Trackdown by Neil Hunter - Bodie the Stalker 1

Trackdown
by Neil Hunter (Mike Linaker)
Bodie the Stalker 1
Star 1979

Bodie is a bounty hunter who kills people.  A rich guy seeking public office wants him to kill some bandits that stole some guns.  Some people try to kill Bodie, he kills them and then sleeps with a prostitute then kills some more people.

I have a pretty high tolerance for cliches in my popular fiction, but Westerns may be worse than Romance as far as following a formula.  And Bodie seems worse than most about being a string of action and sex scenes with barely a page connecting them.

Which is entirely forgivable, as they're some fine action scenes.  Not to be outdone by his contemporaries in the Picadilly Cowboy scene, Linaker turns up the gore, including a lengthy description of a gunman getting caught under a moving train.  Maybe I'm the one getting jaded, but the violence seemed a little perfunctory this time around.

Linaker really excels in using outdoors setting, and I appreciate that it looks like he did a smidgen of research about Central Texas.

Available from Piccadilly Publishing for Kindle, currently at very gentle prices.

Click here to read a sample.

Scorpion by Michael Linaker

Scorpion
by Michael Linaker
New English Library 1980

Scorpions are mutated by runoff from a nuclear plant.  A news reporter and local doctor investigate strange deaths by venom, until the scorpions, some of unusual size, attack in mass.

This is one of the most over the top "when animals attack" books I've read.  Most of the carnage doesn't even come from the scorpions, but from secondary panic.  A bit dog goes mad and attacks.  Cars pile up during an evacuation.  And in the highlight, a score of housewives in a grocery store pile through a plate glass window, only to have the top half come down and shear off body parts.

It could have standed to have a bit more plot - there's a thread about a psychotic security guard that was interesting until he got killed off - and the ending was a bit rushed, but this perfectly executes what it set out to do.

Linaker penned a number of Piccadilly Westerns, which I'll definitely be reading, and a ton of Men's Adventure.  It appears he only wrote three horror novels, which is a shame, but they're all collected under the misleading title The Neil Hunter Horror Omnibus, which is why I almost missed it.

Stony Man 091 - China Crisis

China Crisis
Stony Man 091
by Don Pendleton (Mike Linaker)
Gold Eagle 2007

China mistakenly tests a missle that uses stolen American technology and crashes near the Afghanistan border. It's a China Crisis!



Phoenix Force sneaks across the border, while Able Team tracks down the American end of the arms dealers in South Texas.



This suffers from what ails a lot of more recent men's adventure fiction.  As compared to the 70s and 80s, there's less action across more pages.  The same amount of plot and characterization as in past decades, but the action consists of "go to place where bad guys are, guns are shot, good guy wins".  Even in the anti-climax there are more pages devoted to what the bad guy has packed in his hummer than the actual shootout.  While there's a little bit of hacking and satellite surveillance, there isn't too much techno-thriller tedium.