by Adam Lassiter
Dennison's War 2
1985 Bantam
Dennison's War is the series about righteous mercenaries, recruited from various walks of life, and after the first installment it looks like each character gets a solo novel, starting here with Matt Conte, the former mafia assassin.
A nymphomaniac scientist with a lot of government passwords is kidnapped by Vancouver, the world's deadliest assassin, and Dennison is hired to bring her back. The first third of the book is characters repeating this to each other.
Conte tortures a guy and finds out where Vancouver is, then hangs out in the Philippines for the middle third. A little travelogue flavor and a quick bar fight, but still nothing happening.
Conte and his boat captain sidekick finally assault the island where Vancouver is hiding out, guarded by a small army of natives. He loads up his MAC-10s and we're ready for action! And as if sensing my enthusiasm, Conte gets a knife wound to the leg and things slow back down to a literal crawl.
There's a decent tactical shootout in a bamboo field, and Vancouver is a sufficiently creepy sociopath, but not much to recommend here. In the first book I mentioned that Lassiter would be better suited for a mystery or espionage, but the plot here is "go to this place, hang around, go to next place" worse than most Men's Adventure. We learn nothing of Conte except that he wants to bang the boat captain's daughter.
I enjoyed the detail in the first book, but it was grossly misapplied here. We'll get paragraph descriptions of literal passerbys who do nothing in the story. At least it seemed well researched.
This is the second book I've read this summer where the female captive willing has sex with a man several times after he tells her he's going to traffic her.
Paperback from AbeBooks
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