One Rough Man: A Pike Logan Thriller

I had a one week (non action packed) vacation. Couldn’t put this book down. Great read, just bought the second installment in this series.

It was good but other Pike stories had more action. Overall, it held my attention and looking for the next chapter throughout.

An outstanding debut novel, Brad Taylor draws on his experience as a Delta Force commander to deliver an action-packed thriller. The realism and attention to detail makes this a must read for fans of Vince Flynn and Brad Thor. Pike Logan is a flawed hero who I found myself rooting for time and time again. Authorized by the President, the Taskforce was formed to operate outside the law and without sanction from congressional oversight in order to deal with the increasing presence of terrorists. Pike Logan was the best of the best, and as team leader never failed to complete a mission successfully. At his best when the plans started to break down, Pike was known for his quick thinking and decisive action. Finally succumbing to his wife's repeated requests to retire from his job, Pike was on his last mission when tragedy struck his family. Unable to deal with the guilt of being away when his family needed him most, Pike went on a downward spiral and sought solace in the bottom of a bottle. Meanwhile, Professor John Cahill was in the Guatemalan jungle searching for his mythical Temple of the Priests. When his guides refused to go any further into the jungle, two young natives seeking treasure stole his GPS and found the Temple. They also found a white powder which quickly killed one of the boys while the other made it back to tell the story. Cahill, ever cautious, embedded the GPS coordinates in some music mp3 files and e-mailed them to his niece Jennifer, who was a student at the College of Charleston. He then deleted all information from his laptop and GPS. Miguel, who was a very successful smuggler, was in negotiations with two Arabs to smuggle certain items into the United States when the young boy from the jungle told the tale of finding the Temple and the ensuing death of his friend from the mysterious white powder. Feigning ignorance of the Spanish language, the two Arab terrorists became interested in the powder as a source for a WMD. Miguel, also known as "Machete," was more interested in the treasure and potential wealth it may bring. Machete ordered his henchmen to pick up Professor Cahill in hopes of finding the location of the Temple. Cahill told Machete that he had FedExed the GPS to his niece in Charleston, South Carolina. Professor Cahill died as Machete was torturing him to find out additional information about the GPS. The two terrorists found the key to the embedded mp3 files on a thumb drive amid Cahill's possessions and were able to obtain the deadly powder. Machete sent a team to Charleston to retrieve the GPS from Jennifer and as luck would have it, Pike was able to thwart the attack and kill the mobsters. Pike did not want to be looking over his shoulder from the Machete's agents for the rest of his life, so he agreed to go to Guatemala and deliver the non-existent GPS. Jennifer went with Pike and they formed a somewhat tenuous and unlikely partnership. It was in Guatemala that Pike and Jennifer learned of the terrorist's possession of the WMD and they decided they had to stop the attack in order to prevent widespread death and panic. In Washington DC, a member of the government also learned of the terrorist's intentions and decided to delete all known references to the attack in order for him to play the part of hero and savior, thus catapulting him to a higher position in the government. He wanted no loose ends and ordered Pike and Jennifer to be killed. Therefore the dynamic duo found themselves chasing the terrorists and dodging multiple assassination attempts. This was a very good debut novel with an interesting plot and in depth knowledge of special forces operations. If you enjoy action packed novels as I do, then this is the book for you. I look forward to reading the future adventures of Pike Logan and Jennifer Cahill.

I ran across another of Brad Taylor's Pike Logan books and liked it so much that I wanted to back track to the beginning of the series. This makes one of the best first novels that I have read in a long time. Taylor has a close expertise in the deadly world of special operations and he shows that in his descriptions of hand to hand combat. More than that, he gets us inside the head of his hero as Pike Logan tries to figure out how to stay alive and how to prevail in his many fights. The fights are top of the line thriller fodder, they make the book. He has invented a quick moving plot that we can not only follow but that we can believe. He takes us from Central America to Norway to Bosnia with enough description that Taylor might have been at these locations. He surely did his homework if he hasn't been there in person. We suffer no ambiguity in this story. The good guys are good and the bad guys are bad. We do receive a nicely calibrated dose of bad guy motivation, which is nice to have. The baddies might be totally bad but they are not simple cartoons. They do what they do for their own reasons and we know and understand those reasons without having to agree with them. The good guys are not all drawn with as much care. We don't know much about the team mates, including knowing what they look like. In a fast paced thriller this might not be necessary but it prevents the coveted five star thriller rating. On the strength of reading the book further along in the series, I ordered out three or four more Pike Logan thrillers. I expect to devour them as fast as I did One Rough Man.

