Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #824403 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 544 pages

Customer Reviews

super......................
Air Battle Force starts the same way as all Dale Browns books.Straight into the action.This book is yet another high paced read.Once I picked the book up,I could not put it down.Long may Dale continue to prroduce these excellent thrillers......

It Loiters and is Gratuitous
I have read all of Dale Brown’s novels and have enjoyed his work. As an author he took his tales a step further than others in the genre by researching/creating believable cutting edge technology that was operated by enjoyable characters. He did not create super heroes that belonged in comic books, rather pilots and their teams that would read as though they could be found in the armed forces of our nation. His political players were also credible and their behavior, however unsettling, never strayed beyond what we might read or hear of in the news. “Air Battle Force”, is only the second of his books that I feel is poor, and it is weak because he tread the same ground he covered in his last work and allowed a gratuitous mean streak that may have a visceral appeal but is out of place in his collected novels.

In the tale it is mentioned that all but 2 of the original crew from his first novel are gone. The majority of members are missing and those that remain are embittered and often place their own personal feelings and vendettas ahead of any manner of rational action. This is not the first book that stretches credibility by having his players break every manner of law without consequence, some now engage in behavior they once would have routinely condemned, and practice conduct the author would not have written of. When some of the, “good guys”, engaged in electric shock torture I nearly put the book down. This type of vigilante behavior may appeal to the lowest common denominator of hatred but I don’t believe it has any place when it is our armed forces that are portrayed as the practitioners. The armed forces are made of imperfect people but this does not mean their imperfections create monstrous behavior by default. It kills the credibility of the tale even though this is a work of fiction.

Dale Brown is also too established a writer to opportunistically use events in The Middle East for 2 consecutive books. The racist rhetoric went well beyond what was credible until it deteriorated in to simplistic bigotry. To read this book as well as his previous novel is to be subjected to the idea that every person who fights and is a Muslim is a deluded, violent psychopath who believes he is God’s Instrument. This type of thinking is simplistic and not worthy of this writer.

I will again pick up his next book with the hope that he will once again bring new high technology and a great tale to readers, and will not recycle the same gadgets that have appeared in previous novels together with clichés about people and their beliefs that are as misguided as they are destructive.