Nevermind, now it’s showing. So is the other one. Weird.

Can you send me the link to your review? For some reason, yours and someone else’s aren’t coming up on the main page.

Thanks for the feedback, it will definitely help for book 4. 🙂

Of course. Submitted it and it’s already live (darn, that tells me I should be working, not posting here^^).

Actually having to write that review made me realize what I found to be the weak part: The end does not come as a surprise and getting there is also not much of one.

Now I am in a bad position, of course, so this may be just me: I read the sequel before, I have a good idea what you think about the current state of the world and I regularly read “those kinds of books”. Also, I learned that real investigations are not dependent on bright flashes of insight, but putting in the hours, or shaking and rattling things until something falls off (like every job, I guess). So this is totally realistic. But not surprising.

Around christmas, I read some books by Larkin and Bond (the other masters of the 90s geo-political thriller, “other” as in “they are not Tom Clancy”, though Bond worked with Clancy on ‘Red Storm Rising’). Anyway, ‘Vortex’ stuck to my mind: It is a fictional South vs. North Korea. It says so on the cover. No surprise at all. But how the events come to pass is still quite surprising and engaging (and involves a politician’s aide, a bill with the politicians name on and a bad combination of incentives for all voting blocks).

You had several small scenes (like that one missing detail for the important building, that patrol car crew not listening on the right channel or that one black SUV not being a part of any observation) that had a huge impact for the characters involved, but not for the story. Using those to advance the story (the patrol car giving away the observation, for example, though this is an old trope – or some event blocking swat from taking the higher building instead of combat inertia(or whatever you guys call it in the US)) would have improved it for me to 5-star level.

And now I need to leave to go punch holes in innocent paper.

Bam! Thanks Paul!