Starting to read this book I wanted to love it however, it never really picked up for me. The sign of a fantastic thriller is the desire to stay up much later than you ought to trying to fly through the book as quickly as possible. This is done to see how all of the crazy situations are resolved. At no point throughout this book did I feel that compulsion kick in. ***Spoilers to follow***This story just seemed so unreal on many more levels than a normal spy thriller that it didn't seem remotely believable. The first unreal scene to me was shortly after Agent Harvath survives a powerful avalanche. Now I understand that he was a former seal however, the man has been beat to the edge of living and then manages to go galavanting around the ski mountain, abseiling down a sheer icy cliff face, beating up an FBI agent, and mucking up another crime scene. All of this is accomplished right after being pummeled by an avalanche into a boulder while skiing as quickly as possible. From there it just maintains that level of absurdity throughout the entire story. He gets knocked in the head a few more times, while already dealing with concussion like symptoms and short term memory loss. Instead of locking him down based on suspicions of being in cahoots with those that kidnapped the president, he manages to escape to Europe after further getting the assaulted by mercenary hit men trying to kill him. One would think that escaping to Europe under a different identity would give our hero at least a little break, but no low and behold the American mercenaries are hot on his trail! Additionally he picks the worst possible location to meet a team of trained European mercenaries in a location that has only one access point, a tourist train... Somehow Agent Harvath manages to escape this insane situation that he put himself into with only a grazing gunshot wound. At this point in the story he is still walking and fighting as if he hasn't been slammed into a boulder while skiing at top speed to get away from an avalanche, whacked in the back of the head with enough force to knock him out in his apartment, popped in the jaw during hand to hand combat with mercenaries, and taken a grazing bullet wound to his arm or shoulder. To top it off he's been on the run, short on sleep, and this is over a span of a few days. For me this just takes the action thriller concept to one of the polar extremes, which I didn't find that enjoyable. Roughly 377 pages in Claudia Mueller rejoins the story. From here it is a relatively quick 130 pages to the finish line. While this occurs Agent Harvath, who should probably be moving a little bit slower, manages to get a near case of hypothermia when the Lions try to take him out and he goes for a swim in a Swiss river, and scales several thousand feet of vertical elevation. From here he and agent Mueller scale a sheer ice face at night with cramp-ons, ice axes, pitons, and rope. While the ascent is occurring Harvath gets tangled in his assault rifle strap, which starts to choke him to death however, Mueller has enough time to climb between 2-10 meters of sheer ice to pull him up before he runs out of oxygen. Yet she gets interrupted and he still manages to survive... At this point all nine lives should be used up and he should be on the floor asleep from sheer exhaustion, yet that is not the case! They then assault a hidden base, which had no hidden intruder alarms (slightly suspicious from a top-notch group like the Lions), and rescue the President. Hooray!!!At the end of all of this it just seemed ludicrous to me that he had somehow managed to survive all this and keep on trucking like nothing happened. I wonder if I just wasn't in the mood for an action thriller like this one, as I normally enjoy them for that sense of all the impossible little things falling into place. I'm going to give more of Brad Thor's novels a chance to see if the character and world can be redeemed however, as of the moment I remain skeptical.
This thriller is the first of a series chronicling the adventures of one Scott Harvath, Secret Service agent and all-around stubborn, slightly egotistical, obsessive pursuer of justice/bad guys, adrenaline junkie, etc. etc. To be honest, I actually read one of the books later in the series before I read this one. I hate doing that. I hate breaking continuity, stepping in the middle of an ongoing story, but I digress. Scott Harvath works the Presidential detail, but this particular day, he is escorting the president's teenage daughter around the ski slopes at Park City, Utah. After a fine day of skiing, the president and his daughter get a snack before heading to a borrowed chalet at the end of one of the more dangerous runs, the Death Chute (nice foreshadowing eh?). The president takes the Death Chute followed by the majority of the Secret Service agents, and Scott helps the less skilled daughter down an easier route. The weather is bad, getting worse, and the radios the agents are using have been cutting out all day. The first daughter takes a tumble, and while she is getting back up, Harvath observes the president's group disappearing behind some trees....and not long after an avalanche barrels down on top of them. When the avalanche has settled and the agents at the base of the mountain can get up there to the Death Chute, they find dead agents all over the place, and the president is missing. Harvath manages to get an injured, unconscious teenage girl out of the snow and down to some agents on snowmobiles just in time to pass out from his own injuries. Upon waking, he figures he is the only one that can really get to the bottom of the incident. His guilt over his team getting slaughtered drives him to bust into every area his supervisor tells him not to go. His search takes him to D.C., to Germany, to Switzerland in his dogged pursuit of rumors, hunches and vague