No Man's Land

That's how long it took me to blow through this book. Short chapters, lots of action and great dialogue. I've ordered the rest of the Corso series. I hope they are as good.

We need to know a little more about Frank and Mr. Ford accomodates us novel by novel bringing more of him out in the daylight. Like Spenser, his past is revealed in snippits of conversation with or about third parties, or in mental meanderings solo voce. Certainly the most interesting thing about him is just that, he's an interesting guy. Tall, well built, articulate. Earlier novels have gotten across the explanation of why he settled in the Pacific Northwest and a little more about his family and his tortured relationship with his father. Here we meet Timothy Driver, Trident Submarine Captain and Harvard Graduate School, graduate, coming home from sea duty unexpectedly, finding Mrs. Driver doing some underwater drills of her own with somebody NOT Captain Driver. Captain Driver decides to off the Mrs., Lothario and his career all at once, hence the capital murder sentence, a book by Frank and incarceration in the private prison for the worst of the worst in Arizona. Melanie Harris is a TV crime reporter who lost her daughter to a pyschopath seven years earlier and now loses her husband to a change of fortunes. So in a way, Harris and Corso are both emotionally exiled to their own Elba when Driver leads a brutal revolt amongst the inmates in the private Arizona prison. Ford, who often has a political agenda of some sort as an undercurrent, lambasts the prison system and the new "for-profit" privatization move, and the adventure, a little disturbing but mostly hair raising, begins. Frank is wise, compassionate, arrogant with authority, well heeled, get's shot (what's new?), and is caring. Melanie Harris is hot and confused. It is difficult to accept the etiology of Captain Driver's descent into hell, and Mr. Ford doesn't help us much with either reviling him or feeling sorry for him. It seems unlikely that a proud extremely educated man who carries the armament to destroy the entire world for a living, would find his wife in coitus with SOD (* some other dude) and react that way. And, if he did, that he would end up in the worst prison in the world outside of Iran. For that required suspension of disbelief, Mr. Ford really deserves a 4 1/2. But the book is a true to life page turner that you can't put down. And Meg Dougherty and her nasty, nasty comments, gratefully are on vacation. Or in therapy. 5 stars. Larry Scantlebury

Timothy Driver was once a Navy SEAL and the Captain of a Trident missile submarine. He came home unexpectedly and found his wife in bed with another man. Capt. Driver dispatched both wife and her lover to the great beyond. As a result (and somewhat unbelievably as the result of a crime of passion), Driver is sentenced to life in prison without parole. Anything but a model prisoner, Driver causes a major optical problem (blindness by puncture wounds) for another prisoner to whom he had been "sold" as a sex slave. Driver becomes a a guest of the Meza Azul prison in Arizona, which is run by a private corporation. Within short order, Driver compromises the high-tech facility and takes over the prison. He promise to execute one guard every six hours unless Frank Corso, who wrote a book about Driver, is delivered to the prison. Uh huh, Ford's plot and character development would, under normal circumstances, leave a lot to be desired. But happily Ford's idea of plot is a hyper-kinetic, utterly unpredictable series of events that would serve as a model for chaos theory. One by one, seemingly unrelated events come together to produce unintended and unexpected consequences, much to the delight of the reader. Corso is actually a near-minor player in the novel, which is a plus. He's just sort of there, sometimes the victim of events, sometimes the beneficiary. Driver is a man on a mission who, incidentally, is a cunning operator. Corso is important to him for reasons that are not clear until well into the book. Overall, a delightful read and a fine thriller. Thin plot, thin characters, but in Ford's hands, neither is a consideration. The man simply knows how to tell a hold-on-to-your-seat story. Jerry

In No Man's Land, by G.M. Ford, Frank Corso is finally on his own. In Red Tide, his companion, Meg Dougherty, finally left him for good. I found Red Tide to be a great book with one of its only faults being the way that Meg leaves. While her presence is definitely missed in No Man's Land, Ford manages to make the book gripping despite it. This book also continues where Red Tide left off in how we get into the minds of other characters as well as Corso, which enriches this book enormously. While it is still not perfect, Ford has written another gripping thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. There has been a riot at a privately-run maximum security prison in Arizona. The leader of the inmates, Timothy Driver, has a special request. He wants Frank Corso to come to the prison, or he will have a guard killed every six hours. It seems that Corso wrote a book about the murders Driver committed, and Driver wants him to come along for the rest of his story and write the truth. This riot also attracts the attention of Melanie Harris, of American Manhunt, who races down to Arizona after being informed of this big news story, as ratings have been going down for a while. When Corso finally shows up, he finds a situation much more fluid then he imagined. Driver, a fellow inmate named Kehoe, and Corso escape from the prison and a massive manhunt begins. What is Driver's ultimate purpose in involving Corso in all this? Does he want to go out in a blaze of glory documented by the only writer Driver trusts? Or is there another motive involved? And will Corso survive to tell the tale? No Man's Land claims to be a "cross-country journey" for Corso, but it turns out to just be a few western states. Still, Ford has once again branched beyond his native Seattle, and this time it doesn't feel as forced as it did in A Blind Eye, when the Midwest didn't really feel like the Midwest. This time, it feels more natural, as they travel from the deserts of Arizona to the mountains of Nevada and beyond. However, that could be because I'm not as familiar with that environment as I am the Midwest. Still, Ford seems to do a great job with the setting. The best things about Ford's books are usually the characters, and he doesn't disappoint here, with a few odd exceptions. Corso is, of course, wonderfully done. It's unclear how long it's been since Meg left, but he clearly still misses her at the beginning of the book, and she even pops up in his mind occasionally during everything else. He's still the same man, though, always looking out for the underdog and not taking any grief from the higher authorities. His relationship with the FBI in this one is typically rough, and it predictably causes some dangerous situations as he is not believed when he finally does try and call them in. His relationship with Melanie is a little more unusual, as we're not used to seeing him in a casual fling (Meg has been around since the beginning for the reader

At Meza Azul, Arizona maximum security facility, former Navy Captain Timothy Driver holds 163 people hostage. He threatens to kill one of them every six hours until true crime writer Frank Corso, who wrote a bestseller that treated the naval officer with respect, meets with him. He has put to death a guard so the authorities are taking Driver seriously, but finding Corso proves a bit of a problem until the Coast Guard locates him sailing in Seattle's Garrison Bay. Corso has no idea why Driver insists on seeing him now even if the writer painted the murderer as a victim too in the crimes of passion killings of his wife and her lover. Although he prefers not to go to Meza Azul, Corso cannot pretend to have A BLIND EYE to the fact that Corso will kill innocent victims. He enters the prison with instructions from law enforcement officials to learn what Corso and his seemingly more unbalanced partner Cutter Kehoe wants. Inside Corso becomes a hostage when riots and chaos break out. With few options if any, Corso's only hope to survive resides in a cold passionless killer whose humanity was sucked out of him by his spouse's betrayal. NO MAN'S LAND is a gripping action thriller that fans will lose sleep over while they try to finish it in one tense sitting. The story line moves forward at hyperspeed and never slows as the audience wonders whether Corso will survive in spite of being the hero of this tale and previous novels. G.M. Ford scores big time with riveting taut tale that once again keeps his works at the top of the line. Harriet Klausner