Fast paced thriller following team of former soldiers fighting crime in only way that can affect the crime - by robbing banks associated with the organized crime and used for money laundering.

After lady friend of one of the soldiers is maltreated by a shady crime boss group decides to bring his crime fiefdom down.

This is a novel written in time when original Mission impossible, A Team and Equalizer shows were very popular. That being said in here we also have a team in which every man is a specialist for certain area - be it technical or social. Also some of them are not that OK themselves - some are troublemakers but Army helped them find their place so to speak. They might all come from various backgrounds but in the Army and in hell that is Vietnam war they learned to look beyond the social status and race and rely on each other through tough times.

Considering the length of the novel and number of the characters they might all seem one-dimensional and cliche - but keep in mind when novel was written. Today we have seen volumes of books, TV shows and movies with the same plots but that was not the case in the day.

All of the above [at least for me] does not deduct anything from the story or novel itself. I truly enjoyed it as a kick ass action story.

Good thriller, recommended.
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It's a brand new CD and I thought it was something new by Block. But it was written in 1969. It's interesting to read a story like this where the participates have no email, cell phones or internet. A group of ex-soldiers band together to bring down criminals that the justice system doesn't want to handle. This looks like a book the television show "The A-Team" could have been based on. I'm afraid that ultimately, the book is terrible on it's own terms. The team is supposed to be looking for justice but the body count of innocent people was just too high to justify the ends. ( )

In modern parlance you might consider this "Ocean's Eleven" meets "The A-Team." Basically a bunch of retired Special Forces guys get together to knock over a bank after a tip from a call girl who then conveniently disappears from the plot. It's too bad the book wasn't longer but like a lot of Block's books it's a fun little yarn. Also interesting that he uses a couple of things that show up in other books. The Canadian mining scam was used in another one I can't remember and Block's Keller series has a lot of stamp collecting in it.

That is all. ( )

A group of ex-enlisted men and army officers forms a team to do what the law can't: catch bag guys. Sort of like the A-Team. (This was an early Block and for all I know gave someone in Hollywood the idea.) The colonel, who has money, creates lives for them to account for their unusual income. One of them is a stamp collector and dealer (shades of a future Keller?), another an encyclopedia salesmen (he didn't mind conning people into buying a good encyclopedia since everyone ought to have one - on the other hand one could live an entire life without one, too.) A third is a travel agent, anyway, you get the idea, all have jobs that made it relatively easy to hide money that came from the extracurricular jobs. They decide to take on a mob boss by duplicating one of his earlier bank robberies to assure that he is accused of the second. Lots of things start to go wrong, and while the group has an ostensible moral compass, the justifications for some of their cruder actions struck me as hollow.

Clearly a minor, exploratory work, it shows some of Block's talent and is a fun little read. ( )

http://uvula-fr-b4.livejournal.com/2005/12/27/ ( )