Since one of the targets in Wild Fire was Los Angeles, I can imagine how scary it would be like if the Wild Fire scenario was intentionally initiated in my hometown.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

Fail-Safe

THE ECCO PRESS

Written by Eugene Burdick + Harvey Wheeler

Copyright © 1962 by Eugene Burdick and John Harvey Wheeler, Jr.

All rights reserved



In Fail-Safe, during a routine strategic airborne incident deployment from the Strategic Air Command on an unknown airline, one group of American nuclear strike bombers accidentally gets a "go" code from their Fail-Safe box to complete their mission - to bomb Moscow.

I remember watching the 1964 movie Fail-Safe with Henry Fonda, which was based on the book, in junior high school and how suspenseful the movie was - and the awful executive decision the President was forced to make here at home. The movie was so suspenseful that all the students in my class were interested in the movie, which is hard to do to interest a rowdy junior high class. This was still during the height of the Cold War, so the relevance of the movie particulary hit home with us. I am not sure if it was the politics or the hardware that my class liked. I think the guys were interested in the planes and hardware, like I was. Watching a primitive, when compared to today, computerized tracking system as the high-speed, high-altitude planes head deeper into Russia - and the Russians response - was both cool and terrifying at the same time.

All of the above from the movie is in marked contrast to the book, which has the first half of the book dealing with all the politics. The bombers do not really get the orders to head for Moscow until halfway through the book, which I was a scene that I was waiting for. Reading through all the politics was boring when compared to the suspense of the movie. There was one entire chapter on the background of one character, but the character's background had no real bearing on the story except for the character's academic achievements. When I was reading this chapter, I was going - "Get on with the story!" Even the 2000 live-event TV movie Fail-Safe was more suspenseful than the book, of which I believe is mainly due to the quality of the acting and the compact pacing of telling a story in a two hour time-block. The cover of the book that I had read had a sticker on it, Soon to be a CBS-TV Live Movie Event Starring George Clooney.

You can see how trusting all of our military strength to such fail-safe machines like this, especially with such awesome power of the Strategic Air Command, is a precursor to such things as the Terminator movies - like Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. It is interesting that the term "fail-safe" just really means that if a failure happens, the failure should happen in the safest fashion.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

Flight of the Phoenix

HarperEntertainment
An Imprint of  HarperCollinsPublishers

Written by Elleston Trevor

Copyright © 1964 by Elleston Trevor. All rights reserved.

Search Amazon.com for the flight of the phoenix



In Elleston Tevor's The Flight of the Phoenix, a Skytruck air freighter runs into a sandstorm - and crashes in the Sahara desert,  the largest desert in the world. Now the survivors of the air freighter must struggle to stay alive in one of the hottest places on Earth as they desperately try to build a smaller new airplane from the wreckage of the Skytruck.

The development of the surviving characters are uneven - as I only recall half the characters of whom I could distinguish from the others. The struggle for leadership between the guilt-ridden pilot Towns and the obsessed engineer Stringer, as they construct the new plane to get away from their harsh landscape, is the main focus of the characters - although I was a bit put off by Stringer's inexperience with the real world. When the British soldier Captain Harris insists on traveling through the vast desert to a distant oasis to get some water, it seems almost cruel to me that the captain expects his sergeant to go marching with him into the parched, forbidding dessert. Especially since the Sahara desert gets less than three inches of rain per year. This book has been made into two movies - the 1965 film with James Stewart with a Fairchild C-82 Packet, as well as the 2004 film with Dennis Quaid with a Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar. I saw the 2004 film in the theater and the plot point towards the end of the movie was a shocker for me, but it seems to have been played down in the book.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.
Search Amazon.com for the flight of the phoenix

ATTACK OF THE SEVENTH CARRIER

ZEBRA BOOKS

Written by Peter Albano

Copyright © 1989 by Peter Albano



In ATTACK OF THE SEVENTH CARRIER written by Peter Albano, the fifth book of the Seventh Carrier series, the Imperial Japanese aircraft carrier Yonaga - which was originally supposed to be part of the Pearl Harbor attack force in 1941 - must deal with getting combat ready to go against an enemy naval fleet, while Lieutenant Brent Ross is assigned to a WWII submarine.

