Tiger by the Tail by John Ringo and Ryan Sear

It all begins so simply, with a training mission for some of the Keldara warriors replacing the many lost in the battle against the Chechen insurgents. Mike Jenkins and his chief of staff, Adams, have chosen as their final exam the task of taking back a freighter from a group of pirates near Malaysia, then destroying their home base. All of this goes relatively smoothly, except that his team takes captive a "prostitute" being abused by the pirates, and discovers a locked case full of motherboards designed to control nuclear power plants in the pirates' treasure.

Though it takes Mike a while to figure it out, it seemed obvious to me before it was revealed in the book that the prostitute, Soon Yi, was a secret agent in deep cover for Chinese intelligence, tracking down the stolen motherboards for her government. After Mike contacts his friends at the highest levels of the U.S. government, he is asked to find out where the motherboards were going, ultimately, and get that information back to U.S. Intelligence. So begins the adventure through Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar and other fun places in the Far East. Mike's team takes on gangsters, the police, a rogue Chinese general and even the military forces of a sovereign nation.

Plenty of graphic action, both military and sexual. Sear's addition to the writing team seems to add a bit more "documentary" style to things - each time Mike's team lands in a new locale, we get a couple of pages of background on the country, city or political unit, and there seems to be more detail about the capability of various weapons used by Mike and others. Not the best novel in the series, by a long shot, but not as poor as some reviews would have you believe. Hold out for the paperback before you spend the money.

A Deeper Blue by John Ringo

A Deeper Blue is the fifth and possibly final novel in this series. Mike, Kildar, Jenkins is in a self-induced drunken stupor at the start of this novel, emotionally incapacitated by the loss of a loved one in the previous book (spoiler?). Unfortunately, islamic terrorists have teamed up with drug runners in the Caribbean to attempt to import VX nerve gas to the continental US, and perpetrate a WMD attack. When the President calls, Mike won't answer, so his second in command, Adams, and some of the intel and combat teams head to Florida to work with the CIA, FBI, ATF, and all the alphabet soup you can eat to try to stop the terrorists.

When Adams and Vanner, the Kildar's intel chief, are shot in a raid that turns into a trap, Mike must rouse himself from his caravanserai and head for the States to avenge them and continue the operation. There's lots of great action on the high seas, as the Mountain Tigers take to cigarette boats to pursue the smugglers, others fast-rope onto a freighter to interrogate the crew, and Katya "Cottontail" impersonates a Girls Gone Wild coed to infiltrate the drug lord's yacht.

True to form, no surprises here. Action-packed fun for mature audiences only.

Choosers of the Slain by John Ringo

Possibly the best part of this book comes from the forward, "Any attempt to learn anything from these books is disrecommended by the author, the publisher and the author's mother who wishes to state that he was a very nice boy and she doesn't know what went wrong." Ringo cracks me up sometimes.

In the third book in the Paladin of Shadows series, Mike is pretty well settled in as the ruler, or Kildar, of his own private Idaho in Georgia (the country not the state). The training of his mountain militia is going well, and the training of his harem even better. The crops are coming in and the new brewery is almost built. What more can a man ask for?

Well, a normal man might not ask for anything much, but a senator sure will, and when Mike is called to Washington to meet with a powerful member of the President's opposition, he's not especially happy about it. It seems that one of the congressman's friends has lost his daughter in Eastern Europe somewhere, presumably kidnapped and sold into white slavery. Senator Traskel makes an offer the Kildar can't quite refuse, both because of the five million dollar reward and his nagging sense that something just doesn't smell quite right here.

So Mike takes some of his fighters and intel folks off into the hinterlands - actually, they start in the hinterlands and head to the big cities - to see what they can dig up. The problem of sexual slavery is huge in the ruins of ancient Samarkand, and Mike smells a great big rat living in the moral sewers.

Just another rapid-fire adventure, complete with the usual sex and blood and rock and roll. There is one amusing side plot going on, with the Keldaran lad Mike has designated to get the marketing started for Mountain Tiger beer booking a convention booth in Sin City. Mike and his troupe of lovelies and heavies take a break from the combat action to fly into town, wow the sales reps, and disrupt the smooth operations of a couple of governments, while they're at it.

Kildar by John Ringo

Kildar is the second book in the Paladin of Shadows series, which starts with Ghost. In this book, Mike wandering through Eastern Europe, looking for a place to lie low after foiling several terrorist plots in the last book. He's driving through a snowstorm in Georgia (the country, not the state) and gets stranded in a small town in the mountains. While getting to know the local constabulary a bit, he discovers an old caravanserai for sale for a cool million Euros, with ownership rights to a small valley with tenant farmers also thrown in, which turns out to be just what he needs.

The tenant farmers are called the Keldara, and in an amazingly convenient coincidence, all of the women turn out to be supermodel gorgeous and the men to be the descendents of ancient warriors. Mike sets out to modernize the valley and its subistence farming techniques to improve the lives of the Keldara, and hires a cadre of his old special forces pals to train up a mountain militia to defend his new digs, and incidentally to interdict Chechen terrorist movements through the area.

As one might expect from experience with Ghost, the story is filled with lots of military trivia, graphic battles, and gratuitous sex. The climax (if you'll forgive the expression) is reached when Mike's Keldaran forces defeat a light batallion of Chechen bad guys with five squads of half-trained farm boys, who catch on to soldiering like tigers in a sheep cot, and when they rescue a group of girls who were sold to the Chechens to be sex slaves and Mike diverts them to his own harem, for lack of any better ideas.

Oh, and most importantly, the women of the valley brew the best beer in the known universe.

Just a fun romp to while away the hours.

Ghost by John Ringo

Ghost is the first book in Ringo's Paladin of Shadows series. I had a review of the fourth book, Unto the Breach, already written and posted it here in June, so since I've got them handy both in paperback and Nook form, I'll probably do some catchup and give you some info on the earlier books, too.
Ghost is written as a series of three interlinked stories, which would work as novellas, or which might have been serialized in the SF mags at first. In the first little vignette, Mike Harmon, a retired Navy Seal who is trying to settle in to life as a college student after leaving the teams, witnesses a co-ed getting snatched by what are obviously professionals, and decides quickly to do something about it.

He follows the kidnappers, and discovers that they are terrorists who intend to ship the girls they've captured -50 in all - to an undisclosed location in the Middle East, and broadcast their torture and murder on worldwide TV to force the U.S. to remove its forces from the area. Mike, whose nickname in the teams was "Ghost" for his ability to move and kill silently, stows away on the plane the terrorists are using and hitchhikes all the way to Syria to their hidden base. There, he foils the plot and rescues the girls, of course. The U.S. government at its highest levels is grateful for his exploits and rewards him with lots of cash and sort of puts him on retainer to help them deal with other issues that may come up.

The second story takes place in the Caribbean, where Mike is enjoying some R&R on the fishing boat he bought with some of the loot from the first story. He's partying with some beach bunnies when the call comes in that terrorists have a nuclear weapon that they're smuggling through the area to plant somewhere in Florida and detonate. Mike drops his fun and games and picks up his weapons and heads out to foil the plot.

The third story shifts to Eastern Europe, where Mike is hanging out, now that things have gotten a little hot for him in the Caribbean. He's actually on the prowl in the brothels there when he runs across a hooker with a heart of plutonium...well, actually she just tries to sell him a nuke. Intrigued, he has her lead him to the sellers, but it's too late; the bomb has already been sold to some Chechens. He lets his friends in Washington know what's going on, then follows his nose as the trail leads all over Europe to find out who has the bomb now and what their target is. As you might imagine, it all ends mostly well for Mike, not so well for the terrorists.

Graphic violence, graphic sex, and a smart-ass hero. What's not to love?

Unto the Breach, by John Ringo

This is the fourth book in Ringo's series that started with Ghost. The title, of course, comes from the oft misquoted line from Henry V. Ex-special forces soldier, Mike Harmon, has once again been tasked with a deadly mission to stop biological weapons from falling into the hands of Chechen terrorists, and he and his Kildara warriors are up for the challenge.


I think that these books fall into a wish fulfillment category for Ringo, and probably many of his fans. Just things we'd like to see happen, rather than the total foul up that results from bureaucracy and normal human stupidity in the Global War on Terror these days. For example, there's a great sequence where Al Jazeera is doing an interview with a Chechen terrorist general, being broadcast live on CNN as the terrorists are claiming they're going to wipe out Mike's forces, with the usual accompaniment of jihadist bragging. Suddenly, the general's body explodes in a splash of gore, as one of the Kildara snipers uses his high powered rifle to spectacular effect, seen worldwide on tv.

Of course, there's some more obvious wish fulfillment stuff, showing how Mike deals with having a harem full of young nubiles, exercising his droit du seigneur in his fiefdom, and playing with a vast assortment of high tech weaponry. Oh, and don't forget the awesome beer they brew in the village!

This one has plenty of action, suspense, and a few good plot twists. If you haven't already, pick up the earlier books in the series and enjoy the ride!