Black Dice

Mack Bolan the Executioner #98

by Don Pendleton (Series Creator), Dan Schmidt (Contributor)

PAPERBACK

Genres: Fiction

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

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.

Wikipedia: Don Pendleton

Reviews

[Jordan Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mack Bolan is called in to West Virginia to help extract a KGB deserter, only to quickly find himself in the wilds of Alaska, embroiled in a 3 way battle between the KGB, the CIA, and a far right militia.

With a plot that sounds like pretty standard Executioner fare, and one of the more disappointing covers of the series, Black Dice seems like a pretty pedestrian story in this lengthy series.

Yet Dan Schmidt takes full control of the story and goes totally crazy with it, writing one of the most action packed, non stop, over the top, violent, mean spirited, completely bonkers entries up to this point. There’s hardly a page in this 252 page book where someone isn’t dying, something isn’t being blown up, or Mack Bolan isn’t devising yet another plan to escape his situation.

Black Dice is seriously on another level when it comes to these books. There’s helicopter explosions, barroom shootouts, limbs being caught in bear traps, throats being slashed, heads being cut off, or people being nailed to trees. There’s an entire band of drug induced ex prisoners thrown into the mix as well…you know, since the rest of the stuff wasn’t insane enough.

I really wanted to give this one a solid 5 stars, and I went back and forth on my rating, eventually settling on 4 stars as the plot threads and multiple characters do get confusing at times. Many of the Russian names are far too similar to distinguish, and the cookie cutter stereotypes of the CIA team and militia make them hard to separate. The conclusion also felt like a let down after 251 pages of violent action. Regardless, Black Dice proves that even though these books are basically the same thing over and over, there is still opportunities to make them that much more fun and memorable.

[Jim Dunlop · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Dan Schmidt pen Mack Bolan novel is pretty excellent. I think Mr. Schmidt channelled GH frost in this one as the stakes go up more and more with Bolan tracking a Soviet defector with a master list of KGB assets around the world. He’s being protected by the CIA who is hoping to exchange him for two American traitors that are being brought in by the KGB. This book has a lot of groups going at once with right wing American militia man the KGB assassins, CIA para, military soldiers and Bolan all meeting head to head in a battle in Alaska. On top of that, the KGB releases a bunch of crazies from a secret government facility in Alaska and arms them to attack a small town and distract all the CIA forces. It was a very good read all in all, though I will say there seem to be too many groups and probably would’ve been served in a Superbolan as things get wrapped up too quickly. The executioner is actually a secondary character in this book as there are so many different characters that chapters are spent dealing with their scenarios. Well written nonetheless.

[Joe]

cool title. someone should use it for something good