Clive Cussler's Hellburner (Oregon Files)

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A group that sits with its finger on the trigger of a torpedo so deadly it could level entire cities. Spectacular fighting scenes ensue, with ex-SEAL Cabrillo displaying tenacity and skill worthy of the best fictional heroes. Aside from that, the main villain's backstory was underwhelming, as was the supporting villains' stories. While the evildoer Hakobyan will “do business with the Devil himself if it turned a profit,” Cabrillo will never do anything against American interests. The name Hellburner occurs twice near the end and is not integral to the storyline, but it makes for a good title.

Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U. I thought Mike Maden’s style was true to the Clive Cussler’s original books and to the characters he created. I got up to 200 pages and just quit because I wasn't interested in the story because I knew what was going to happen. I'm not familiar with Maden's work, but he did a fine job keeping the familiar feel of all the unique characters in the Oregon Files. The characters just felt really "dead" to me, there was no spirit and Juan and the others just sort of annoyed me.This felt more like a plodding series of events instead of the rip roaring, fast paced adventures of the Oregon Crew. With millions of innocent lives hanging in the balance, the Oregon's crew must unravel a tangle of drug-smuggling routes and international conspiracies spanning from the Aegean Sea to the Indian Ocean. The Oregon continues to be a wizard ship with all the latest tech features to go along with a brilliant, capable crew. It's entertaining, but there's only so many times I can read about the Oregon saving a city or country from annihilation with a few seconds left on the countdown clock through some crazy scheme Juan has cooked up. When I read the book and found out that Reyes was going on the mission to kill the drug lord, I was really disappointed.

The Oregon seems nigh on invincible at this point, being equipped with a rail gun, Gatling guns, missiles, EMP cannons, super drones, NSA level audio and visual surveillance, and so many other bells and whistles that I can't see anything being a threat to them at this point. This stand in author for him has gone overboard with details of gun makes and models and mansplaining how things worked.The narrator, soon established as Elliot Chase, then zooms out to address the reader directly, introducing the players—most importantly movie star Lana Farrar. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival.