False Flag (Jason Trapp #2) 1.5Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: False Flag
Series: Jason Trapp #2
Author: Jack Slater
Rating: 1.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 362
Words: 114K

This was an absolute piece of garbage, trash, whatever word you’d like to refer to it as. I’ll be done with this writer after this.

To give any of those of you who have hung around for awhile, this reminded me exactly of the Agent Zero series and the Jet series, both of which were also about supposedly super duper secret agents written by authors who obviously don’t know a thing about that subject, and I do mean absolutely nothing about it.

I ended up emailing Fraggle to run some things across her radar to make sure I wasn’t completely out to lunch. I wasn’t. So I’m going to copy/paste the majority of that email to show just how stupid this author this and why a brick wall is smarter than he supposedly is.

/wide

I didn't start taking notes until later. I wish I had started from the get-go. But I'll try to list the chapter, the relevant sentence or sentences in italics and then my question or comment.

I also had a ton more notes after where I leave off, but most of it was around Trapp being wildly inconsistent in his methodology (who he kills, why, etc) that shows he's not a professional at all. We're just told that he is. I was getting steamed, again, so figured I'd leave off :-D

Plus a lot more pro-China stuff. The President of the United States would NEVER lower himself to talk to some random ambassador. He'd be on the Red Phone, or whatever color it is, with the General Secretary (ie, China's president) himself. And this is an instance of the author just not getting the American mindset. Whether it is of Trapp or anyone else, they do not THINK like Americans who are in those positions. It is Hollywood'ized beyond even Hollywood.

Chapter 14: about Trapp

"Maybe he was being irrational, but he couldn’t help it."

The "best in the business" agent, like Trapp supposedly is, has that kind of feelingzzz trained out of him. He CAN help it, or he would have been dead long before this.

Chapter 23: about Ikeda (female agent)

"Alstyne was her first kill. He deserved it, but the CIA operative was no psychopath. She should have been flown directly to an Agency shrink after completing the operation, for a debrief to check he mental state."

Is equating killing of any kind with being a psychopath. I can't even begin to describe how wrong that mindset is. Especially for those in a military/black ops situation.

Killing is part and parcel of an agents job. It is beyond unbelievable that she would have immediately flown back to have her little feelingz coddled. She'd get a 10min exam to make sure she didn't enjoy it and that would be it. She'd spend more time on paperwork for the poison lipstick. And only a naive idiot in the business would think otherwise. Or an uninformed writer.

Chapter 28: about Trapp arriving in China

"he knew that if America picked a fight with this country, it would be like Germany invading the Soviet Union in 1941, or Napoleon doing the same a hundred and fifty years earlier."

Choice of the word "picked a fight". The whole book is pro-China, anti-America and no agent of the United States black ops would even THINK that way.  And numbers aren't everything. Sure, China has 4 times the US's population, but 9/10ths of them are still uneducated peasants, because China's communist party keeps them that way to control them.  We'd kill the leadership and let the country wallow like a ship without a rudder. I'm a civilian and even I know that much military doctrine.

Chapter 39: about Trapp and his boss talking about Ikeda

"“Ikeda isn’t the priority,” Mitchell said sharply. “She knew what she was signing up for. Those are the risks in this business.”
Trapp’s fist clenched, and a pang of anger shot through his body. He knew that Mitchell wasn’t saying anything that he himself didn’t believe. Hell, he’d said exactly the same to others many times.
But this, somehow, was different. It wasn’t academic, or cut and dry. He had sent Eliza into that room and hadn’t been able to protect her.
She might have known what she was signing up for. But she couldn’t possibly have expected to have been failed in that way.
This was Trapp’s mess. And he damn well intended to clean it up."

He obviously doesn't believe it, otherwise he wouldn't be "reacting" this way.  He's no professional. It isn't different. Every agent can expect to die on a mission, and to be tortured first. Trapp knows this, Ikeda knows this.  And it isn't Trapp's job to "protect" Ikeda, she's a full fledged agent after all. Nor is it his "mess". His job was to kill the scumbag and recover the info/flash drive. He did both of those. Rescuing Ikeda is a good thing, but it's not priority, just like his boss says at the beginning. 

Chapter 42:

""But in all those years, at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the real threat had come from terrorists, not nation states."

And those terrorists were and continue to be, funded by Nation States. It's a series of proxy wars. 9/11 was funded by the Saudis. Libya trained and funded terrorist cells all during the 70's and up until Qaddafi died. And a "trained agent" would know this and not make asinine statements like the above.

★✬☆☆☆

From Devilreads.com

They say revenge is a dish best served cold.
But Jason Trapp is losing his taste for it. For six months, his personal crusade has taken him around the world, mopping up the last of the Bloody Monday conspirators. There's only one left, and after the crooked financier Emmanuel Alstyne meets his maker, Trapp's debt will be paid in full. He vows he's done with the business of death.
Unfortunately, it isn't done with him.
After a simple kill mission goes sideways in Macau, leaving a CIA spy kidnapped, half a dozen Chinese agents dead, and America's satellites burning in the skies, Trapp is propelled back into the game. Eliza Ikeda was taken on his watch, and he's determined to get her back–no matter the cost. The problem is, he has no idea who took her, why, or what they plan to do next.
Trapp knows he's being played. And with the world's only two superpowers hurtling toward the precipice of war, time is running out...

