The Red Horseman - Stephen Coonts

The Red Horseman (Book Reveiw)

The Red Horseman (Book Review)

Nuclear warheads turn up missing. A British journalist is dead and it all is tied together somehow. The Cold War is in progress and someone in the Soviet Union and the C.I.A. are working together to transport warheads to the Middle East. Jake Grafton and Toad Tarkington are sent on a mission to find the warheads. C.I.A. agents visited both their houses and tell them not to go to Russia. Jake is now a target for terrorists everywhere. Apparently someone in the Middle East wants to have nuclear weapons. Jake thinks if the missiles are obtained by unfriendly Middle Eastern countries they would launch them towards America. Toad and Jake went to Russia on a mission to find the missing Warheads. They hire a hacker to assist them in locating the warheads. Meanwhile an American journalist named Jack Yocke is already in Russia and saw some Russians with machine guns gunned down a whole bunch of people. The weird thing was no police or any other agency responded after the shooting was over. Jack told Jake about the incident as soon as he arrived in Russia. Jake then told a Russian officer and he said he didn't know why the police didn't take action. Jake and Toad already thought Herb Tenney was behind the massacre and suggested to the police to arrest him. They went with the police to search Tenney's place. The search revealed strange tablets that may have made Jake sick at the party the other day. After Tenney is released he dusted his house for fingerprints and finds matches for Toad and Jake. Jake then learns Herb is up to something and it is related to the warheads. Jake finally learns the tactics of how to be a navy seal. He also learns how to skydive and most importantly fly a jet aircraft. His skills would later be put to the test when he gets in a dogfight with four Russian jets. He surprisingly makes it through without being killed. Jake finally finds the nuclear warheads. He figures out Saddam Hussein was behind all of it. I recommend this book to people who like techno-thrillers and mysteries. I also recommend it to people who are interested in the armed forces. This is a really great book and I enjoyed it a lot.
The best reason I liked this book was because of the non-stop action. In the beginning some C.I.A. agents went into Jake's and Toad's house. Jake fought back but the two C.I.A. agents overpowered him and threatened him. Toad was threatened but then Jake got his gun and scared them away. There was when the journalist saw the terrorist shooting and lived to tell the tale. The journalist even inspected the dead bodies without anybody noticing. Finally the best part in the whole book was the dogfight. I don't know how a person who just learned how to fly a jet can shoot down four planes all by himself but Jake managed to pull it off. It was unrealistic but it was very exciting to read in specific detail how Jake shot them down.
The second would have to be a lot of the events were explained in explicit detail. When Jake was first learning how to become a navy seal it told you how they drilled through the training and how perfectly he did it when he actually had to. The author told how unstable Jake's first flights were and how he struggled with getting it off the runway because he would either give too little power or too much. On his first flight I thought he was going to crash because in flight he couldn't stabilize the plane properly.
Last was when Jake was solving the mystery. It made it seem like you were the character in the book trying to figure out the mystery. The start of the mystery was very confusing because it had a whole bunch of names and sometimes I forgot some of them. Later in the problem it started to get very interesting because you could sense Jake getting closer because of all the events like General Brown dying, the shooting, etc.
Last was the book was unpredictable. When the journalist's body turned up in the ocean without any signs of drowning is one example of this. He probably wasn't drunk and records clarified that there were C.I.A. agents aboard. There was also a time when people Jake knew kept dying and you thought he was going to be next. For instance General Brown died of a heart attack because of the tablet with poison that Tenney gave him. That is how the British journalist died and even General Shmarov died all of a heart attack. For some reason Jake managed not to get poisoned which really surprised me. I would have never figured that Saddam was behind the entire problem. I thought it was going to be some random terrorist but it was a well known terrorist.
This book is for people in the armed forces and for people who like mystery/thriller books. Jake developed in many ways as a character. The book was unpredictable, had lots of detail, and lots of action. I really liked this book and this is one of the best books I read. Jake would have never survived without Toad by his side giving him advice. Toad didn't have to come to Russia but he did anyway to keep him company. The details made it seem as if you were the main character not Jake. The fight was explained in detail, the training, almost everything was explained in a lot of detail. The book was also like there was action on every single page and I never wanted to put the book down. The dogfight was too interesting for me to go and do something other than read.


