Just Finished Reading: The Sea Witch by Stephen Coonts (FP: 2012) [253pp] 

This was a collection of three short novellas by an author I used to read a lot of pre-Blog. The first story was the titled ‘Sea Witch’ (1999) which revolved around an American ‘jinx’ fighter-bomber pilot early in the Pacific War being assigned to be co-pilot in a PBY Catalina (one of my all-time favourite aircraft) after the original and well-respected co-pilot had been killed. There followed the usual trying to fit in trope and it was obvious from the start that the ‘jinx’ would end up saving the day. This he did – but not in the way I’d expected. An above average story overall. 

Next up was ‘The 17th Day’ (2003) which told the tale of an American pilot in the Royal Flying Corps on the Western Front. The pilot's pre-occupation was, as you might expect, survival especially as it's his 17th day in service which is the average life-expectancy of a fighter pilot in that theatre. The question is: will he make it through the day. Despite being a well-constructed story, it didn’t have a lot of tension (can you really imagine the main character dying part way through and the officers in his squadron shrugging their shoulders and saying “Well, them’s the odds.....”. The flying scenes were well handled although, depending on how my memory is, I did think he stole a real incident for his fictional lead to add a bit of addition danger/threat. Still, it was reasonably entertaining. 

By FAR the worst story was the last - ‘Al-Jihad’ (2001). This was a frankly ridiculous story of a retired marine sniper being hired to assist a navy brat whose parents had been killed by Libyan terrorists by blowing up the airline they’d been travelling on. The plot, if you can call it that, was incredibly muddled and barely made sense. Even I could see ten other (and better) ways of eliminating the targets and that’s without getting into the area of extra-judicial killing. The conclusion was a nonsensical cherry-on-top and honestly made me laugh out loud at the stupidity of it all. I can only imagine that the author’s publisher asked him for a quick terrorist related story, and he passed on the task to his teenage son, then made a minimal effort of ‘clean it up’ and put his stamp on it. Terrible. 

This had been (as so often is the case) sitting in a pile of books for YEARS and I decided to finally ‘get around’ to it now. I might have tossed it if the story order had been reversed but that didn’t happen. Reasonable overall but not recommended even for the hard-core thriller reader. I’m SURE that there’s MUCH better stuff out there!