by James A. Moore and Mark Morris
2020 Titan Books
This tie-in novel fills in the gap between the 1990 film Predator 2, which was set in 1997 for some reason, and the 2020 video game Predator: Hunting Grounds, and maybe ties in specifically with a DLC set in 2025. Based on this novel, not much happened over 28 years.
This is the story of marine Scott Devlin, who went from a private guarding the ruins in the aftermath of Predator 2 to running an OWLF command center, the OWLF being the secret Predator hunting organization that Gary Busey worked for.
Ninety percent of the page count is military peeing contests. "You don't have clearance for this soldier", "I don't report to you", "Who's your commanding officer?", etc. Most of the rest is Devlin trying to make sense of the skinned corpses showing up in terrorist conflicts around the globe. A little of this would be OK to show Devlin's perspective, but seeing as how the reader already knows it was done by Predators, way to much page count is devoted to a non-mystery.
Over the decades, Devlin joins Dutch Schafer, Schwarzenegger's character from the first film, and runs counter-terrorism missions that run across the Predators' handiwork, but not so much actual Predators. There's a quick sequence at the beginning with Dutch fighting a Yautja, and a quick fight at the end, with some non-encounters along the way. The best action sequence was a bar fight.
Afterwards there's a lengthy epilogue with Devlin finding love and describing the aftermath of some of the comic tie-ins. At 330 pages it could have easily have lost a third, and the audiobook felt like an eternity, probably because I couldn't skim through the lengthy "What could have done this?" inner monologues. A lot of it felt like a Grammarly commercial in reverse, with the sentences packed with as many redundant words that could fit.
I try to be kind to tie-ins, as they sometimes have impossible stipulations from the franchise owners. I could see this being a case of "Don't add any new characters, organizations, or concepts, and only have them defeat three Predators. 150,000 words. And make sure to introduce female Predators, dog predator things, and why Dutch is able to move without a walker in 2025."
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