You’ve seen Stan Mitchell featured on this blog before, both in interviews and reviews, and you’ll continue to see him pop up from time to time as long as he keeps releasing top-quality action-thrillers. In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that over the years, Stan and I have become online buddies with grandiose plans to purchase matching luxury cabins on a private lake in Colorado once we become internationally-renowned, multi-millionaire action authors. Does that make this review biased? Hell, man, does a bear shit in the woods? (Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve never actually seen a bear shit in the woods…)
Anyway, action aficionados who despise the doorstop bloat of many modern day thrillers will find the Nick Woods series as refreshing as chilled watermelon on a hot summer day. I’m sure there are readers out there who prefer 600-page slog-fests, but I’m not one of them, and few authors operating in today's thriller market write as crisp and lean as Mitchell; he’s the kind of guy that sees no reason to use 10 words when 9 will suffice.
In Nigerian Terror, Nick and his Shield, Safeguard, and Shelter (S3) team of ready-to-rock trigger-pullers lock horns with Boko Harem terrorist thugs and pretty much kick all kinds of bad guy butt. And by "kick," I mean "shoot with 5.56mm projectiles." Because praise the ammunition gods, the bullet count is high in this one. If Mitchell got paid a buck for every round fired in this book, he’d be a lot closer to that aforementioned Colorado cabin.
In addition to the blistering firefights, this novel features some brutal hand-to-hand combat sequences that spice things up and trust me, you'll feel the blows slamming off the page so vividly that you'll risk concussion just reading about them. No fancy martial arts choreography, just good guys slugging it out with bad guys in rough, dirty, jaw-rattling brawls.
Bottom line, the violence quotient is plenty high enough to satisfy fans of this kind of literary carnage. And if you’re not a fan of literary carnage, why on earth are you reading a blog called Guns ‘n’ Guts?
Nick Woods must be getting tired from all these bullet-blazing missions, but here's hoping the grumpy gunslinger doesn't get too much down-time before rocketing off on another job in Book 5. After all, there’s no rest for the wicked … or the heroic. I don't care if Nick’s leading the S3 pack or going lone wolf (actually, I prefer lone wolf Nick), just so long as he keeps strapping on his guns and getting down to the business of ventilating villains. Pay attention, action junkies, because Stan R. Mitchell is quickly becoming one of those can't-miss authors in the genre. And if you buy enough of his books, maybe Stan will pay for both our cabins…
I discovered the so-called “Piccadilly Cowboys” series back in the pre-internet days, mostly by stumbling across them in my endless haunting of used bookshops. But somehow I missed Bodie the Stalker. Edge, Steele, The Undertaker, Jubal Cade, Breed … they all made their way onto my bookshelves, but it was only a few years ago I discovered there were other Piccadilly Cowboy series. I started reading Bodie the same time I started reading Claw, Crow, and Hawk (all excellent series as well). And yes, thanks to Google, I am now fully aware that there are even more Piccadilly Cowboy series I need to track down. Anybody know where I can find Gringos #1?
Anyway, if you get high on violent, bloody action-westerns, then you need to be reading the Bodie the Stalker series. They’re written by Mike Linaker (under the Neil Hunter pseudonym), an expert word-slinger who would later become one of the fan-favorite authors of The Executioner series. This time around, our titular bounty hunter comes to the aid—and the bed—of a beautiful copper mine owner who is being bullied to sell her claim, and as the title suggests, all sorts of hell explodes. Along with some dynamite.
While nobody will mistake Bodie for being one of those white-hat heroes, he’s not as rattlesnake-mean as some of his contemporaries (we’re looking at you, Crow). So yeah, maybe he’s not Edge … but he isn’t John Wayne either. He takes no crap, never backs down, and is perfectly willing to go to guns (or fists) if that's what the situation requires. Bodie ain’t afraid of bullets, that’s for sure. No, he’s not an assassin, but he’ll blast a hole in your heart if you need killing. And thank the gods of gunpowder, there always seem to be lots of unsavory folks that need killing when Bodie rides into town.
Speaking of killing, the carnage quotient is high—that’s praise, not criticism, by the way—and in keeping with the Piccadilly Cowboys tradition, the violence is fairly graphic. We're not talking Edge levels of gore, but brain matter gets blown to bits on more than one occasion. Other things get blown too, nudging this toward "adult western" territory at times. Bodie definitely knows how to handle his six-gun, but his love-gun skills are in fine form as well. Yeah, you won’t be mistaking this for a Louis L'Amour novel…
High Hell is the 3rd Bodie title I've read and while the series is not my favorite of the "violent western" era (that title still goes to Edge, with Breed and Crow as runner-ups), they feature enough fast-paced, bullet-blazing escapism to keep me coming back for more. As sure as a vulture will eat a dead man's eyes, if you enjoy blood-soaked six-gun action, you need to hunt this series down.
