Andrew Watts (1)

Rapidly went downhill after a good opening

I couldn't get in to this. It starts off with a man being abducted on his way home. He is shanghaied, put on a plane, destination unknown, and ultimately to an unknown island, with many other Americans of different backgrounds and skills. They are told they are there to come up with ways and means for China to attack and conquer the US, so that others can come up with defences. No-one demands to see proof of the identity of those in charge, nor of the genuineness of what they are being asked to do. I got bored with the naive discussions of how to destroy their own country, and flipped on several pages to see if anyone would start to question the setup.

Though the initial few pages were good, I didn't find myself strongly drawn to any of the characters. Their reaction to the situation into which they were placed was unbelievable, and I felt I was being kept waiting too long for "the story to start". I don't think I am likely to go back and finish this, or the others in the trilogy.… (mais)

While not quite as intriguing as the first book, I thought The War Stage was still quite good. The first novel focused on David Manning, a US intelligence expert on satellites, who gets tricked into working for the Chinese to look at ways to bring down the US. This book shifts to the Middle East to David's brother Chase, who's a Navy SEAL now working with the CIA on tracking an effort by the Chinese to shift currency to bitcoins, a digital currency. The Chinese are offering to assist the United Arab Emirates and Iran into adopting the new currency. But China is also looking to control bitcoins, something they're advertising as not being possible; it's supposed to level the economic playing field and damage the strength of the US dollar.

Some of the narrative is a bit heavy handed on the economics of it all, but it's still pretty well explained.

The action later on is well done and pretty plausible. I'm looking forward to the third, and I assume final, book in the series, set to come out in late 2016 or early '17.… (mais)

"The War Planners" is a pretty good book. It's about a group of US military as well as public/private intelligence specialists who are "recruited" to take part in a war game. The difference is, they're to play the part of China, if China were to want to invade the US. How would these experts go about it? What's really going on was pretty obvious to me, especially since protagonist David Manning was abducted for the mission right off the bat, not "recruited" like the others were. Clearly not all is what it seems.

The idea was good, but could have been executed a bit more thoughtfully. The whole scenario seemed off from the beginning. But the action was good enough to keep me going, and the ideas the Red Cell comes up with are pretty terrifying. I enjoyed it enough to buy the second book (the first is currently free from Amazon).… (mais)