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Title: Savage Son
Series: Terminal List #3
Author: Jack Carr
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 464
Words: 134K
This was a love letter to the short story “The Most Dangerous Game”. Carr starts his introduction talking about it in fact. He mentions that the idea came to him first, but he needed Reece to get to that point and so he had to write the first two books. If you liked TMDG, you’ll like this story.
Much like Carr’s previous books though, he takes a while to get to where he’s going. Reece faces down a large group of russian mobsters in some mid-western state out in the middle of no-where and it was awesome. But Carr felt like he had to set things up like a SEAL operative. Too much detail to things that don’t matter in a novel. This would have been a fantastic 350 page novel. I probably would have given it 4 stars. But there was simply too much setup.
I found the fight against the mobsters in the US to be the better fight, as the one in Russia on the deserted ice island where the Crazy Guy was hunting Reece and his buddy Raife turned out to be rather anti-climactic. Carr should have taken a page from TMDG and tried for a three day fight and flight narrative instead of a six hour in and out escape narrative.
Overall, I was pleased with this read and am satisfied with how it turned out. While I still have one more book to read, Jack Carr is doing a much better job with James Reece than “Dalton Fury” did with his Delta Force series. That might sound like faint praise, but praise is praise and Carr should be thankful.
★★★☆☆
From OfficialJackCarr.com
Deep in the wilds of the Russian Far East, a woman is on the run, pursued by a man harboring secrets, a man intent on killing her.
A traitorous CIA officer has found refuge with the Russian Mafia with designs on ensuring a certain former Navy SEAL sniper is put in the ground.
Half a world away, James Reece is recovering from brain surgery in the Montana wilderness of his youth, learning to live again, putting his life back together with the help of investigative journalist Katie Buranek and his longtime friend and SEAL teammate Raife Hastings.
For reasons both personal and professional, the Russian intelligence-mafia consortium has their sights set on removing a player from the board before he can return to the battlefield, targeting Reece on U.S. soil.
With an unknown entity inside the U.S. government compromised by Russian intelligence, Reece is forced to recruit a team of former commandos to bring his unique brand of vengeance to the Russian Mafia on their home turf, turning the hunters into the hunted.