Book: Kildar by John Ringo


Entertaining military thriller

John Ringo
Kildar
Baen, 2006
ISBN-10: 1-4165-2133-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-2133-4
462 pages
$7.99

Kildar is a military thriller by John Ringo. I said of part of an earlier military thriller in the same series by Mr Ringo that it's improbable even by the rather relaxed standards of the genre, but that it was enough fun that I didn't much mind. The same can be said for this book.

Mr Ringo's hero, Mike Harmon, is a former navy SEAL. As the book starts, he has a good reason to lie a bit low and plenty of money. He's on his way to a ski resort in the eastern-European country of Georgia and gets lost in a snowstorm. He stops in a town and ends up buying a fortress-like caravanserai there. That rather large house comes with a valley and farms tended by people of an unusual ethnicity for the area. So he becomes, pretty much, a feudal lord. ("Kildar" is the title he gains.) The area he has moved to is one that's often used by Chechen bad-guys for running drugs and guns.

The book is an entertaining fantasy in which the outcome is never seriously in doubt. Much of the book is actually about mundane matters. It rather feels as though Mr Ringo found it entertaining to speculate on what would be involved in being a modern-day feudal lord. The prose is breezy enough that those parts held my interest and the action sequences are very good. Mr Ringo does feel obliged to make it clear that his hero is a flawed person by having him engage in some violent sex.

I rather imagine that Mr Ringo makes use of the situation he has set up in the book in subsequent novels.

Posted: Thu - December 20, 2007 at 06:56 PM   Main   Category: 

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