ALEXANDER HAWKE

Full Name:	Alexander Hawke
Nationality:	British
Organization:	Presidential Agent
Occupation	Agent

Creator:	Ted Bell
Time Span:	2003 - 2020

ABOUT THE SERIES

       Alexander Hawke is a go-to guy for the President.
       Hawke is a very rich man, Chairman and CEO of a major conglomerate, who loves adventure and hates injustice. He also happens to be a very close friend of the President of the U.S. from many years before the man ran for office and comes to the aid of his friend on several occasions. Additionally, he is on occasion intimately familiar with the female Secretary of State.
       When he was 7, he was cruising the Caribbean with his parents when they ran afoul of modern-day pirates. Hidden by his father, he watched in shock their brutal murders, trauma which affects him to date. Rather than cripple him, however, it strengthened him and gave him a deep need to fight bad guys whenever he can. It is a bitter irony that Hawke would realize later that he was a direct descendant of a legendary English privateer who had also prowled the same waters.
       With the death of his father, young Alexander inherited an incredible fortune and an estate and title in England, making the boy the latest in a line of Lord Hawkes. As he grew into manhood, Hawke chose to put aside the privileges of wealth and join the Royal Navy and during that lengthy service became very skilled in naval combat, earning numerous medals and commendations for his actions. Eventually the duties of his company demanded his attention and he reluctantly left the military to become head of his corporation.
       Hawke is assisted in his adventures by a varied and extremely interesting band of people. The action often moves to these other players but the author is very good at making sure the excitement never leaves.

NOVELLAS AND SHORT STORIES

Number of Stories:	3
First Appearance:	2012
Last Appearance:	2015


1			Crash Dive novella Written by Ted Bell Copyright: 2012 Hawke is asked to fly illegally into another country's airspace to meet secretly with a man to try to stop a new war. When that country detects his plane, things become dicey.

2			What Comes Around Written by Ted Bell Copyright: 2014 A former CIA agent with a vengeful grudge is in action. A former CIA director is dead. A high ranking current CIA official then dies. Alex Hawke is also on the man's list.

3			White Death Written by Ted Bell Copyright: 2015 The death of two different European bank leaders in short order makes MI6 think somebody is up to no good and he asks his best man, Alexander Hawke, to look into it.

MY COMMENTS

I really recommend this series. In a modern world of publishing, books have to be bigger than ever, which the Hawke series definitely is, but Mr. Bell doesn't fill the pages with fluff but with highly intelligent plotting and character development. One of the best things that the author does is to have such outstanding supporting characters who get into exciting scrapes of their own and do not need to be constantly rescued by the main hero. In fact, they often do the rescuing, which is a huge plus for the series.
The adventures are wild but not over the top and the timing will grab you and hold you and, best of all, wanting the excitement to go on. Well done, Mr. Bell! I hope Alexander Hawke keeps flying for years to come.

GRADE

My Grade: A-

Your Average Grade: A

YOUR OPINIONS

Sir Gerald	A+	5/9/2012 12:37:36 PM	Sorry but I've tried two of these and although they had elements that normally capture my imagination the totality of the effort just didn't work. Boys own stuff.

cch20	A+	7/27/2012 12:55:39 PM	My dad passed Assassin on to me. I was caught up hard within a few pages. The constant changing of locations, twists & some really bizarre behavior hooked me. Alex Hawke is better that Bond.

raybaraesq	A+	8/27/2012 8:04:05 AM	I love this series. I can't read them fast enough. This is the one current series that I truly can't wait for the next installment.

zulutime	A+	1/24/2013 9:43:28 AM	B, at best at this time. Too wordy, must be being paid by the word.

zulutime	A+	1/28/2013 7:59:47 AM	Finished second book (SPY) in series by Ted Bell. Again it gets a bit wordy and off track with descriptions that muddle the tale. The writing is a constant up and down between- "why is this here, too much information" to "hey, this is good stuff" very staccato in its presentation. Makes to want to skip over stuff.

David	A+	4/19/2014 10:30:30 PM	The most uneven of the current top thriller writers Bell is prone to some absolute drivel (his England never did exist not even when P.G. Wodehouse was writing about it) Hawke is so wonderful you half hope he'll fall on his face, and there are huge gaffs (in one book he informs readers Hawke drove from Gibraltar to Cannes in two hours --- what at, light speed, it's close to 1,000 miles by land, the whole Spanish Corniche and most of the French one). His Stoke is just insulting as a black character and Ambrose Congrieve makes John Dickson Carr's Dr. Fell look like realism. But he does manage some high nonsense of an entertaining type, and I keep coming back thinking he will get his act together. He never does but at least he believes in his own absurdities and that helps. I manage to get past the nonsense and enjoy them anyway, though not in the way I do Rollins or Cussler. I would recommend these as the literary equivalent of a summer blockbuster, but his Never never land version of the British countryside, the aristocracy, and the forelock tugging peasants is absolute horse hockey, and in his most recent book he tries to force the oldest plot extant, the computer that wants to take over the world, down our throats, and despite an attempt to dress it up with a bit about Singularity just trots out the same old computer trying to wipe the human virus off Earth plot that was overused back in the early sixties. He does do marvelous set pieces, and Hawke has some splendid toys, but I lived and worked in England at a fairly high level and Bell's version belongs in Disneyland. Even for high concept you have to pay some attention to reality. Bell seems to never have heard of Great Britain's greatest threat to Hawke and his ilk --- the Inland Revenue. Still, at least he doesn't call Prince Charles 'Chuck" like Clancy idiotically had Jack Ryan do in Patriot Games.

jc	-	2019-05-05	Agree with three other comments here for the same reasons they state. In comparison with Baldacci, Battles, Box, Patterson et al, Bell is poor quality.

jc	-	2019-05-05	Books 4 and 5 are reversed on this list. On the author''s site ''Tsar" is #4 and ''Spy'' #5.

dbuhler	B	2020-09-02	Why all the A+ ratings, when we agree that Bell and Hawke are simply second rate. To read Cumming, Steinhauer, and Maxim is to be in spy grad school. To read Bell is to revert back to middle school.

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