Highly recommend this book. I love reading the first book of a successful author. Fascinating to see the growth and development. Brad started out strong with this first book. You can tell he was just a few years from being in the action from special forces. It shows in every action scene. And there are many of them in this book. Get started on this Pike Logan series. You won’t regret it.

I’ve read the first three books, and while I would probably keep going if they were on Kindle Unlimited, they’re not. And they’re not quite good enough for me to justify buying the rest. Starting with the good, the writing is definitely above average. The prose is solid. The dialogue is solid. Overall, it’s better written than a lot of books in this genre. It leans more toward a Tom Clancy style than a pure popcorn novel, which I appreciated. There’s also a little more action than I expected, especially considering how the series is marketed... for a spy thriller, it delivers a decent amount of action. That said, the author has some habits that really started to bug me. One is the constant use of the word “said.” Even when it’s just two characters talking back and forth, you get he said, she said, over and over, on nearly every line. It’s distracting and completely unnecessary most of the time. The formatting also felt off to me. There are very few long paragraphs. Instead, you get a lot of short ones. A character speaks, then there’s a pause in its own paragraph, then they speak again, then another pause, all broken up into separate blocks. A lot of that could’ve easily been combined into single paragraphs without losing clarity. It’s not technically wrong, but I didn’t like how choppy it felt. Now for the bigger issues. WARNING: mega spoilers after this point. Why is it that in books like this, the main character’s family always has to die? Every single time. There’s always a wife. There’s always a kid. And they always get killed so the main character can stay on the mission and not have to leave so his crying wife isn't upset with him for being away from home all the time. Who cares if your husband is saving the world every week, right? It’s beyond played out at this point. It’s lazy. It’s cringe. It’s been done a thousand times, and I just don’t care anymore. That trope alone knocked this series down a star for me. Setting that aside, there’s another thing that really hurt my enjoyment: the moral hand-holding. It’s constant. You’re repeatedly told who’s good, who’s bad, what’s allowed, what isn’t, and how everything has to be done strictly by the book. Some scenes are just ridiculous. You’ll have task force members literally minutes away from terrorists about to kill massive numbers of people, and instead of acting, they spend an entire chapter arguing about whether they technically have authority to operate on U.S. soil. I don’t want to read pages and pages of characters debating procedure while half the country is about to die. It’s not realistic for an off-the-books operation like this. You think people in that position are going to stop and worry about breaking a rule when millions of lives are at stake? They’re not. They’d go do the job. The constant moral lecturing and procedural paralysis just gets exhausting. At one point, a terrorist is preparing to take down the entire U.S. power grid... and guess what? Half of the characters in the book get upset and all sniffling because they had to beat up a man a little bit to get the info. And it wasn't even that violent of a scene. I've seen waaaaay worse. Come on now, guys. These are killers! Or at least, they are supposed to be. You think black-ops teams like that are afraid to get their hands dirty? i think not. But here they are, threatening the man who punched the terrorist in the face a couple of times, telling him if he didn't stop immediately he would be arrested, even though he got the information out to save untold lives. And we aren't talking about the CIA or anything like that here, as obviously they would mostly play by the rules. Nope! These are guys especially meant for stuff like this. To get the mission done no matter what. To play like the rules don't apply for them. After all, that's what the blurb basically says, right? I suppose the moral hand-holding sets this series apart from others in the genre, but it just didn't feel plausible. Not to mention that the man whose family is killed (in a horrible fashion btw) seems to not care that the killers only got a little bit of time in jail. But sure, he's happy enough to beat up random terrorists and eliminate them if they dare to harm his teammates. I'm not saying every series like this needs to have a revenge thread, and maybe it comes at some future point... but you think a black-ops killer like that is going to just be alright with his family's killers chilling in jail? Again, I think not. Between the tired family-death trope and the nonstop moral hand-holding, I’m knocking my review down another star, and since it’s also not available on Kindle Unlimited, that’s where I’m stopping. Overall, this feels like a series that could’ve been great with a few different choices. As it stands, it falls a little below average for me, despite the above average writing and decent action.

