ALEXANDER HAWKE

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.

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.

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.

B, at best at this time. Too wordy, must be being paid by the word.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.