Full Black - Brad Thor

Last night I was sitting in the airport and realized that my Kindle wouldn’t turn on. No problem, I stopped by a kiosk and picked up a action/adventure/thriller to kill some time.

Oh boy.

Ok, there may be some spoilers here, but I only made it about 20% of the way through the book, so they’re probably not huge spoilers. I also left it in the seatback pocket and read the Skymall catalog instead, so I can’t actually quote anything I read. Everything here is a paraphrase.

So here’s the plot as I understood it: The bad guy is a billionaire Hungarian jew who hates America and wants to destroy it and make it more socialist. I’m not sure in which order he plans to do these things, but he’s definitely evil. And a billionaire. And Hungarian. And Jewish. And socialist. But his name isn’t George Soros–that’s a completely different evil billionaire socialist Hungarian Jew who’s trying to destroy America.

Our antagonist’s devious plan for destroying America is:

[ol]
[li]Brainwash schoolkids into believing that America is bad. Seriously, Phase I of his clever plan is to indoctrinate schoolkids. Sample dialogue: “He’s corrupted our school system into teaching children that America is evil.” “My God, can we do anything about this?” “No, it’s too late, there’s no way to reach them now. They’re thoroughly brainwashed”[/li][li]Make America more socialist. Apparently Phase II of his plan to destroy America is unemployment insurance and health care. He’s been doing this for decades, so the current socialist state of our country is the result of decades of this evil mastermind’s planning and plotting.[/li][li]Create a global currency. The culmination of our evil Jewish billionaire’s plot to destroy America is to create a global currency. And the only way to prevent this is for the world to go to a gold standard, I bet. Probably a bad plan for someone who makes money currency trading, unless that’s a different evil billionaire.[/li][/ol]

Our hero is a former CIA agent who quit his job following the election. The old president was willing to do what it took to fight terrorism, but the new president is weak and only wants to talk. Our hero was only able to keep fighting terrorism by going private-sector.

At this point I stopped reading, but I suspect our hero kills the evil Jew, gold standard, President is a traitor, truth gets out, Socialism averted.

I can usually do the suspension of disbelief thing for long enough to get through a book, but it’s hard when the author keeps preaching his political beliefs at you.

Wow, that sounds bad. Here, let me recommend a better book - a series. Have you heard of the Left Behind series of books?

:wink:

Crap happens.

No, that bad guy is Romanian, so totally different. Or so they tell me, all Commienazisatanistjewmuslim furriners look the same to me

Yeah, I remember reading about the first half of one of Thor’s early books. It was about a guy killing random politicians and the detective trying to catch him. And Thor had the detective sympathizing with the killer because of course everyone with any sense knows that killing politicians is a good idea. But technically it’s illegal, so he felt obligated to catch him.

My advice is to stay away from William Johnstone and John Ringo as well.

Damn… I’d misread the title as “Full Brad - Black Thor” and thought “Now that sounds interesting!” and opened it up.

This isn’t nearly so interesting as a Black Thor would be.

In the same spirit, try re-reading Little Nemo’s post.

I’m of course picturing an authorial Chris Hemsworth, complete with furrowed brow and ready sledgehammer.

Yeah, trying to type with a sledge hammer would put anyone in a cranky mood.

I just struggled through Thor’s Hidden Order, a book about how secretly evil the Federal Reserve is. The characters launch into lectures at each other for pages on end about how they are destroying America, and the protagonist is like a character in a Chick Tract. “Oh, I did not know that! That sure is terrible, HAW HAW HAW!” and is about as historically accurate as a Dan Brown novel.

He seems to be a wacko neocon, and isn’t shy about using his fiction as a soapbox.

And in terms of the book itself, it was mediocre at best. The main plot turned out to be more of an afterthought, and never really even got resolved.

I predict that is next novel will be about the Gold Standard and reveal that his hero’s great grandfather played a part in the Boston Tea Party.

About 10 years ago I thought Brad Thor was pretty much the same as Vince Flynn. But with each book, I had to start overlooking more and more political crap. The last one I picked up around 4 or 5 years ago I couldn’t finish, and that was the end.