I’ve been following Christopher Greyson’s Jack Stratton series for some time, with considerable pleasure. They’re not great literature, but they’ve been fun mysteries with appealing characters, friendly to Christianity.

Sadly, I didn’t much care for the latest, Captain Jack.

This book would seem to initiate a new stage in the series. Jack has at last married his sweetheart Alice, and they’re honeymooning in the Bahamas, which were devastated by a recent hurricane, but are all the more welcoming to tourists for that. They book a diving trip with a guide, and while they’re underwater, another boat approaches. By the time they’ve surfaced, the guide is dead, stabbed to death. They alert the police, who immediately tag them as the most likely suspects in the murder.

Before long they’re running (and swimming, and flying) all around the islands, closely pursued not only by the (mostly corrupt) police, but by Bahamian drug smugglers and mysterious Russians, all after the location of a lost Russian nuclear sub.

If it sounds far-fetched, it is. What’s worse, author Greyson seems to have succumbed to Hollywood Action Flick Disease. It’s all action and chases and gunfights, all the time, each chase more improbable than the last. And our hero shakes off all injuries and carries on with minimal first aid assistance and no apparent need for sleep. And let’s not forget the obligatory female sidekick (Alice) who don’t need no steenking protecting.

I didn’t believe a paragraph of Captain Jack. I only finished it because of my residual fondness for the series.

Your mileage may vary.