Tag Archives: Harry Bauer

Fiction, Reviews

‘LA: Wild Justice,’ by Blake Banner

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I had run out of bargain books that I’d picked up through online deals, and noticed a Harry Bauer book by Blake Banner. And I thought, “I haven’t read a Banner for a while. I wonder why I stopped following him?” A check of my past reviews gave no clue, so I bought LA: Wild Justice, the 7th installment in the series. It proved entertaining in a popcorn movie way, but I also was reminded why I’d given Harry a rest.

Harry Bauer is a professional assassin working for an ultra-secret agency called Cobra. His bosses call him in for an assignment: they want him to kill a saint. The saint in question is Sen. Charles Cavendish, a billionaire who famously bankrolls a number of much-needed relief organizations around the Third World. He feeds the hungry, provides clean water, cares for the sick, etc.

In fact, according to Harry’s bosses, he operates those charities only as a blind. The entrée he gets to many corrupt countries permits him to sell drugs, arms, and chemical weapons to some of the world’s worst actors – including Harry’s worst enemy in the world.

But Harry has hardly begun his job when one of his bosses is kidnapped. Now it’s a race against time to complete the sanction and rescue his friend.

Harry is a hero very much in the James Bond mold – and I mean the movie Bond, not the one in the Fleming books. He effortlessly subdues very formidable enemies, even in groups – until the plot points call for a dramatic setback. He suffers traumatic injuries and just fights on. Pain barely slows him.

LA: Wild Justice was fun, mindless entertainment. What annoyed me – and this is probably why I dropped the series before – is that the author likes to leave the reader with a cliff-hanger. That just annoys me. Stand-alone books should wrap up the main plot. There can be larger, ongoing plots over a series of books, but you owe it to the reader tie up the threads on the main problem in the volume in hand.

Still, an entertaining book. Moderately recommended. I’m likely to read the next eventually.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Silent Blade,’ by Blake Banner

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I’ve been following, and enjoying, Blake Banner’s Harry Bauer series of action thrillers. The Silent Blade is the sixth in the series. It delivers all the action you could ask for, though it’s probably best not to think about it too much.

Harry Bauer is a covert operative for a shadowy private organization called Cobra. His particular passion is wiping out drug lords. In the last book he got rid of two at once, and now he’s on the run in Trinidad, cut off from his employers, trying to figure out a way to get back to New York without alerting either the law or the cartels.

Then he meets a beautiful woman who works for the CIA, who first helps him and then turns him over to her bosses for “enhanced interrogation.” They want to recruit him, they explain, but first they need to know who he’s been working for. He finally escapes from them and runs to the leader of a Colombian cartel, offering (he claims) to be their source inside the CIA when he goes to work for them. Here he meets another beautiful woman, and fireworks (of a couple kinds) follow.

The action is hot and heavy, the sex pretty much the same (though not too explicit). But I can’t resist noting that the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense. Harry has reached a stage where he seems to just jump into deadly situations without a plan for survival. Are we supposed to think he’s a master strategist, or does he just have a death wish? I have a suspicion we’re not supposed to think that far.

Good of its kind. Cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Immortal Hate,’ by Blake Banner

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I recently reviewed a novel that I found a little difficult to read. Blake Banner’s Immortal Hate was not like that at all. It was fast and easy and very quickly finished. Popcorn reading, well done according to its kind.

Harry Bauer, hero of Immortal Hate and the other books in the Cobra series, is an international assassin working for the customary shadowy international organization. His brief is to eliminate the worst of the worst monsters in the world. He’s good at it, and remorseless.

“The worst of the worst” certainly applies to General Kostas Marcovic, fugitive Serbian warlord, who was guilty of one of the greatest atrocities in the recent Balkan troubles. Now he’s been identified as living under a pseudonym on the Caribbean island of St. George. Harry’s orders are simple – go in, kill the man (make it look like an accident if possible) and leave without making a fuss.

That, however, is not Harry’s style. On the ferry to the island he meets Helen, an attractive woman who runs a bar on the island. Helen senses that this is a dangerous man, and sets about enticing him to help her friend Maria extricate herself from the affections of a local drug lord. Harry is in no way reluctant to help out – he has a particular hatred of drug merchants – but Helen is not prepared for the swift and ruthless way Harry will go to work.

But that’s just the beginning. It turns out there are two old Serbians living on the island, and each claims the other is the real Marcovic.

On top of that, there’s a hurricane coming.

Over the top, lightning-paced and morally problematic, Immortal Hate was the equivalent of a Hollywood action movie. I enjoyed it, but I’m not entirely proud of myself for it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Quantum Kill,’ by Blake Banner

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“Of course you are. You’re James Bond cleverly disguised as an inbred redneck.”

“Thanks, I love you too. Actually, in my experience, most rednecks I have met were very fine people with solid values. And the worst inbreds I’ve met were among the European aristocracies and the Boston Brahmins.”

Harry Bauer, hero of Blake Banner’s Cobra series, is an assassin working for a private security firm that contracts to the government (for deniability). He is deadly and efficient and ruthless, but he has a code – he only kills the worst of the worst.

So he’s surprised when, as Quantum Kill opens, his bosses call him out of a well-earned vacation, asking him to do a job entirely outside his wheelhouse. There’s a woman (they won’t tell him who) at a certain place in Canada. Harry is to pick her up and transport her to Washington DC by a certain date, by a devious route he can work out for himself.

When he finally meets the woman, she’s a puzzle. She’s attractive, but strangely distant and affectless. She makes no effort to make friends, but soon they have more to worry about than their relations, when hit teams locate them – they can’t figure out how – and Harry has to do what he does best to keep her alive. It gets more puzzling when he figures out that the hit teams are CIA.

