David Rollins: War Lord

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War Lord - the best adrenalin filled escapism around
David Rollins has written another page-turning, adrenalin filled thriller in the Vin Cooper series which equals and sometimes surpasses most current top selling military/espionage action thrillers.

Special Agent Vin Cooper is different from other fictional action heros (such as Jack Reacher, Mich Rapp, Oliver Stone etc.).  Whle he is happy to work in a team he achieves most when he acts as "Lone Ranger with no Tonto". He has been scarred, both physically (with serious bullet and knife wounds) but also emotionally with the recent death of Special Agent Anna Masters - "Masters and I had been close - partners and, well partners".

Compared to most other heroes, Vin Cooper is extremely funny, especially when facing life and death situations. Here are some examples:
1. When answering an important multi-choice psychological test Vin answered A to everything, giving him a different personality reading to everyone else.
2. "What are you going to do Cooper?" "Don't know but it never stopped me before."
3. "You don't like following orders, do you Cooper?" "Orders I like fine. It's just stupidity I'm not down with."
4. When faced with disposing of a body from a public toilet - "We have to get rid of him." "He's too big to flush - I tried."

Still guilt-ridden over Anna's death, Vin agrees to help out an acquaintance of hers - a Vegas showgirl - to find her boy friend Randy who is missing when his plane  goes down in mysterious circumstances near Darwin. She has also been sent a gruesome package - a severed hand wearing Randy's Air Force Academy ring plus a mysterious ransom note. What starts out as a search to find out what happened to Randy soon turns into a world-wide chase to prevent an event of catastrophic proportions. In the process Vin adds some more bullet wounds to his collection, some first and second degree burns and just misses out being bitten by a very deadly snake.

Those of you who read Ghost Watch will also recognise some of the really nasty types that Vin battled in the Congo.

I read a lot of thrillers and David Rollins has been at the top of my list since he started writing about 10 years ago with Rogue Element and Sword of Allah, featuring the Australian SAS. This Aussie author then moved on successfully to his current series featuring US Air Force OSI Special Agent Vin Cooper. I look forward to reading the next book he is currently working on  - Standoff (Vin Cooper, Book 6) about the Mexico/US drug trade.

PS Where does the humour come from? His website shows Rollins' inimitable Aussie humour - "What sort of books do you write? Ones without pictures to colour in."