Clive Cussler's Fire Strike

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As expected, the heroic lead character Juan Cabrillo and his familiar loyal and brave crew members are present to provide the exciting action. Juan and his team went to some lengths to make sure nobody was killed unless there was no other option despite it putting themselves at greater risk (because the bad guys would clearly not be holding back on trying to kill Oregon's crew. The Oregon is not only a vessel but is a main character, an extension of every great character on board. Although Clive Cussler's novels were pretty generic, they were plotted out well, with almost every situation being necessary to the plot.

stars for believability of opening sequence and weird over protectiveness of getting crew into the sick bay. It is always hard to "develop" an existing character or team of characters in a series of books because they still have to remain true to their core identities so that the readers do not lose interest in them; in addition, there are so many different authors in the books that it can become difficult to keep track of true character development in prior novels. There are at least five different stories taking place, and none seem to have any relationship to the opening scenario, or to each other. I enjoyed the blending of current technological levels with advanced theories and advanced levels of technology to extrapolate how things might turn out if such technology was more prevalent today.A former British Royal Navy/Chief steward on The Oregon but I always knew there was more to Maurice than meets the eye.

Juan Carrillo and his team of high paid mercenaries are tasked to find the missing brother of an associate that has been reported serving time in an overseas high security prison. I would recommend reading any one of the dozen novels in the Oregon Files series before Fire Strike. In this book, we get the intro chapter of the book to discover some of Maurice's earlier military history before he retired from the British Navy and joined Juan Cabrillo's crew.

Langston Overholt, their CIA contact asked for an off the books favor to find an old colleagues brother that leads the gang into all sorts of trouble. I enjoy the stories where the Oregon people are in control, we get some character development, and the enemies have no idea what they are dealing with (and are doing the best they can) because, well, they have no idea this ship and crew exists. A mad scientist-style villain with genetic engineering is at the center of Fire Strike but there are other parallel subplots.

Hard to believe that this book flies under Clive Cussler's banner, and that it has such a high rating on Goodreads. I stopped reading the Numa files and Fargo books because they were all the same just different locations. This is one of those novels where you are thrown into a character's situation for a chapter, and then you are thrown into another character's situation in the next chapter. Yes, its all luck and significant amounts of danger but at the end of the day we feel safe in knowing that our favorite crew will triumph again. The characters feel developed out and we worry for them, even when we sense that they are in danger.At the same time, it was interesting to read about how Juan and his team sought to use non-lethal methods to attack the secret training camp at the abandoned monastery; that was pretty cool and well-written, I thought.