As they take a roundabout route as far out of their way as the Azores, the barriers between them start to break down. But more is going on than Harry and his employers have been told, and in the end he will resolve the problem through doing what he does best, in a shocking but oddly satisfying climax.

I’ve read some of Blake Banner’s books outside the Cobra series, and I was disappointed in certain attitudes and plot elements, especially in religious matters. But in this series, I haven’t had that problem – such opinions as Harry Bauer expresses generally please me.

I’m torn a bit as to how strongly I should recommend this series to our readers. In terms of reading pleasure, it’s top notch. My interest never flagged from the first page to the last (and as I grow older, flagging interest is a problem I have increasingly as I read). But the violence is harsh and stark and uncompromising. I feel a certain amount of guilt for enjoying it so much.

But enjoy it I do.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Einstaat Brief,’ by Blake Banner

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Book three of Blake Banner’s interesting – and modestly impressive – Cobra series is The Einstaat Brief. Once again we follow our hero, “ethical” assassin Harry Bauer, as he fights international evil.

This time out, Harry is facing a situation he never looked for. He’s in love, with a beautiful, red-haired Texas girl. He knows he can’t bring her into the life he’s living, but he figures he’s done enough killing, even in good causes. He’s going to retire, and move with her to a ranch in Wyoming.

Then a team comes to kill him, and they seem to be government agents. Harry’s superiors at Cobra make him an offer he can’t refuse – one last emergency job, and he can retire and they’ll guarantee his and the girl’s safety.

The job is a rush assignment, without adequate preparation time. Harry will have to improvise. He is to infiltrate a luxury resort hotel in Andorra, and assassinate three of the world’s most powerful internet moguls. These three are plotting to inject an algorithm into the world wide web which will give them control of all the world’s markets. But money isn’t their goal. They want to manipulate international economies in order to incite wars in the Third World – to control overpopulation.

Harry manages to get in, but he interprets his instructions freely – he steals the men’s laptops, and kidnaps one of them. But when he gets home, he finds a more dangerous, personal challenge in store.

I am enjoying this series, but this is the last installment available to date. Another is coming in December. Fun reading, with cautions for a high body count and mature language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dying Breath,’ by Blake Banner

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Here we slowed, but not much, and moved, hooting and honking, among cars and motorized rickshaws, in a city that looked like it was built in the twenty-fifth century to be inhabited by people from the fifth century.

Book 2 in Blake Banner’s Cobra series, about elite assassin Harry Bauer, is Dying Breath. It’s as much fun as the first one.

As I read the Cobra books, I’m reminded, in a way, of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Except that I like Bauer better than Bond (though I’ll admit I’ve only read a couple Bond books). I find James Bond kind of flat as a character. Harry Bauer is an interesting person, and he occasionally hints at opinions I can get behind. On the heroic indestructibility scale, he’s certainly Bond’s equal.

As I mentioned in my last review, Harry Bauer is a former commando, now employed by a super-secret, non-governmental security organization to take out the worst people in the world. His latest assignment seems relatively straightforward – to infiltrate a New York hotel and execute two Chinese scientists who are working on a plague that could become pandemic.

But, as any reader will expect, things don’t go according to plan. The set-up isn’t what Harry expected, and he ends up on a quest that takes him from New York to Casablanca to Bangkok, and which will introduce him to an intriguing femme fatale with lots of deadly secrets.

What any reader of this book will note is that it’s relevant in a very particular way. A moment of recognition comes packed inside at no additional charge. You’ll know what I mean.

I noted one plot problem: Harry makes use of an EMP (Electro-magnetic pulse) machine to knock out electronic systems, but they don’t seem to affect his or his partner’s cars. This is not explained.

Highly recommended as entertainment. Morally problematic in diverse ways.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead of Night,’ by Blake Banner

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The maître d’ sat me next to a table of noisy, overdressed beautiful people; the kind who leave their plastic surgeon’s designer label hanging out of the tucks behind their ears.

Harry Bauer, hero of Blake Banner’s Dead of Night, is an American and an orphan. Somehow his wanderings led him to Britain, where he joined the Special Services. He’s a valued and effective commando, until the night in Afghanistan when he nearly kills a prisoner – an Al Qaida leader who raped, tortured, and murdered an entire village. He gets kicked out of the service, and is soon back home in New York without job prospects.

There is one party willing to hire a guy like him for security work, however, in spite of his hazy military record – a Russian gangster. Harry goes to work for him, but he goes in with a plan – one that will leave a lot of bad guys dead, and Harry considerably richer.

But then he’s detained by some mysterious agents, who escort him to an interview with the head of a secret, international security operation called Cobra. Cobra is not directly sponsored by any government. Its sole purpose is killing – eliminating the worst of the worst, whom the law cannot touch. Harry agrees to join them with little hesitation. Especially because his first target is the same terrorist he had to let go in Afghanistan.

Trouble is, the CIA is holding that monster as an information source, and Harry will have to get through them to get to his target.

Piece of cake.

I occasionally read military action thrillers, but they aren’t my favorite reading fare. But Dead of Night went down real easy with me. I finished it quickly, and had a good time with it. The action never lags, the prose is good (it even made me chuckle occasionally), and Harry comes through as a complex, fully developed character. I hastened to buy the second volume in the series.

I hesitate to recommend this book wholeheartedly, because it’s very bloody, and the body count is high. There’s also the moral question of revenge and whether it’s right to kill just because the victim “needs killing,” so to speak. So the moral ambivalence here is greater than in your average mystery. And, of course there’s always the language and adult themes.

But it sure was a fun read.