Deep State (Jason Trapp #1) 3Stars

 

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress & Blogspot by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Deep State
Series: Jason Trapp #1
Author: Jack Slater
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 391
Words: 124K

I started this book and something just seemed “off” to me. Nothing huge, nothing glaring, but something just wasn’t right. So I started highlighting and taking notes whenever something struck me. I finally twigged to what the root cause was when I saw the following sentence:
“As Perkins and Winks manhandled the prisoner inside, Trapp gently grabbed Dani’s arm. She was dressed in black jeans, a warm JUMPER and an FBI windbreaker.”
~Chapter 40

That explained everything, and I mean everything. For those who don’t understand, I shall explain. The English Language is not a monolithic entity. It is broken up into two main spheres of Influence, The King’s English (booo, hiss, fart noises) and American English (patriotic singing, manly muscles, rah rah rah). In American English, which this book should have been written in as it is dealing with the American Government and a member of a black ops CIA team, a jumper is someone who is about to or has already, committed suicide by jumping from a high place, usually a building. It would be quite UNUSUAL for someone to wear a dead body as part of their clothing outfit, even if they are an FBI agent. However, in the King’s English, a jumper is a warm, long sleeved garment that is between a shirt and a coat. In American English, we call that garment a “sweater”. So this author, which I shall get to next, is some bloody foreigner acting like he knows what the feth he’s talking about when it comes to action and adventure and American Patriotism.

And he gets it wrong. Completely wrong. Jason Trapp is supposed to be this super patriot, a Mitch Rapp as it were. He views himself as a sheepdog for the sheep of the American Public. The problem is, he despises the sheep for how they act, thinks he’s innately better than them and doesn’t come across as serving them at all. He comes across as a macho blowhard with an attitude. Big Government is here to help and damn any of you peons who thinks to get above himself by actually trying to better himself. Eat dirt slave. THAT is the vibe I get here.

After that blinding revelation that this wasn’t written by American (rah, rah, rah!), I tried to find out some info about the author. I usually regret doing that, but there are times when my personal enjoyment doesn’t matter and I need to know the truth. There are several Jack Slater’s. One of them is this author. Another appears to be some Brit who writes police procedural novels. But the biggest hit on google is for this Jack Slater:

Maybe this author’s name really is Jack Slater and it is not a pseudonym. I can’t say. But his website has even less info about him than my About page has about me and the “photo” just screams anonymity. My skeptometer is running above the 100% mark concerning this guy.

There is also the very typical European outlook on individuals owning guns and using them as they should. The lady FBI character spouts off a thought about how “the good man with a gun” is just a myth and that situations are never solved by such a mythological being. The problem is, for the author, that’s a lie. Not misinformation, but a damned lie. The reason the public doesn’t hear about the many instance of “the good man with a gun” is because it doesn’t fit the mass media’s narrative here in the United States and thus they never run with the stories. But you can find those stories in the local papers, etc. Lest you think I am simply making up crap (like the author did), this is a documented phenomena that Larry Correia writes about in his book, In Defense of the Second Amendment. Full set of footnotes in the rear of the book.

I have now written over 600 words condemning this book. Most of my reviews are half that length, even including the synopsis (remember, short stocking bald men are the most attractive and the same goes for reviews), so I can understand if you are totally confused about why I still rated this 3stars. Two words

The Fething Action. (fething isn’t a real word so it doesn’t count, ha!)

Jason Trapp takes on terrorists with an aluminum baseball bat. He is attacked by a fighter jet with a big ol’ bunker buster missile and survives. He takes on a whole squad of Israeli mercenaries who are the best of the best (but not good enough). And he poisons the Vice-president of American with a Batman level poison pen. IT. WAS. AWESOME. In a previous review I joked about parachuting in and killing you with a nuclear bazooka. Well, Jason Trapp would have actually done it.

All of that being said, the next book will make or break Jason Trapp for me. If I get even a whiff of anti-gun propaganda, I will dnf the series like Mitch Rapp putting a bullet in a terrorist’s skull. No fear, no hesitation.

★★★☆☆

From the Publisher:

If you come after the CIA’s most feared assassin, there’s one cardinal rule: Don’t miss.
America is under attack. Thousands lie dead after simultaneous strikes across the country. The day will come to be known as Bloody Monday.
Jason Trapp, codename ‘Hangman’, was a covert operative whose feats became the stuff of legend. He was the tip of the spear—the man his country unleashed when all hope was lost.
Six months ago, someone sold him out. The Agency listed him as killed in action. He lost everything—and everyone—he held dear.
But Trapp’s not that easy to kill. As his country reels from the deadliest terrorist attacks it has ever witnessed, Trapp’s personal vendetta leads him right back to where he started: duty to his country. The violence, the terror, the assassination of his partner… It’s all connected.
And now the Hangman is coming for the guilty.