What do you think?
Rate this book
Mack Bolan the Executioner #373
Code Of Honor
Pink. Orange. White. Indigo. In the ruthless and unforgiving world of mercenaries, these are the code names of an elite group of assassins, known collectively as the Black Cross. They leave behind no DNA, no evidence at all-and until they were recruited by the shadowy group, they were the best and deadliest operatives working for the U.S. government.When someone begins targeting retired American servicemen-CIA, navy and marines-Stony Man decides to send Black Cross a new recruit: Mack Bolan. Bolan must infiltrate the cell of skilled assassins, taking the entire organization apart, body by body. And he'll do it the only way he knows how... Executioner style.
192 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2009
10 people are currently reading
44 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 28, 2020
Poor Editing
The story was typical Executioner. However, the book ended before the story. Like recording a TV show and recording stops just before the end. Poor edit ruined the book.
The story was typical Executioner. However, the book ended before the story. Like recording a TV show and recording stops just before the end. Poor edit ruined the book.
January 6, 2015
This is the first Executioner novel I'd read, and thankfully these are all stand-alones (or else I wouldn't have understood anything, having jumped into this series at the 373rd installment). It took me two evenings to read this; it provided a nice, quick fix of action-packed mayhem and cheesiness I'd come to expect from this type of story (the cover is what got me to borrow this from my local library). It's a decent read and pretty straightforward as far as any of these stories go, which means no subplots that get dropped or over-convoluted messes resulting from when the author could have taken a simpler storytelling route and didn't--which is a relief, because these kinds of stories don't require overly complicated fluff to stretch it out any longer. It'd be the length of any action movie script, it's competently written (minus a few missed errors here and there, like a missing letter in 'and' or something, which were also scarce), and it has some nicely written action scenes. The characters are as cardboard-cutout-cliche as you can possibly get, each assassin Bolan has to take down fitting into some kind of stereotype, but that's part of the charm of these things.
The only problems I had were that often the author took half a page to pause the action with descriptions like, say, the backgrounds of each and every assassin Bolan is fighting against, what guns they're using (I'm a bit of a firearms fanatic myself--not an 'expert,' but I had a general idea of what gun each person was using, at least), why they're attacking Bolan, etc. Luckily, since it's such a quick read-through, these paragraphs don't take up much time to read, and while they do slow down the action a bit, at least the author took the time to flesh out these unfortunate individuals before Bolan blasts their heads off or something. My guess is that every time the author paused the action to describe each assassin's (or mercenary's, take your pick) past or motives (or weapons of choice), he did it in an attempt to escape the action movie cliche of turning every background merc into nameless, expendable cannon fodder whose only goal seems to involve getting blasted by the hero. Ironically, one of the primary members of the Black Cross DOES go unnamed, so there's that. It's more-or-less a hit-or-miss. Despite the lengthy paragraph, I didn't have too much of a problem with it, since from what I could tell, the author was as brief as possible without going off on a tangent with a mini-essay on each man right before they get shot.
Aside from the cliched dialogue and those descriptions, with are both minor issues, the story flowed well and it was a short and fun read. I'll be reading more of these, for sure. Hopefully my library has a lot more of these than I saw when I last visited.
The only problems I had were that often the author took half a page to pause the action with descriptions like, say, the backgrounds of each and every assassin Bolan is fighting against, what guns they're using (I'm a bit of a firearms fanatic myself--not an 'expert,' but I had a general idea of what gun each person was using, at least), why they're attacking Bolan, etc. Luckily, since it's such a quick read-through, these paragraphs don't take up much time to read, and while they do slow down the action a bit, at least the author took the time to flesh out these unfortunate individuals before Bolan blasts their heads off or something. My guess is that every time the author paused the action to describe each assassin's (or mercenary's, take your pick) past or motives (or weapons of choice), he did it in an attempt to escape the action movie cliche of turning every background merc into nameless, expendable cannon fodder whose only goal seems to involve getting blasted by the hero. Ironically, one of the primary members of the Black Cross DOES go unnamed, so there's that. It's more-or-less a hit-or-miss. Despite the lengthy paragraph, I didn't have too much of a problem with it, since from what I could tell, the author was as brief as possible without going off on a tangent with a mini-essay on each man right before they get shot.
Aside from the cliched dialogue and those descriptions, with are both minor issues, the story flowed well and it was a short and fun read. I'll be reading more of these, for sure. Hopefully my library has a lot more of these than I saw when I last visited.
December 4, 2012
I just rediscovered Mack Bolan again after reading dozens of these adventure thrillers as a kid... after reading this and another I purchased on my Kindle, I found a 103 book collection on eBay that I got for $36.00!
Yep... these never get old.
Yep... these never get old.
May 6, 2012
Pretty good shoot-shoot novel. Again, I would watch this if it was an action movie! =)
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews