The third installment in the Alex Hawke adventure series is easily the best book yet, though there were still a few wrinkles that needed ironing out. Sometime spy Alex Hawke is called in to rescue an American spook who has fallen into the hands of the Chinese. The Chinese, who have become close friends with France, are up to something big, and it somehow involves beautiful actress Jet Moon, whose bed Alex is roused from when duty calls. Jet’s father, General Sun-Yat Moon, is in league with her dubious boyfriend, Baron “Schatzi” Von Draxis. The French, the Chinese, and the German shipbuilder are up to no good, infiltrating the Arab empire of Oman as part of their plans. While Alex’s ex-Scotland Yard investigator pal, Ambrose Congreve, travels to New York to hunt for witnesses to a decades-old murder related to the French-Chinese plot, armoire-sized Stokley Jones rescues Jet from her angry boyfriend and travels the world gathering clues with her, figuring out what the French and Chinese are up to. Meanwhile, Alex has to infiltrate an impregnable fortress to rescue a sultan and his harem from their enemies. There were a lot of loose ends to tie up, and just when it seemed like things were winding down, they kicked into overdrive, and Alex suddenly found himself in a race against time to save New York City. Though the book wins points for handling a multi-faceted mystery, I have a few small complaints. First, though Ambrose Congreve is a charming character who adds wonderful texture to the back story, he was given far too large a role. Pages that were spent describing his fondness for the finer things would have been better spent on Alex, whose role in the book was minuscule. Alex is recovering from severe heartbreak, which is a challenging aspect to add to an adventure yarn, but merely leaving him alone for the bulk of the book made me feel cheated. I like Alex! This would have been a good time to delve into who he really is, maybe have him get back to some hobbies he had let slide in his grief over his wife’s death, but he merely played a bit part instead. Stoke’s part was just about right, and I always find myself smiling when he’s on the page. My other complaint is about the action. Though Bell can write a pretty good action scene, this book had a tendency to leave the action when it was hot and not return until the dust was settling, cheating us out of the juiciest bits of the story. These scenes are utterly vital in an adventure novel, and he’s doing well up to a point, but the final quarter of the important, tense scenes needs work. Two scenes I sorely missed in their entirety were Jet’s family dinner that ended badly and the final takedown with Stoke and one of the bad guys at the very end. Shame on the editors for not insisting on a few more pages there.There was a great deal of character development going on here…for Ambrose Congreve. The rest of the characters, especially the star, needed a little more attention. Bell is still relatively new at this, and he’s taken on one heck of a story with this book, which was a smashing success. Its few imperfections mar the overall product very little. He’s created a great cast of characters; so it’s natural that I want to get to spend more time with some of them. Alex Hawke and friends are climbing the ranks, and they’re high on my list of favorite adventure heroes.
In Ted Bell's scorching follow-up to his New York Times bestseller Assassin, intrepid intelligence operative Alex Hawke must thwart a secret, deadly alliance between China and France before they annihilate everything and everyone in their headlong rush toward world domination. Aboard the Star of Shanghai in the south of France, an American spy is held captive. He possesses vital, explosive intelligence linking two nations and one horrifying plot. If he is not rescued, he faces certain torture and inevitable death. Nearby, in a seaside hotel, a man still haunted by the loss of his wife two years earlier finds comfort in the arms of a beautiful Chinese actress--but is she to be trusted? So begins Pirate, an electrifying thriller marking the return of international counterterrorist Alex Hawke. In Paris, a ruthless descendant of Napoleon has risen to power, hell-bent on restoring France's former glory. His fiery ambitions are cynically stoked by a coterie of cold-blooded Mandarins, plotting behind the gates of Beijing's Forbidden City. Cloaked in secrecy, this unholy alliance devises a twisted global plan, backed by China's growing nuclear arsenal, that will send America and the world to the brink of a gutwrenching showdown. With the aid of his old friend and former Navy SEAL, Stokely Jones, Hawke sets out to investigate the deadly connections that bind the French-Chinese axis. Together, they discover that a powerful German industrialist may hold the key, somewhere inside the walls of his Bavarian mountain lair. Meanwhile, clues to an old and gruesome murder in Paris lead to New York City, where horrifying evidence could finally bring a madman to his knees. In the end, as American and British forces prepare to defend a sovereign and oil-rich Gulf nation against unwilling occupation, the terror is all too real. The world is once more balanced on the knife-edge of a full-blown nuclear confrontation. Hawke must once more prepare to hurl himself deep into the nightmare visions of madmen. He must garner every ounce of strength, courage, and useful pain from his past. He must defeat this enemy or else forfeit the lives of untold thousands, including his own, to an axis of evil no historian could have ever predicted. Packed with unrelenting action, glamour, and high style, and featuring the spectacular Alex Hawke, who time and again transports readers to the edge of danger, Pirate is a spellbinding thriller. Be prepared for Alex Hawke's most daunting and heart-pounding mission yet. Here is an author who gets you in the palm of his hand...and then clenches his fist! Review "Very Bondlike...." -- The New York Times From the Inside Flap "PIRATE is the third and best of the Hawke novels, an already brilliant series of derring-do and contemporary swashbuckling that contain more action and interesting characters than most books do in three." - Joe Hartlaub
Do You like book Pirate (2006)?
Alexander Hawke is called back into action again in Pirate. Again, he is like a Clive Cussler replacement without all the cheesy-ness his son and multitude of co-authors are now putting into their books. Bell is the real deal, and so is Pirate. So are any of his books for that matter. And they only keep getting better and better as each one comes out. This is a thriller in every sense of the word. But a high-brow thriller because Hawke brings that James Bond feeling to the story that Jack Reacher never could(not that Reacher would care about that shit!). Just try out one of Bell's books, you aren't going to be disappointed.
—John Boettcher
To be honest, a 2 rating is a gift. While reading a book, and I must reread pape after page because I cannot maintain concentration on the novel, then something is clearly wrong. I've ready many Cussler books that many others have said that Bell's novels resemble.....I think not. I bought three of his books at a used book store....luckily, I will return all three, one read, and the other two not.the only character I enjoyed from this work was the Scotland Yard Congreve detective.....the rest, not so much. Wordy, contrived, and quite boring. The 514 pages might have made a decent book reduced to 350.
—David
China and France have formed a deadly alliance – they are after the oil in Oman and from there – the world!On the side of the good guys: intrepid Counter-Terrorist freelancer, British Intelligence Officer and all round English Pukka good chap, Lord Alex Hawke and his band of International merry men including man-mountain American Stokely Jones. Harry Brock, American agent, rescued by Hawke from the clutches of Chinese agents on a boat in the South of France is now part of the team. Legendary New Scotland Yard criminalist Ambrose Congreve needs to prove who murdered French Foreign Minister Luca Bonaparte's father many years before, he also needs to work out why a beautiful Chinese woman is trying to assassinate him. He then wants to make sure that he wins the heart of Lady Diana Mars. NYPD Lieutenant Mariucci wants to know why a couple of aged mobsters have been killed by a rather strange Chinese man and what the Leviathan, a huge ship sitting in NY Harbour, is threatening to do to his city.On the side of the bad guys: Luca Bonaparte, French Foreign Minister promoted to French President when the Prime Minister and President are assassinated. General Moon and his beautiful twin daughters Jet and Bianca – agents of the Te-Wu – the Chinese Secret Police. Major Tony Tang, General Moon's pretty public face and Hu Xu, assassin, torturer, master of disguise and all round bad guy. Baron von Draxis is the German shipbuilder, owner of a hidden Schloss in the mountains, cruel and vicious lover of Jet Moon, who built Leviathan to be the weapon that the French and Chinese will use to bring the free world to its knees.And that's just a start – there are more characters charging in and out of PIRATE than extras in a Cecil B. DeMille epic movie. Actually PIRATE is a bit of an epic book – at 514 pages, it's a doorstopper of a thriller that starts out at breakneck speed and doesn't let up even in the epilogue.PIRATE really shines in a few ways. Great characterisations taking stereotypes and making them so big and wide and glorious that they become a homage. Congreve's stiff upper lip is so stiff it's a wonder he can shave in the mornings. Hawke is the bravest, the truest, the most multi-talented human being in the world. Stokely Jones is the classic huge man, short on words, high on emotion, faithful to the last. Then the action scenes which are over the top yet manage to never slip over into caricature. You can almost imagine all of the scenes actually happening. (Well, maybe not, but it's not so outlandish to be completely farcical.) PIRATE obviously has a political element to it, but at no stage does it feel like it's trying to make a propaganda point. As you'd expect from something as tongue in cheek as PIRATE – the suspected traitor in the midst isn't and somebody switches sides in a poignant change of heart.PIRATE is a rip-roaring good fun, entertaining roller-coaster thriller. Read it and have a darn good cheer from the sidelines.
—Karen
