Drug cartels. Kidnapping. Brutality. Terrorists. Traitors. Shootouts. The Polaris Protocol has all of those things.
Not counting the three “eBook shorts” that have been released, The Polaris Protocol is book five in the Pike Logan series (book six is set to be released this July). The books are written by retired Lieutenant Colonel Brad Taylor, a former infantry officer and special operator who began writing the series during his twilight assignment as the Assistant Professor of Military Science at the Citadel. His books have repeatedly landed on the New York Times Bestseller List and the USA Top 150 and his latest is no exception.
The Polaris Protocol starts with the Taskforce, a super secret entity made up of hero Pike Logan, his teammate and love interest, Jennifer Cahill, and a group of lethal hardasses with amusing names like Retro and Knuckles, operating in Turkmenistan, while a reporter is witnessing something he shouldn’t back in the States, a young boy is taking his last look out a plane window, and close air support in Afghanistan is going all wrong. Things start really getting crazy when one of the above is kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel and we learn there’s a traitor trying to sell national security secrets. What follows is a maze of firefights, fistfights, and a race to stop a countdown.
Although the book follows the standard requirements of this kind of action novel, there are a few things that make Taylor’s book different. First are the details. I’m not talking about facts about the countries the Taskforce finds themselves in or weapons systems details, though those are good too, but the details that make Taylor’s background apparent. One example is when Logan makes the decision not to set off a fire alarm, not because he is concerned about the noise or people congregating, as an uninformed author might say, but because they don’t know the TTPs of the local cops. These kind of details give the story some authenticity.
Second are his bad guys. While I thought his hero and heroine were a little like cardboard cutouts with the emotional consistency of three year olds, I liked the cartel enforcer and terrorist characters Taylor created. They had much more depth and realism to them than his other characters and they pulled me into the story. I don’t know if this is a product of Taylor’s background, where you spend more time studying the enemy than you do blue forces, or some other reason, but I don’t usually like the bad guys and I did in this book.
Overall, I liked the premise of the book – the concept of GPS disruption and its effects is interesting and handled creatively by Taylor – but it took about 200 pages for me to really get into the story. While the beginning of the book was filled with plenty of action, it lacked the suspense I was hoping for, with Taylor too often tipping his hand about what was coming, rather than trusting his reader to figure it out. This is the first Pike Logan book I’ve read, so I can’t speak to how it compares to the others. I can tell you I liked reading his blog, where he talks about everything from Benghazi to Edward Snowden, better than I liked reading the book. But, then again, I’m a former intel analyst.
If you’re looking for a little something to read this weekend, you can find hard copy and ebook versions of his novels out there at all the usual places (signed copies available through his website). You can read more about the author or find a list of other books he’s written on his website and you can see details of the research he’s doing for his next book by following his Facebook page or Twitter feed.
© 2014 – 2020, Sarah Maples LLC. All rights reserved.
No Comments