recollections. He doesn't just have the kidnappers to worry about, but also men from back home, doing their best to stop him. The story was "okay", but the book could have been better with more thorough research. Specifically, Thor seemed to have fallen for a very typical but flawed assumption: Mormons are frightfully odd and gullible. Are there gullible Mormons? Yes. Are there odd Mormons? Yes. But come on. Get your facts straight, mister author boy. First off, Mormon Sunday meetings last three hours, not five hours, unless said Mormon is a Bishop or a Relief Society president or missionaries, or a stake presidency. Rank and file Mormons try to keep it to three hours, thank you very much. Second, most Mormons do NOT believe that the husband has a say whether his wife gets to the Celestial Kingdom, the highest level of heaven. God is a just god, not the head of a "good old boys club". God has the task of final judgment, not spouses. And thirdly, Mormons in Utah are not sheep that do not question what the Church does or does not do on a Sunday. If a Deseret Industries semi-truck was seen on the road on a Sunday, people WOULD notice and somebody WOULD wonder because the D.I. does NOT operate on Sunday (the D.I. truck was part of the kidnapper's plan to get snowmobiles up the mountain undetected). Yes, the reader does "suspend belief" at times for the sake of the story. But sometimes an ill-researched story is blatantly, and painfully, obvious. Get your facts straight before you write your fiction! Okay. Now that I got that off my chest. There was plenty of profanity (f-bombs) and violence (shootouts). Parents may want to steer their kids away from this one. No sex, but some sexual wisecracks are made amongst the agents. I don't think it necessary to read this book before the others in the series, as they seem to stand on their own pretty well. I think there are definitely better books to read in the thriller genre, but there are definitely worse out there too.
What do You think about The Lions Of Lucerne (2007)?
I'm having a hard time just giving this book 3 stars. It just doesn't measure up to more than average, at best.First of all, I found the pacing rather off. There is some good action at the beginning to set the stage, but then for the next 80% it just goes from one random action scene to the next. The bad guys are inept and Harvath is just as inept. He is never in control of the situation and relies more on luck than what little skill he exhibits. Movies with never-ending action sequences bore me to tears. Books with never-ending random action don't improve the situation.The book looses focus. After a couple hundred pages you totally forget what the plot is really about...finding the president. It becomes more a "chase" novel. And then there is the ending. More like a Columbo or Murder She Wrote ending where far too much detail is held back and then thrown at you in the final chapter. Pretty cheezy in my opinion. I wasn't too thrilled with the political stuff either.Thor's description of Mormons (being raised as one) is seriously flawed. Obviously he tried to pick up a bit of Mormon trivia, but unfortunately it was seriously inaccurate. First of all, Mormon bishops are not "ministers" in the Protestant sense, but clergical leaders. They rarely "preach" from the pulpit. And the subject matter he had him "preach" about was a total farce. "Doctrine" I'd ever heard of. Secondly, Bishops don't "retire." As in almost all callings within the church, they are temporary, voluntary, unpaid and then the person is "released." The average bishop serves an average of 5 years.I'll give Thor another try, but it had better be far better than this one to keep my attention.
—GymGuy
Meh.After reading 11 Vince Flynn novels, and being unable to wait until Vince beats cancer so he can write some more, I decided to give this Brad Thor guy a shot. I'll keep looking for a fix elsewhere. This is very mediocre writing; the dialogue often didn't fit the intensity level of the situation. For example, they just had 30 fellow Secret Service agents shot up, and the president kidnapped, and immediately after Thor feels like it is a good time to develop protagonist Scot Harvath's character with some everyday, locker-room type, humorous banter--and not of the "this is how I'm dealing with the difficult situation" variety. There are a bunch of other flaws. The supposedly "highly trained" mercenaries hunting Harvath just stand and spray bullets ineffectively. The depiction of Mormons is hilariously flawed. Though the plot is okayish, it just doesn't satisfy. Glad I only bought it used on Amazon.
—Tyler Montague
One does not expect Shakespearean prose, Holmesian smarts or Dilbertian wit while picking up the books of this genre but even by the usual standards, the plot and the tale are below par. It is all action, which is what is needed, but even more "luck".The entire story is full of accidental discoveries, charmed life-saving instances, the complete stupidity of the villains who are otherwise extremely intelligent in committing the most difficult of the crime and coincidences that break open the crime. And these happenstances are in the dozens. The villains' forgetting to kill the good guys while the good guys have to be around them to move the story forward, the same villains allowing the secrets to escape because of the eavesdropping, the good guys surviving at least five point-blank shots/similar at various stages with the partner appearing in the nick of time, the partners-to-be coming across each other through a "common friend" in Swiss Alps and the list just goes on and on and on.I am sure Thor's celebrated hero must have got a lot better in the later books, but unlike Vince Flynn's and other similar authors' superheroes, he starts somewhat low on deduction and intelligence. And the book suffers gravely as a result.
—Nilesh
