It is difficult to believe that this was the best Higgins could do. He has been a successful author and has published over 70 books. However, he seems to be phoning it in.

In the case of The Killing Ground, with Sean Dillon and his fellow British special agents, the plot is simplistic and transparent. You know when the chief of the department reminds them to wear their ballistic vest, within a heartbeat, someone is going to get shot, but saved because of their vest. When a shootout ensues, Dillon's men always shoot their quarry right between the eyes.

Convenience upon convenience, coincidence upon coincidence, made this a painful book to listen to. Christopher Lane does a decent narration job for the material. It's a shame he didn't have a little better book to read. ( )

The body count continues to diminish. There is some excellent suspense near the end. The story largely tells itself without nudges from General Ferguson or Sean Dillon. A couple more characters have been introduced bringing the number of good guys to a nice squad sized group. It is pretty clear that Higgins has a long-range plan in mind so we'll just have to read along to see where he takes us. ( )

There were so many problems, plot holes and disconnects with this novel it made it hard to enjoy.

- Plot holes, plot holes everywhere: The Rashid family who was wiped out in prior books is now magically back, apparently with Islamic fundamentalist members, members who in the prior novel took no revenge for the slaughter of their family. The appearance of the new family members also broke the plot of a prior novel which saw no one alive to inherit the family company. Then later in the book, despite essentially controlling a small state no one points out to the Rashids that the white people who have suddenly appeared to explore an ancient wreck were last exploring the wreck when they were having a shoot out with the Rashid family.

- Scenery is recycled: in a prior novel there was an old world war 2 building updated with high tech security in the out skirts of a town with a nearby pub and caravan park. The pub had an over talkative old man who amazingly is the only person who knew how to bypass the high tech security via a forgotten tunnel. The climax of this novel occurred in the exact same scenario including the over talkative old man and forgotten tunnel only a different location in England.

- There are many paragraphs dedicated to how terrible Sunni Muslims are, yet the entire novel the 'hero' muslim is operating for Osama Bin Laden / Al-Qaeda who are Sunni. It's as if OBL/AQ were thrown in to increase sales in light of today's Islamic terrorism.

- The characters often tell teach other things they already know. If two characters have been using bulletproof vests/waistcoats for over half a decade I really don't think it's required for one to explain to the other the mechanics of the vest.

- The characters lines are interchangeable giving you no 'sense' of a character, one specific thing said by one character is often randomly then said by another leaving you to double check who's in the conversation. The characters also change the way they speak, Sean Dillion spent several recent novels pronouncing 'old' as 'ould', but now has once again resumed saying 'old', bizarre.

- Cover: The book cover has a Citation X small business jet on the cover with an engine on fire, however in that plane is only briefly used and the plane in the book which does actually have an engine issue is a Hawk, and it wasn't on fire, it just had black smoke from a leaking oil seal.

Overall, this is terrible book and HarperCollins should feel bad for wasting resources printing it. ( )

I haven't read any Jack Higgins books for around 15 years, and I am now glad of it. This had little pacing or suspense, was packed with stilted conversations, and was in places just plain ridiculous. ( )

Adequate but unremarkable episode in the long-running Sean Dillon series. ( )