Tsar (Alex Hawke Series #5) Book

This book starts with a prologue set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fittingly, the basis for the 'mission' that Hawke is assigned is patently absurd - going after a secret Soviet listening post on a Norwegian Island, covered in a way that makes no sense. Then as he is being shot at (during a "rainy and foggy day" he somehow "sees" a "glint of sunlight" off of his would be killer's binoculars. Also,Bell has Castro "importing" Russian "ICBMs". Castro didn't "import" them and they were intermediate range missiles, not intercontinental. Then Bell has what he tries to make into a larger-than-life character named Hawke who is single handedly going to penetrate a Soviet installation on an emergency basis to steal information. Seriously? But the best part is when a sniper takes a shot at Hawke, misses of course, and then sprays the area blindly. Hawke kills him with one shot. After all, he was carrying only one bullet. The entire five pages are just ridiculous - and that's just the beginning of the book. It gets progressively worse.

These absurdities do a good job setting the tone, though. From there, it's downhill.Historical inaccuracies aside (this is a fiction after all), "Tsar" jumps off the deep end into the ridiculous. By the 20th chapter Hawke will be bedding the "Tsar's" beautiful daughter; by the 25th chapter Hawke teams up with a CIA officer to rescue the Director of MI6 and the former Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard after they were captured by Jamaican drug smugglers Don't ask how or why,just go with it. Forget how ridiculous it is that aged MI6 director is running around a tropical island with a handicapped former Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard spying on drug dealers who are spying on Hawke. Don't bother.

Later, some Chechens get blown up in Miami, while a singer from the Cape Verde Islands doesn't, for reasons. There's a sci-fi Russian airship floating around, and a Russian srial killer. All sorts of things are happening, but it's not clear why, and the book's historical and linguistic inaccuracies (note to Ted Bell: Russians don't call Chechens "hornye" -- that's not even a word in Russian) go a long way towards muddying the waters even further.

There are others who can pull of this kind of thing. Clive Cussler is one of them. Cussler's plots are elaborate fantasies, his characters outrageously incredible - but Cussler can pull it off. Bell cannot.

Next we are introduced to the son of the aforementioned spy who, of course, is described in great physical detail. That's important, because we are introduced to him as he lies nude on a secluded Bermuda beach. Of course, the most beautiful woman in the world (nude, of course) appears unexpectedly from the water, obviously a passenger from the luxurious yacht just offshore. Yes, yes, this is the world of the perfectly formed spy meeting the perfectly formed woman who just happens to be the daughter of the most evil man in the world, the Kremlin's mysterious new "Tsar."

Noting the lead character in this book is Ex- Royal Navy you would think Mr Bell would ensure he has some of the basics down pat, he doesn't. From Uniforms (Cdr Hawke seems to have invented a Tropical Mess Kit where his gold stripes are on his sleeve, not his shoulder boards), to rank (the XO of SEAL Team 6 is unlikely to be a Naval CAPT (Of-5) or Army/Marine Officers (Of-2) are unlikely to be an XO, to basic understanding of the Navy (Ensigns are not enlisted, are unlikely to be working in pairs firing a gun etc).

He writes of a "German" ZR-1 Zeppelin as having bombed London during WWII. Huh? The ZR-1 was a German built, but US NAVY Zeppelin ship known as the USS Shenandoah. It was built in 1923 and crashed in 1925. It didn't even exist during WWII.The author also identifies an Ensign as an Enlisted man's rank.

He describes a Gulfstream IV business jet as capable of 400 kph. The Gulfstream will do nearly twice that speed. He has the pilot risking death by making a high speed landing in order to get our hero on the ground quicker. A Gulfstream can be slowed down by about a hundred miles per hour in the last ninety seconds of flight using air brakes and flaps. A hot landing buys no significant time and no rational pilot would do that.

It's hard to explain exactly what I am talking about unless you have read the book. But to give one example, let me tell you about the villains. These include the Tsar, who rides around in a supercharged Zeppelin, kills his victims using methods borrowed from Vlad the Impaler, and builds computers with remote-controlled bombs in them, and Happy the Baker, a demented psychopath who dresses all in white and enjoys rape and murder and delivering bombs in wedding cake boxes (The events that take place rely on the reader's gullibility in order to be plausible, but not even a 15 year old would buy the ridiculous story Happy the Baker gave the policemen in Salina, Kansas) I know Fleming got away with supercharging his villains, but for me, these guys were just too far over the top for me to believe in them.

Other absurdities:
Hawke fought "Hezbollah jihadists in the Amazon" (What?)
- Zeta is"`the last word in the Greek alphabet" (it is?)
- Someone to be executed in a federal prison for a federal crime gets a `stay of execution' from a state governor? For a federal crime? Huh?
- "A bloody billion dollar Bushehr reactor for Iran which will produce enough spent plutonium to produce sixty bombs minimum" There's no such thing as 'a Bushehr reactor'. Bushehr is a town in Iran not a reactor brand.
- The Russians "could bring Europe to its knees in under an hour by simply turning off the oil and gas taps." Under an hour?
- Pravda was one of the Russian president's favorite newspapers. "There were three newspapers arrayed there beside his place setting. Pravda, the New York Times and the London Times."Pravda still exists in print form?
- The Russians were upset because we were "putting missiles into Poland and Czechoslovakia." Czechoslovakia still exists?

Other nonsense:
-The hero's love is free to go anywhere she wants throughout most of the book. She is portrayed as woman who does what she wants where she wants throughout the book. In the end, when it is of paramount importance that she be anywhere that her father isn't, she suddenly is welded to him like glue, powerless to get away. It didn't make a lot of sense to me other than it was guaranteed way to make sure she didn't survive. I pretty much knew she was doomed when they fell in love. It would have been difficult writing stories with her hanging around the hero's neck. Romances are exciting in a thriller novel. But marriages?
-The hero finds some thugs torturing his friends. He could just waste the thug but sets up a boxing match instead. What? I thought Hawke was an intelligence officer?
-One of the baddies has an opportunity to whack the only two witnesses to his crime (blowing up a city). This baddie whacked more people in the book than anybody. He decides to let the two witnesses go because he couldn't think of a good reason to kill them. They of course turn right around and their information is used to foil the grand plan of the evil doer. This same bad guy felt it was necessary to kill two children, rape and murder their mother, kill their father, etc... He is supposed to be some kind of "elite" Russian professional. For somebody "elite", this idiot isn't half as smart as me. Somewhat laughably, this "elite" killer and two of his cronies are taken out by a common female pop singer. In what world are Russian mobsters wimpier than divas?