47 books into this series and Mack Bolan, the executioner, is still doing his thing. Only now, instead of wiping out murderous mafiosos, he’s got a blank check from the United States Government to kick ass and take names of the world’s worst terrorists. We’ve already seen him head to Panama, Algeria, to his proving grounds of Vietnam, and the Florida Everglades, all in effort to confront and destroy terrorist head on. In “Renegade Agent”, he’s globetrotting from Libya, to Italy, to London, all in an effort to take down Frank Edwards, an ex-CIA agent who has turned his back on America and joined forces with the Communist forces of Russia. In typical Executioner fashion, Bolan blasts his way through countless bad guys, discovers an ex-love interest/coworker, and manages to save the day, all wrapped up in a nice and easy to read 188 pages. Written by Steven M. Krauzer, I had extremely high hopes for this one. Krauzer had previously written “Double Crossfire” and “Terrorist Summit”, 2 of the best of this iteration of the executioner books. Sadly, that’s not the case and, unfortunately, “Renegade Agent” is, at this point, the weakest of these white cover Golden Eagle publications.
Rather than be a straight up thrill fest like previous entries, “Agent” takes far too long to get moving. The opening chapters crawl at a snail’s pace and have next to no bearing on the eventual outcome until about 30 pages in. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of expiation and set up, however Krauzer, for whatever reason, wasted all that on countless and pointlessly repetitive flashbacks to previous books in the series. At this point, 47 books in, I think it’s safe to say that most readers are at least marginally familiar with the storyline and don’t need to be reminded multiple times of the cast of characters or Bolan’s past exploits. Fans are also pretty well versed in our main protagonist’s point of view regarding violence and killing. Krauzer took every conceivable opportunity to beat the audience over the head with Bolan’s pseudo-philosophy and made this a slog to get through.
The last chapter does set the course back on track, though it’s too little, too late and ends up leaving this book with a pedestrian rating of 3 stars. That’s not necessarily that bad, but Krauzer is a much better author than “Renegade Agent” presents.
©1982 Published by Golden Eagle
Review by @jdog_reads
No comments:
Post a Comment