Based on a few of the other reviews, I will write this one to focus on what the book is, what it is not, and why I gave it five stars. First, what it is: It's a thriller with a military spec-ops backdrop. It is very much in the same style of a Vince Flynn/Mitch Rapp book or a Jason Bourne thing. The main character is, as the title suggests, a rough dude who has the best training possible to back it up. He is a broken man that has all but given up and is brought back into the fight, almost unwillingly. Sound familiar? Well, it should because it's a pretty familiar premise. Then why five stars? Hold on, I'm getting there. What it isn't: I've seen a few reviews of people complaining about things like character development. Give me a break. Don't read a book like this if you want some long, drawn-out, in-depth look at humanity and all the complexities therein; it's a fast-paced thriller, for cryin' out loud. If you're buying it thinking it is anything but, then....well, you didn't look into it very hard. Too bad for you. Go back to "Little Women" or something. Why I gave it five stars: Two reasons; one, because as thrillers and books of this genre go, it's as good as any of them out there. Two -- and this is the more important reason -- because of who the author is, what he's done and his own personal expertise on the subject of the book. Allow me to explain. One of my biggest problems with books like this is the author's lack of knowledge regarding military tactics, weapons, fighting, covert work, etc. Well, this is one of the rare chances we have where we can read a book by a guy who has literally "been there, done that." Brad Taylor's resume should speak for itself to anyone who has any knowledge about the military. And for those who don't, rest assured, he's been among the very best this country has to offer. Because of that, this book's "good guys" are doing things and conducting missions the way things really can and have been done. It's not some fat, out of shape booger-eater author pontificating about what a hero would do; it's a guy who knows what to do because he has truly done it. For that alone it is worthy of five stars, but it really is a well-written thriller. If you're into Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne, Mitch Rapp, et al, then you will definitely dig Pike Logan.

The bottom line is the book is a very good read from first time author Brad Taylor. I would caution readers not to quit on the book in the first 100 pages as I almost did. It is almost as if the first 100 pages where written by someone else. It was tedious and I felt like I was pushing the author along. But then the book took off and with the addition of "Jennifer" we had an excellent story. The author did a good job weaving the two personalties of Pike and Jennifer. By the end of the book I was in love with Jennifer and I sincerely hope the author brings these two back again in future books. As one female reviewer said "can't wait until the two hook up". If you like Vince Flynn you will enjoy Brad Taylor.

Great read looked for another author and happy I have found this one, kept me awake at night because I couldn't put it down

First time reading this author and couldn't put the book down. Pike Logan was as good as the early Mitch Rapp books and much better than the recent ones! Now off to order more of Brad's books.

Pike Logan, ehemaliger Task Force Operator, nun ein gebrochener Mann, psychisch am Ende und kurz vor einem Blackout, hat nichts mehr zu verlieren. Seine Family wurde ermordet. Sein Leben zerstört. Seine Zukunft in ein einziges tiefes pitch-black verwandelt. Erst eine diffuse terroristische Bedrohung und Jennifer "Koko" Cahill, die ihn, dem großen Pike Logan in einer Bar das Leben rettet, bringen den besten Mann der Task Force wieder ins Spiel. Pike und Jennifer werden ein Team im Team. Zusammen gehen sie auf die Jagd. Brad Taylor schreibt in der ersten Person, verbindet so den Leser mit Pike auf eine meisterliche Art und Weise. Pike Logan ist ein Mann, der auf der einen Seite durch Wände marschiert, aber auf der anderen Seite einer Frau die Tür aufhält. Er ist stur, verletzlich und kompromisslos, weiß, wie man Terroristen aufspürt, beschattet und mit Erlaubnis seines Chefs Kurt Hale auch endgültig von dieser Erde befördert. Wer einen realistischen, schnellen und punktgenauen Stil mit einer guten Portion Irony und Witz mag, ist bei Brad Taylor absolut richtig. Die Story ist gut recherchiert, die Surveillance trocken "All elements ..." und die Story führt den Leser in eine brutale Welt, in denen ein Menschenleben wenig und tote Frauen und Kinder viel bedeuten. Für mich ist dieses Buch ein gelungenes Debüt, sehr empfehlenswert und ein nächtlicher Pageturner.

Great read

Good first novel. Fast. Though the first person singular narrative is somewhat jarring