By: D.Bennett

Red Horsemen is a dull event

I love reading, but this book actually made me dislike it enough that I started looking for reasons not to read. Hopefully it is just this book.

Stephen Coonts flying high at a low altitude

The high point of "The Red Horseman" is the aerial dogfight between Jake Grafton (flying a Russian Su-25 "Frogfoot") and four Russian Su-27 "Flankers", with most of the action taking place below 200 ft. altitude! Stephen Coonts is very good at writing about this kind of combat, and you really feel that you're right there in the cockpit with Jake.

This book is the fifth or sixth (depending on how you number them) book in the Jake Grafton series. By now Stephen Coonts had established himself as a worthy competitor to Tom Clancy, and in my opinion his books are better than Clancy's. In particular, the characters in a Stephen Coonts book are real people, and people you enjoy learning more and more about.

In the first two-thirds of "The Red Horseman" the story unfolds slowly, but satisfactorily, as an international political thriller. Jake, now a Rear Admiral in the American Defense Intelligence Agency, is sent to Moscow to help monitor the Russian dismantling of their nuclear warheads. The CIA is also involved, but not in the way we would expect, and of course some warheads go missing.

The last third of the book becomes a techno-thriller. The hunt is on to retrieve the missing warheads and to ensure that no more will be stolen. In addition to the great dogfight mentioned above there is a very detailed description of how a major military operation to secure an enemy airfield would be done nowadays.

I found this last section of the book to be the most interesting and exciting part. The whole thing is rather unrealistic, but the reader is willing to ignore that because it's so exciting. Unfortunately, I thought that the ending was a bit too far out, and this is part of the reason for the lack of the fifth star.

Also on the negative side, I found Stephen Coonts opinion of post-glasnost Russia overly derogatory. He has his characters saying "nothing works here" and "Russia is on its way to the stone age" so many times it becomes silly. This is especially true with the hindsight we have now that Russia did survive the Yeltsin era and is slowly but surely becoming a developed country by western standards.

A very interesting sub-plot in "The Red Horseman" involves the death of a British newspaper mogul named Nigel Keren. Stephen Coonts has very clearly modeled Nigel Keren on the real-life Robert Maxwell. Even their dates of death are identical!

In conclusion, a very good techno-thriller, up to the usual Stephen Coonts standards. If you like military techno-thrillers with lots of political skullduggery, then this is for you.

Rennie Petersen

Interesting but poorly written

I can't believe I made it through the book, this is the first book in a long time that I have been tempted to drop in the middle. The plot is very interesting and at times kept my attention. It also got more and more improbable as the plot grinded its gears through the book. Jake Grafton is apparently some kind of god and can do anything and go anywhere apparently without authority from anyone else but himself. The book would have been alright if these were its only flaws, after all it is a novel and I expected to put my disbelief on hold while I read (not everyone can write like Clancy).

The major problem with the book is the writing. All the characters are extremely one dimensional except maybe Jack Yocke. The dialogue is awfully written and can't Coonts think of any other word for helicopter besides "machine"!? There were numerous plot holes, but I will concede that Coonts made an effort to fix them though somewhat lamely.

This book may be OK for people who have read the other books in the series and have already gotten used to the characters, but if this is going to be the only Coonts book you read, steer clear because it could be your last.

Good Book, great fun

This is a good book to read, the plot is ok, the thing that i dont like is that Jake Grafton in this book is almost like a superman, he can fly planes, well ok, but jumping with seals without like he was one for years is not very much real, and handle a squad of SU 27 Flankers with a single Su-25 frogfoot is almost impossible to happen .. i think this is the major faults in the book, the rest is ok .. one of the most improved chracters in this book is Jack Yocke, overall this book is very good to read and the history is well written