Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆
The structure here is kinda odd. While each of the three volumes included in this omnibus are effectively standalone stories, they each feel so slight as almost not to be worth bothering with. In particular, there seems to be a lot of descriptive padding, covering journeys, meals and technical trivia that don’t develop character or push the story forward. The heroine – nominally, at least – is Jo Modeen, who had become the first woman to be accepted into the elite Special Air Services regiment of Australia. Two years after leaving the military, she finds herself at a bit of a loose end, until contacted by her former CO, Ben Logan, who makes her an offer.
He wants to bring her in as part of his team at NatSec, a covert operations group affiliated with the Australian Intelligence Service. They are “called in when diplomacy and other methods fail,” to solve problems of Aussie national security. The first volume largely concerns her training, with a brief diversion early on, to deal with a case of domestic abuse. The second sees Jo’s father, a magistrate, one of three high-ranking officials kidnapped by terrorist group, the Spear of Allah at a conference in Brisbane. And the third sees the group kidnap Ben’s wife and daughter, in an effort to coerce him into using his team to do jobs in their interests. Really, on the basis of this block, it feels like the members of NatSec and their families cause more problems than they solve.
The main issue is that, in volumes two and three especially, this becomes much more of a team effort, rather than concentrating on Jo. The NatSec team typically ends up getting split-up, with smaller groups performing various tasks, whether it’s surveillance, hostage rescue or whatever. This significantly dilutes the book’s focus, with Jo feeling like she has been forgotten about for multiple chapters in a row. I mean, as generic action, kick the butts of the terrorist stuff, it’s marginally okay. But I definitely expected much more focus on Jo, to the point I wavered over whether or not it even qualified for this site.
There’s also a problem in that she is rather too high-powered. The blurb compares her to Jack Reacher: I’ve not read those books, but we’ve been watching the TV show, as well as the Tom Cruise movies, and it takes a good deal of finesse to make someone who’s so amazing, work on the screen, or the page. I’m not seeing that finesse present here. We do get extended description of how pretty Jo is. On the other side, the Spear of Allah are… well, a bit crap as terrorist groups go. In almost every confrontation with NatSec, they’re easily defeated, and you never get much sense of them being a genuine threat. The end result is conflict without real drama, and I’ll not be going any further.
Author: Frank H. Jordan
Publisher: A Hope, available through Amazon, only as an e-book
Books 1-3 of 12 in the Jo Modeen series.