Storyline

General Mackenzie Hawkins, is back (Unfortunately).

In his guise as Chief Thunder Head the Hawk has discovered a mighty wrong done to his adopted tribe, the Wopotami Indians of Omaha, Nebraska: hundreds of acres of their land have been stolen from them, and are now occupied by Strategic Air Command. Not a situation to please the Hawk, except in its boundless scope for quixotic mayhem.

Sam and his new girlfriend, the beautiful and clever Jennifer Redwing, may put up a fight but they are bound inextricably to the Hawk's dreams.

Review

I disliked Road to Gondalfo, and the two main characters, Hawkins and Devereaux, and to find them in a sequel, well it was never going to enthrall me.

The jacket blurb, describes the book 'This irreverent outrageous novel stands all the rules on their head: it is superb exciting entertainment'. The guy who wrote that was definitely on something very bad.

The book is awful, and I mean a real stinker. Once again the basic premise is quite good, a tribe of Indians who have had their lands stolen, and the battle to get reparations. It is again the way the book has been written. It is supposed to be satirical, but it is totally lost on me. All I can see is various high ranking officials being deeply unpleasant and unprofessional. This extract will show you what I mean :-

'Close it up gumball,' said the swarthy-skinned director of the CIA his voice low but his half-lidded dark eyes ominous. The friggin' campaign's over.'

'Now really, Vincent, there's no cause for that language,' intruded the President. 'There's a lady present.'

'That judgement's up for grabs, Prez. The Lady in question is not unfamiliar with the lingua franca, as it were.' The DCI smiled grimly at the glaring female aide and returned to the man named Washburn at the portable blackboard.'

There is pages and pages of this type of non sensical drivel, all through the book. It takes the story nowhere, and basically gets very irritating. Once you move to the Hawkins/Devereaux, things get even worse, with a mountain of hysterical rubbish. The problem runs through all of the characters, with them shouting screaming and fainting by turn. Devereauxs mother spends large chunks of the book semi comatose, and unfortunately recovers!

The blurb indicates this is a satire. of who and what I still don't know, and quite frankly, don't even care. The book is a complete waste of paper, and is one that I don't ever want to read again.

I hate to trash other peoples work, however in this case I cannot find anything remotely good about the book, the characters are horrible, and the dialogue appalling, with much of it just being people threatening/abusing each other.

If there is one book that you don't buy this is it. Ludlum reached his writing low point with what has to be one of the worst books ever written.

It has been awarded one 'bookie' but in reality it deserves a 0, but my scoring system doesn't allow for it!

Previous	Index	Next