The Gray Man, by Mark Greaney

This book reads like a bad action movie. No real plot other than save the captured princess (here the princess is played by twin girls) while racking up a huge body count all across Europe. The hero is an assassin with a heart of gold: "Court Gentry was the Gray Man simply because he believed there existed bad men in this world who truly needed to die." Two thirds of the way through, Gentry has a gunshot wound in his leg, a broken rib, a severely swollen wrist, deep lacerations on his knees and the bottoms of both feet, fallen off a mountain, and received no medical attention for any of these injuries. Seemingly cornered, he manages to perform a standing leap to grab a rafter, pull himself into an attic, and crawl through a small vent to safety. He later takes a vicious stab to the gut requiring stitches (delivered without anesthetic in a moving car which he was driving) and a blood transfusion. This all sets the stage for a huge gun battle where Gentry shoots his way into a fortified castle to confront his enemies. The Gray Man is part Jack Reacher, part Jason Bourne, and part Batman, but possessed none of the depth of those characters. This is a series, but not sure I'll read any more. Not bad, but not good either.

First Sentence:

The first gunmen arriving at the crash site were not Al Qaeda and had nothing to do with the shoot down.

Locked On, by Tom Clancy with Mark Greaney

I loved some of the early Jack Ryan books, but gave up after Red Rabbit and The Teeth Of The Tiger because I thought they were really weak. I spied Locked On on the bargain table and decided to spend a few bucks and see if anything had improved. Surprisingly, there had only been one book between The Teeth Of The Tiger and this one in the last ten years so plot-wise I hadn't missed much.

The story here mainly follows Jack Ryan Jr. and John Clark; the former chasing a terrorist plot through Pakistan and Russia and the latter on the run due to a political witch hunt. Clancy hasn't softened his views towards politics any here; the Democrats are depicted as cartoonish and practically being pro-terrorist. The news outlets are savaged as well ("Liberal bias in the media was a fact of nature.") and shown to eagerly suppress information that shows Democrats in a bad light. While I agree with much of the sentiment here, Clancy takes it to an extreme. The terrorist plot is on nearly a James Bond scale; a Pakistani General steals two nukes from his own country and intends to force a war with India using a Muslim uprising in Russia as a distraction. I don't think this has the depth of The Hunt for Red October or even Debt of Honor, but it was nice to revisit the Jack Ryan Universe once again.

First Sentence:

The Russians call their Kamov-50 helicopter gunship Chernaya Akula—Black Shark.