Battle Stations: They were silent warriors in a blood red sea...

DEPTH FORCE #4

by Irving A. Greenfield

All hands go to battle stations in this exhilarating submarine thriller! Perfect for fans of Douglas Reeman, Michael DiMercurio, George Wallace and Don Keith.

It’s another high-stakes mission for Captain Jack Boxer and the crew of the Shark…

In Paris to agree the formal handover of the body of an American Marine killed in Arctic Russia, Captain Jack Boxer meets his Soviet counterpart, Comrade Captain Igor Borodine, commander of the Q-21.

The two men are professional enemies and personal friends. They both understand that they will kill one another in open combat if the opportunity arises.

Their mutual understanding is put to the test when a mutiny aboard a Soviet ship results in the Q-21 being torpedoed and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. With no chance of a Russian craft reaching them before oxygen supplies run out, their only chance of rescue is America’s high-tech submarine the Shark.

But with orders from U.S. Intelligence to destroy Russia’s most lethal submarine, the lives of all aboard the Q-21 now lie in Captain Boxer’s hands.

With an armada of Soviet warships closing in, will the Shark blast the Q-21 into oblivion? Or will the hunter become the hunted?

Now it’s one U.S. submarine against the massed might of the Russian Navy…

BATTLE STATIONS is the fourth book in the Depth Force Submarine Thrillers action-packed naval adventure novels set in the 1990s and starring submariner Jack Boxer.

DEPTH FORCE SUBMARINE THRILLERS
BOOK 1: Depth Force
BOOK 2: Death Dive
BOOK 3: Bloody Seas
BOOK 4: Battle Stations
BOOK 5: Torpedo Tomb
BOOK 6: Sea of Flames
BOOK 7: Deep Kill
BOOK 8: Suicide Run
BOOK 9: Death Cruise
BOOK 10: Ice Island
BOOK 11: Harbor of Doom
BOOK 12: Warmonger
BOOK 13: Deep Rescue
BOOK 14: Torpedo Treasure
BOOK 15: Hot Zone
BOOK 16: Rig War

294 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 1985

About the author

Irving Greenfield was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was a youthful runaway, a merchant seaman, and a soldier during the Korean War, afer which his writing talent burst into print. His novel, The Ancient of Days, was a best-seller for six weeks and Tagget was made into a film for TV. his work has appeared in a variety of media, but, of all his works, Only the Dead Speak Russian is his masterpiece.

Reviews

[KerryO · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series is a killer - non-stop underwater action. Once I start reading, I can't stop until I am done with the book!!!

[Richard A Lambing · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exciting series!

[David B · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s difficult to succinctly say what this book is really about since the copy on the back cover only refers to the last 40 pages or so. The first 200 pages are Irving A. Greenfield’s patented meandering storyline that just spills over from the previous volume without any recaps or reminders. For a while, I thought Greenfield had finally cracked the code on this series. There are fewer cocktail parties and long conversations between Boxer and his son about pizza toppings and more international intrigue and political backstabbing, but it all turns out to be a tease. Boxer’s Soviet counterpart, with whom he shares a mutual respect, is cornered into a plot to kidnap or assassinate Boxer, so it looks like we might get some man on the run action…but Boxer has to return home when his mother is hospitalized, so it goes nowhere. But it turns out Mom was beaten to death in a home invasion and Boxer knows a guy who can track down the perps, so it looks like we might get some vigilante action…but nothing comes of that, either. To be fair, both of these plot threads might be picked up in a future volume without any reference to what happened in this one. Greenfield’s facility with sex scenes remains unchanged; any eroticism he manages to conjure dissipates every time he drops the term “bung-hole.”

https://thericochetreviewer.blogspot....

[Timothy McNeil · Rating 2 out of 5]

Filled with all the wrong details (I don't know if the details are wrong, but the attention to them detracts from any sense of pace) and frequent, but joyless sex scenes, Greenfield's fourth effort in the series is an odd duck. Who was the intended audience, people who would never commit to reading an entire Clancy novel AND who needed a hero who has sex with everyone he meets?