Scarecrow: A Shane Schofield Thriller (Scarecrow Series)

What Reilly did here with all the action was fun. Instead of having down time in the book to let the characters figure things out or solve problems, Reilly just made them do all that while there was action going on. Want to talk to other characters and figure out why things are happening, well lets do that while getting chased and shot at doing over 100mph on the highway. Just good old action fun.

If you want an entertaining airport book, pick up Matthew Reilly's latest pure action thriller, Scarecrow. Short on character development/descriptive writing, this video-game style novel offers action to the highest degree, because there isn't a part of this book that is not action. If you care about good, fluid writing then you will loathe this book, but if you just want some entertainment you will enjoy it. As with his other books, Reilly kills off a main character, but this time bigger than the ones in several of his other novels. If you have read any of Reilly's other high-octane thrillers, than you have become used to the relentless action that marks a Matthew Reilly novel. But this book is completely different than those other books, making them look like snooze-fests compared to the action/adventure/gunfire that constantly keeps happening in Scarecrow. There are heroic good guys, vile bad guys, car chases, explosions galore, countdowns to doom, executions a la guilitine, man-eating sharks, and countless impossible escapes, to name a few elements of the action. There isn't much respect for the laws of physics, as characters zoom to Mach 7 in planes, escape countless exploding/collapsing (take your pick)... things, are always saved from falling from airplanes, cliffs (again take your pick, and make up a few more, because they are probably in there), and miraculouly avoid incredible amounts of machine gun fire. As with Reilly's other novels, there is a multi-faceted plot, and a veritable army of bad guys from various groups or countries, who are usually all trying to kill each other at one point or another. There is also a bit of humor involved with reading Scarecrow. The writing is so bad, and the phrases so juvenile that you have to lean back and chuckle once in a while. There are some real beauties in here, such as "Blam-Blam-Blam-Blam-Blam", "Chunk", "Miss-Miss-Miss- Hit!" and "Ka-Whump". Reilly also sometimes chops sentences in half or leaves out words for the sake of the action. All in all it's fast-paced, entertaining, and low-brow fun designed not to be taken seriously.

I've read almost all of Matthew Reilly's books and can say that Scarecrow definitely keeps with the tradition of an action based story. Again, there were late nights because I just couldn't put it down. I find that Reilly's books have more action than Clive Cussler's, but the stories are as fun and entertaining. They are movies for the mind.

Reilly's fifth novel and third Shane Schofield effort opens even faster than all the previous, if such a thing were possible. After a terse intro where we're told that the world's twelve richest men have issued a massive bounty on twelve highly skilled service operatives (Shane included), we find our erstwhile hero heading into deepest Siberia to the Krask-8 facility to secure a location taken over by terrorists claiming they'll fire the nuclear missiles that have been conveniently forgotten about since the end of the Cold War. The only member of his seven man team retained from the previous Area 7 is Book II (son of Book) as his girlfriend, Libby Gant, and Mother are on another mission.Reilly neatly crosses the two Delta force operatives off the hitlist as Shane locates their headless bodies in the vast submarine repair hangar just before some really bad guys open up on him....and continue shooting for the next four hundred-plus pages.We move from scene to scene as the world becomes Scarecrow's hunting ground. After escaping the Siberian facility he learns of the motives behind the attack and of the groups of bounty hunters, featuring the Zulu, Zamanov and his teams of Skorpions, Killian's Executive Solutions, Larkham's IG-88, the Hungarian and Alyssa Idei - the latter two are somewhat puzzling as they inexplicably disappear mid-plot and are never mentioned again - all of whom are after him. Moving immediately to the Karpalov Coal Mine in the Hindu Kush where his girlfriend, Libby Gant and Mother are involved in a four way battle to flush out terrorists who are inadvertently themselves a target for the bounty hunters he is saved by Aloysius Knight (misjudged hero) who is his self-declared protector for an even greater fee. The novel splits to follow Knight, Schofield, Gant, Mother and Faifax as they come together and split on missions through the remainder of the novel. The action is non-stop and incredible. For example, during one of the Forteresee de Valois episodes the Scarecrow races down a coastal road putting a bunch of highly supercharged cars through paces that even their engineers haven't thought of, takes out more aircraft with more assorted weaponry than you'd believe possible and still swims away to a French aircraft carrier (which he manages to blow up). It basically carries on like this throughout on land sea and air as Scarecrow foils the supertankers and ends up disarming an ICBM in an X25 doing Mach 6 60feet away from the missile. The trusty maghook makes multiple life-saving appearances throughout as well.The plot is fairly convoluted though it effectively deals with the meglomaniac aims of one of the Majestic-12 group to create a war that appears to have been triggered by global terrorism in order to recreate a global Cold War, thus making millions on the armaments that would subsequently be demanded. However, we focus on Jonathan Killian who has his own personal motives and is particularly evil with his shark pit in his med