Violence of Action

September 30, 2002
Riding the wave of controversy over Iraq, and dedicated "To the many heroes of September 11th," this 10th volume in the breathtakingly crude but bestselling Rogue Warrior series again stars hairy-chested author/narrator Capt. Dick Marcinko, ex-navy SEAL and covert-ops antiterrorism expert. Licking his wounds after unjustly serving time in a white-collar federal prison, Capt. Dick is called to Washington when the White House is confronted with the theft of a suitcase-sized nuclear bomb by a band of terrorists. After capturing one of the terrorists, Dick's team tortures him into revealing the group's plan to nuke Portland, Ore., as the first step in establishing ethnic purity in the world. Marcinko may have jettisoned his longtime co-writer John Weisman (whose name no longer appears on the title page), but little else has changed. As in previous volumes, Dick is boorishly self-aggrandizing (he boasts of bedroom swordsmanship with a 10-inch saber), and the first-person narration is punctuated with personal confidences that detract from the authentic descriptions of cutting-edge high-tech military weapons and vivid action-packed scenes of engagement. Bordering on comic book satire and saturated with gruesome, gratuitous violence, the novel should fly off the shelves into the eager hands of the rabid legions of blood and guts fantasy-fulfillment RW readers. (Oct. 22)FYI:Rogue Warrior novels are hardly kiddie lit, but according to the publisher, Blue Box Toys is releasing a series of RW action figures to be sold at toy stores around the country.

June 15, 2002
A new, improved Rogue Warrior is back, ready to counter the latest terrorist threat, which entails the nuclear destruction of a U.S. city.

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2002
The Rogue Warrior returns, after a year's sabbatical from " Detachment Bravo" (2001), and it is a return full of both elements in its title. Dickie-boy's new team--himself plus two, one of them a gorgeous, female ex-Delta Force operative of Apache descent--faces a renegade special operations colonel and his pick of ex-spec-ops people. The colonel, a rabid white supremacist, has stolen a portable atomic bomb and means to bring about race war in the U.S. by detonating it in Portland, Oregon. Tension, disorder, and body counts escalate to the final climax, when the RW and his teammates go in side-by-side with a platoon of SEALs and snatch hanging victory off a cliff. Marcinko, writing solo this time, may be responsible for things like a rather prolonged torture scene, but then he is equally responsible for making the book the page-turning kin of its predecessors. Of course, in a post-9/11 world, neither the novel's scenario or the need for a Rogue Warrior seems as implausible as it once did.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)