Operation Hail Storm
Brett Arquette
Rating: ***
I should preface this review by stating that the author sent me (and everyone else on goodreads by the sound of it,) this book for free in exchange for a review, and presumably in the hope I'd buy his newly published sequel.
I have to be honest that I started this book fully expecting not to like it, the sheer amount of 5 star reviews and uplikes on Goodreads seemed very suspicious. However I actually enjoyed the book, although there are some things that I think need some improving. It was an interesting plot, particularly the technical details about the drones and it's fast-paced and kept you interested the whole way through.
However, I did have a few criticisms which I'm hoping will be improved upon in the sequel. There is a lot of unnecessary detail in the book, every character - even the minor ones are given pages of description and backstory when we meet them which bog down the first few chapters and make it difficult to read. The female characters are quite badly written, although Kara was nicely padded out, the amount of female characters who just looked at their fingernails while the men worked or who were completely distracted by clothes and fashion I thought was very unbalanced to the amount of nicely developed male characters. The pure amount of description in the book also led to a lot of repetition, if I was told one more time that Jarret Pepper was the Head of the CIA, for example, I was going to throw my kindle out of the window. While it's nice to have a reminder after the first few times we meet him, still using this description in the last chapter was a bit patronising!
I'm also very confused as to why there is a 'classroom' version of this book available. People mature enough to like reading novels about drone plots to kill terrorists surely don't need swear words and sex scenes edited out!? Or perhaps the author thinks his work in comparable to Shakespeare, Austin or Tennessee Williams and will be on syllabuses around the country soon?
Overall I enjoyed the plot and it's a nice premise, I will probably actually pick up the sequel at some point so it's done it's job!
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Operation-Hail-Storm-Brett-Arquette-ebook/dp/B01N0EBEMK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1516956439&sr=8-1&keywords=operation+hail+storm
Comments