Nathan Warr and his off-the-books black ops team fill a well-carved niche in American intelligence operations, working out of a secret base at Area 51 to respond in secret to some of America’s most pressing threats. After foiling both an attempted nuclear strike and the kidnapping of his niece in the first installment of the series, Warr follows up with an even more sensitive mission: avenging the death of the president’s son by destroying the cartel which created the drug that killed him.
DOGS OF WARR II fits generally into the mold formed by writers like Tom Clancy: military thrillers where the stakes are always impossibly high, fond of the machinery of warfare and the people who operate it. The text mostly succeeds here, showing clear facility with the names and functions of military technology, the tactical interactions of those tools, and the way soldiers communicate to use them. The purely military scenes, from clandestine infiltration to an all-out firefight, are compelling and well-blocked. The text has a clear sense of space and how to move the characters through it. This central challenge is the most satisfying part of DOGS OF WARR II: the plain puzzle of taking a known quantity of people in Nevada, getting them to Colombia, and destroying a factory building, all cloaked in the utmost secrecy.
Unfortunately, the remainder of the text is less effective. Although the prose is grammatically solid, it can get bogged down in unnecessary technical detail (the classic “show, don’t tell” problem) and clumsy positional clauses (over-clarifying the relative positions of characters to the space and each other). The narrative voice itself can also confuse the reader. In the third-person but without a clear point of view–in some instances the narrator seems to directly address the reader; in others, a character jarringly appears to know information they specifically do not. The dialogue suffers similar problems, compounded by the sameness of voice between characters (aside from the stilted speech of the Russians and Colombians, all of whom speak implausible amounts of English merely laced with occasional words in their own native tongues).
The technical failings of the prose allow the plot to advance, but prevent the characters from meaningfully developing or engaging the reader’s interest. Without a clear use of point-of-view, or dialogue that exposes character, most of the cast feels stereotyped, and their actions seem to suit the whims of the plot more than they derive from any kind of interior life. The female characters suffer particular disservice in this regard: a Russian defector is dropped into the team with barely any justification; an uncomfortably useless middle section of the text is given over to convincing a scientist – the “simply too busy with my work to even think about makeup or men” stereotype – to doll up. There’s a fair argument to be made that the genre simply doesn’t favor character, but as the second in a series with more to come, DOGS OF WARR will need more than flat, same-y cut-outs to hold a reader’s attention.
Well-imagined and fast-paced, but thinly-written and muddled at times, DOGS OF WARR II will satisfy aficionados without winning over many new converts to the military thriller genre.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader