Dan Murphy's Blog

Ah yes my good friend Nina (Lara Croft) and her bodyguard/husband Chase are back for another fun adventure.  I wanted to read this book after watching the show Chasing Mummies because it reminded me how much I enjoy these types of stories.  Also this one was a little bit more lighter than the Freedom book I finished right before this that was very complex and a great read but I wanted something I could laugh at and enjoy and this was a great pick.  In this adventure they are on the search for Excalibur, King Author’s sward from the sward in the stone.  It seems that this sward contains special materials that would be helpful in building, what else, a weapon of mass destruction.  Good news is the Russians are the bad guys and Chase and Nina are out to stop them.  Once again a great read and I really like Andy’s style of writing and plan on mixing in and out his books with others.  Not too sure what I think of the development of the characters into a husband and wife relationship I like it better when they just met but it actually didn’t effect the plot as much as I thought it would.  Either way still a great read and highly recommended!

So this book came on my radar because of HAWX, I really liked the idea of another military fighter type book and this was a good choice.  The odd thing while going through my mental list of all the books I have read I almost forgot about this one.  So maybe that says something about the book, or maybe I am getting old and having a hard time remembering things!  Anyways this book is about all the governments that hate the US, and there are a lot of them, conspiring to start a war on us without us knowing it was them.  They manage to commandeer a bunch of drone aircraft and plan on using them to reek havoc on the US.  This was a good read and once again made me a little worried about our national security and how easy something like this would be able to actually do.  I look forward to more books from this author to fill a hole that Tom Clancy might have left wide open.  Once again I will mention how worried I was about something like this actually happening…

In search of an archeology book that would be fun to read I came upon this book thanks to Amazon.  This was a great read and really fun.  Think of it as a cross between Indiana Jones and Lara Croft and the main person here is a women.  She has a body guard or two that follow her around and try to keep her out of trouble as she is always in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The characters and their development are really entertaining.  This is the first book in the series along with The Tomb of Hercules and The Secrets of Excalibur with the same characters.  As the title suggests this book is about an exploration for the Lost City of Atlantis.  The search takes them all over the world and to some great remote places and of course as most of my books tend to have it has a fair amount of interesting technology behind it.  The authors style of writing is short simple sentences and I feel that this plot is fairly believable from the standpoint of ‘can this actually happen’.  There were parts where I was laughing out loud and there were some great action scenes, I was very happy to hear about the fact there were other books with these characters. I made Secrets of Excalibur my next one on the list to tackle.  It is a nice break up from the heavily complex books I tend to pick and is just an all around pleasant read.

This was a great book.  Everybody loves a story about the crazy Nazis and bad Germans right?  In this book a new US submarine is working on a training/testing run of their new sub under the ice in Antarctica when they run into a frozen in time and underground hidden Nazi base left over from the war.  They then launch a big excavation of the project and attempt to find out what happened there as the base appeared to have just been abandoned.  The Germans find out about the re-discovered base and want to make sure its secrets stay safe and that nobody finds out what it was originally created for.  This was a great page turner and I highly recommend it.  The authors writing style is great and keeps you reading, character development is alright but it supports the plot very well.  I look forward to reading more from this author as it seems he has a lot of great sounding books out on Amazon.  One thing I also noted about this writing style I had a great mental picture of what was happening during all the action scenes in the book, sometimes I find some authors are a little hard to visualize the high intense action scenes but not with this one!

I just finished this one last night and must say it was a fun and a very quick read for me.  The basic plot here is there is a Delta Forces team that all its members are named after chess pieces (King, Queen, Knight, Rook, Biship) and their mission is to stop a scientist from perfecting a genetic engineering project that would allow for people to have regeneration abilities and live forever.  It is sort of like the Resident Evil plot line in the fact that a few of their ‘experiments’ go a little crazy and cause some issues along the way. I really like the mix up of military and archeology here it makes for a fun plot line and is also the first in a series of three books with this Delta Forces team.  I look forward to reading the other books in the series.  The author’s writing style is easy to follow and action packed, the chapters switch back and forth so be ready to remember what happened two chapters ago or so to be able to follow the plot easily.  Luckily its not that difficult!

This was probably the first book that I started reading with all my travels and this was probably also the first Tom Clancy book I have read in a long while.  Looks like Tom Clancy no longer writes his own books and this one is the first one written by David Michaels.  I really liked this book as it was written from a person with a strong military background and had great character development.  Long and short of this one without ruining the book is that HAWX is a special program for high altitude flying and as is typically of stories these days an over patriotic leader wants to make the US safer and stronger for the long haul.  This was a super fast read think I read it in about 4 flights to Dallas so a great one to pick up if you haven’t read it already.  I would recommend this one and look forward to another book from this author.