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Title:
Tower of Terror
Series: Able Team #1
Author:
Dick Stivers
Rating: 2.5 of 5 Stars
Genre:
Action/Adventure
Pages: 123
Words:
41K
Publish: 1982
Sigh.
I knew after reading The Stony Man Doctrine in
January (no review) that this attempt at reading more of the 80’s
and 90’s Men’s Adventure Stories probably wasn’t going to be a
splendid success. Even still, this was not what I was hoping for.
There is action. Bad guys get beaten up, the good guys get beaten up. People are shot and kabloo’ied and kidnapped to my heart’s content. The problem is that there was a LOT of running around or driving around between those bits and that was so boring that I was going out of my skull.
I was expecting a Die Hard rip off, even though Die Hard hadn’t been produced yet ;-) The actual stuff at the tower takes about the final 10% of the book. Able Teams gets in, kills the bad guys, rescues the hostages and warns all the law enforcement outside about tons of booby traps inside. The End. I wanted some cat and mouse inside the so-called Tower of Terror. Alas, it simply was not to be.
Finding out that the owner of the company that owned the tower was embezzling possible billions of dollars and using the terrorists as a cover, was a good idea. It just didn’t translate into good writing which would have translated into a better story.
I know I loved the Mack Bolan books as a teenager and not so much as an adult (Mack Bolan #448) and that has carried over to these other Gold Eagle productions. I’m not surprised or even disappointed, but I admit I was hoping that maybe the boy inside me would like this more. I’ve got one more “Action Man” book to read, about another group of special forces men, called Phoenix Force and then I’ll be done with these.
★★✬☆☆
From the Publisher
A Wall Street skyscraper had been invaded. Hostages were being held - and, with them, enough confidential banking data to imperil the entire world.
Ugly, city-wide panic was inevitable until Able Team was called in. Carl Lyons, Pol Blancanales and Gadgets Schwarz were the only possible hardmen for such a mission.
The invaders claimed to be FALN, the Puerto Rican terrorist group. But they were not who they said they were, and their huge quantity of devastating armament appeared to have come from. . . the Vietnamese.