Because of a Chinese space orbital weapons system, modern weapons and machinery become destroyed if used. So WWII equipment is brought out of mothballs to fight the world's terrorists. As Lt. Ross, the American samurai, falls for a mature woman CIA liaison agent, Ross learns how to operate a WWII submarine to fight alongside Yonaga against a battle fleet. Considering that American submarines sank almost five million tons of shipping during WWII, this submarine is an important part of Yonaga's fleet. The loss of one of the major characters in the series is a shock and is sure to affect Ross in future novels.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

G.I. JOE - THE RISE OF COBRA

A Del Rey Mass Market Original

Written by Max Allan Collins
Based on a Story by Michael Gordon, Stuart Beattie, and Stephen Sommers

and the Screenplay by Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, and Paul Lovett
Copyright © 2009 by Hasbro Inc.
Copyright © 2009 by Paramount Pictures

All Rights Reserved.



 A convoy of nano-tech weaponry, weaponry made from molecular robots - is ambushed by aggressive super-soldiers that are called Vipers. The convoy is rescued by a top secret elite team of soldiers from all branches of the armed forces called G.I. JOE. Survivors of the convoy, Duke and Ripcord soon join the team G.I. JOE as they go after the nano-tech weaponry the Vipers stole from the convoy before the Vipers can deploy the weapons. The Vipers collaborate with a weapons dealer, who basically is in charge of a group of terrorists - that will soon become the terrorist organization called COBRA.

This is a fairly straight-forward novelization of the movie with very little additional material to add to the adaptation, which makes it a little disappointing coming from Max Allan Collins. I expected a little more bite in the style from a novelization from the usually dependable Collins - especially after watching the movie, which was more commercialized. I wanted to see more of the envitonmental impact of the nano-technology weapons of grey goo eating all of the metal it touches, like when they ate the Eiffel Tower.

See movie review:
G.I. JOE - THE RISE OF COBRA

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

Alfred HItchcock and The Three Investigators in The Mytery of Death Trap Mine

Random House

Written by M.V. Carey
Based on characters created by Robert Arthur

Copyright © 1976 by Random House, Inc.



 The 24th book in the series Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, written by M.V. Carey, teen aged boys - The Three Investigators - are invited by the uncle of their old friend Allie to spend some time at their ranch for the summer. Allie is suspicious of their neighbor who returned to his family's shut down mine and begins working the mine again. What valuable minerals could he be mining? There was a reason the mine was closed. Tensions rise when a suspect from an old armed robbery is found dead in a mine shaft and The Three Investigators search for a connection as to why the suspect came to the mine.

In this young adult book, Allie is the equal of The Three Investigators analytical abilities which is why she irritates the boys so much - because Allie is just as headstrong and competitive as they all are. It is too bad that I felt that The Three Investigators never really took to Allie. I have always felt that they needed a girl as a regular in this series as a resourceful companion to the boys, and Allie definitely fits the bill.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.

The Devil Met A Lady

ibooks

DISTRIBUTED BY SIMON & SHUSTER, INC

Copyright © 1993, 2000 Stuart M. Kaminsky

Afterword copyright © 2000 Stuart M. Kaminsky

In The Devil Met A Lady, written by Stuart M. Kaminsky and set during Hollywood's Golden Age, private investigator Toby Peters must protect actress Bette Davis from being kidnapped by a spy ring trying to get top secret plans from her husband.

While reading this book, I kept picturing Bette Davis as the girl on the cover instead of how the real Bette Davis looks - which shows how important a cover can be. Davis can be seen at the servicemen-only Hollywood Canteen, which Davis managed during World War II. Toby is just as funny as always, and his police detective brother hates Toby as always. The spy ring is practically comic relief so, despite their violence and guns, it is hard to take them too seriously. The sad part is the seriousness of Toby's sister-in-law's medical condition. Toby and his brother's relationship becomes civil when relating to Toby's sister-in-law, which shows their concern for her. I hope to see Toby's sister-in-law being well in future books. Having Davis vist Toby's sister-in-law in the hospital was a rather poignant touch.

Pancho

All people smile in the same language.