Midnight. Suddenly the Moscow sky bursts into broad daylight. Eight hours later a similar flash also bathes Washington D.C., in its glaring spill.
Twenty-five thousand miles above the two capitals, exploding hydrogen warheads have ruptured the night. In the name of peace, a misguided U.S. scientist has cracked the access code to an orbiting missile and detonated two of its MIRV warheads.
And that is just a warning.
Mack Bolan, destined to patrol the desolate hinterland of terrorism, learns of this horrifying event from a secret link. Thermonuclear doom! The words echo in The Executioners mind as he assaults the scientists hissing snakepit.
Don Pendleton was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, December 12, 1927 and died October 23, 1995 in Arizona.
He wrote mystery, action/adventure, science-fiction, crime fiction, suspense, short stories, nonfiction, and was a comic scriptwriter, poet, screenwriter, essayist, and metaphysical scholar. He published more than 125 books in his long career, and his books have been published in more than 25 foreign languages with close to two hundred million copies in print throughout the world.
After producing a number of science-fiction and mystery novels, Don launched in 1969 the phenomenal Mack Bolan: The Executioner, which quickly emerged as the original, definitive Action/Adventure series. His successful paperback books inspired a new particularly American literary genre during the early 1970's, and Don became known as "the father of action/adventure."
"Although The Executioner Series is far and away my most significant contribution to world literature, I still do not perceive myself as 'belonging' to any particular literary niche. I am simply a storyteller, an entertainer who hopes to enthrall with visions of the reader's own incipient greatness."
Don Pendleton's original Executioner Series are now in ebooks, published by Open Road Media. 37 of the original novels.
This 66th book in the series is wholly readable, but for whatever reason it failed to resonate with me like Cunningham’s previous work. It’s probably somewhere along the lines of a plot that never really felt utilized to its full potential and Bolan himself seeming totally out of it half the time, missing obvious clues and making some very amateurish mistakes with no explanation. Yeah I like my heroes to be at least a little fallible but here it was as if Bolan had zero experience in being the executioner and this was his first mission.
One of the better Bolan books I've read so far. Chet Cunningham wrote half of the volumes of another series I like, The Penetrator. So this one sort of falls in line with that. Also one funny aspect of this is that The Executioner teams up with a dreaded female KGB agent. A little after they team up, Bolan and the women decide to have relations. So in other words, all be it crude, but Bolan screws the Russians once again.
The Executioner is out on the trail of a former NASA scientist that is out for peace. No matter at what cost. He explodes two orbiting missiles over each The U.S. and Russia. He wants total disarmament. He has a small army run by a Japanese warrior with some ulterior motives. Bolan and the before mentioned KGB agent have to stop them before the holocaust rains down on the earth.
Bolan must work WITH the KGB instead of eliminating those who were responsible for his beloved April's death?! {Gasp} Well, this should be an interesting tale...