Confirmed Kill

Michael Williamson gets better and better, whether writing by himself or coauthoring with John Ringo. Always exciting.

This is the third story about Army Ranger snipers Kyle Monroe and Wade Curtis.They had previously been the heroes of "Scope of Justice" and "Targets of Opportunity".In this novel American intelligence services pick up on a plot in the jungles of Indonesia.Monroe and Curtis are given the assigment of taking the killers out.A group of al Qaeda fanatics plan on blowing an oil rich province sky high.Hundreds of innocents will die. General Robash,their commanding officer,suffers a heart attck. He has to have heart surgery and is definitely out on sick leave.He is replaced as commander of the mission by Colonel Weisinger.Weisinger is fat,out of shape and incompetant.He is a disaster as a commanding officer and causes more problems than he solves.Monroe and Curtis have numerous gun battles with the Indonesian terror group.The Rangers finally have to lead a rescue effort to save an American hostage and her daughter.This book is nonstop action.This is an excellent followup to the other two books.Buy this book and read it.You will enjoy it.

If you've read this far down the page on the book, you already know this is the third book dealing with the life and death missions of Wade Curtis and Kyle Monroe, and it is, by far, the trickiest. Mars may be the God of War, but Murphy is the God of Armies, and, as usual, Murphy has a field day with a Curtis-Monroe mission. On top of the usual perils of dangerous territory, uncertain allies, finding the target, and enemies who would delight in their deaths, they start out saddled with a half-trained and fully-clueless superior officer with a horrible talent for screwing up. "Mad Mike" has a talent for dropping the reader into not just the action, but the *feel* of the action, and everywhere in the story, just as in the previous books, we get carried along into the minds of the characters and how their work impacts them, even as we get to read a very well-told suspense thriller. Always, right up to the end, we are forced to keep asking ourselves "Will they succeed?" and "How in the hell can they pull this one out of the firefight?" and ask those questions right along with Wade and Kyle. This book is well worth reading just for the Army-tours-Hell story. Be aware, though, that Williamson bestows a great gift on anyone who reads through it. For he uses his talent to place the reader into the minds of his characters and shows you something that, when it occurs, is a glorious thing in a life. There is the moment when a boy CHOOSES to become a man, with all the responsibility being the latter entails, and you get to see it through HIS eyes. That passage alone is worth the trip. Thank you, Michael.

Mike Williamson and I disagree about this book. I think it is the best of his Targets series so far, and he thinks it is the weakest. Where is it written that authors can analyze their own books correctly? In this book, Williamson adds complexity to the already complex plots and characterizations of Kyle Monroe and Wade Curtis, his lone wolf Paladins from Targets of Opportunity and The Scope of Justice. Not only is their mission much less defined, they are also burdened by a desk warrior who seizes on the opportunity to make his bones in a "special ops" role. Do they get their mission done? Do they carry their commanding burden (oops, I meant commanding officer) or do they frag him? Do the terrorists win one, or can Monroe and Curtis pull another one out of the bag? And what will this mean to the introspective Monroe? How long can he go on doing this without going over the edge? Well, I'm not going to tell you the answers. To find out, it will cost you. You will have to send Mad Mike Williamson money. And as he says, "Thank you. Never can get enough." That's true of Williamson's writing too. Walt Boyes The Bananaslug. at Baen's Bar