Showing posts with label Stryker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stryker. Show all posts

Monday, June 14, 2021

Stryker #4: Deadly Alliance


Stryker #4: Deadly Alliance, by William Crawford
July, 1975  Pinnacle Books

The cover of this final volume of Stryker promises a Blaxploitation spin on the series, but as it turns out Deadly Alliance is of a piece with the other volumes, and William Crawford’s work in general: an unlikable prick protagonist blitzes his way through a string of low-life underworld types, mercilessly beating unarmed men and women and occasionally shooting a few of them while thinking to himself how cops “need to be respected,” before ultimately being captured and tortured himself. And by novel’s end someone will shit their pants. 

While the previous volume was a streamlined affair, so far as Crawford’s work goes – following a linear plot from beginning to end with no digressive rundowns of various one-off characters – this one returns to the Crawford norm, wasting pages with egregious backstory and digressions. It’s little wonder Deadly Alliance was the last volume of Stryker. I would imagine readers of the day just couldn’t connect with it, as Crawford’s style makes for a hard read. And Stryker is particularly unlikable this time. I mean a protagonist can be lovably unlikable, like Ryker, or even lovably unhinged, like Magellan, but Stryker’s just a prick here, with no redeeming qualities to make the reader root for him. 

Stryker’s driven nature is due to the murder of Paul Stalking Deer, a guy who was “more than a brother” to Stryker and served with him in the war, worked on the Stryker family ranch, and whatnot. This murder occurs toward the beginning of Deadly Alliance; the actual opening of the novel has Stryker shaving off his moustache (which he grew as a disguise in the first volume) and “hating himself” due to the crazed violence of his life. After this Stryker meets with Boyd Frazier, a journalist who claims he can get Stryker exonerated and all the charges on him dropped. Meanwhile Stryker is content to live on his ranch here in New Mexico; one wonders if he’s in a pinochle club with fellow New Mexico ranch owner Dakota

Oh and believe it or not, but for once we actually have a few lines of dialog from Stryker’s daughter, who as we’ll recall was blinded in the first volume. She’s basically being raised by Stryker’s mother, who has taught the little girl to speak in Gaelic. However this will be it for that subplot; once Stryker hears of Paul Stalking Deer’s murder, in “the largest city in New Mexico,” Stryker heads off on the vengeance trail. Thankfully the “flying fiction” is nonexistent this time, and for the most part Deadly Alliance is a violent revenge thriller that moves in a linear line. It’s just that I personally couldn’t have cared less about the guy seeking the revenge. 

But then that linear plot line only follows Stryker’s material. We also have too-long cutaways to Boyd Frazier and other supporting characters, complete with time-wasting backgrounds on their lives. A hallmark of Crawford’s – let’s recall how the first volume even told us how Stryker’s friggin’ grandparents met – and a sad return to form after the previous volume. At any rate Stryker heads into that New Mexico city and tracks the leads on who murdered his friend. While the cover calls out the “black Mafia,” ultimately the villains of Deadly Alliance are a group of young left-wing radicals, a la SDS and the Weathermen, a group that happens to be made up of various races. However early on Stryker gets word that a black Mafia might’ve been involved, only to hear from another character that the whole thing is a shuck, a cover story for the real group. 

There are a lot of tiebacks to the first volume, with Stryker hitting some of the same informants and visiting the same places in his quest for info. We get our first indication of the type of novel we’ll be reading when Stryker gets an informant in his car and proceeds to beat him unmerciful, even slapping his ear to rupture his eardrum. It’s definitely hardcore and all, but it lacks the similar “revenge at all costs” vibe of superior revenge yarns like Bronson: Blind Rage. This again comes down to Stryker. There’s just something irritating about him; I know the intention is to convey he’s a supreme badass, but at the same time he just comes off like a creep and you root for the bad guys. His occasional sermons are also off-putting. 

And your last name wouldn’t have to be “Freud” to detect just a wee little bit of homoeroticsm in Crawford’s prose. Stryker constantly insults his male prey with putdowns involving the derriere – everyone’s “buttface” or “assface” or “asshole” or even “dumbutt.” Also factor in how Stryker’s threats also usually refer to butts: “burn your ass” and etc. And Crawford still does that mega-strange thing of his where “hard” curse words appear in the narrative but are bowdlerized in the dialog; ie “Motherf– ” and “C–,” whereas both words are clearly stated in the narrative. Coupled with the curious obsession with male asses – and the fact that Stryker goes ladyless this time – this makes everything rather strange to say the least. The fact that Crawford clearly wasn’t even aware of how all this comes off makes it even more humorous. But then, maybe he was; in Deadly Alliance Crawford shows a sudden familiarity with pop culture, referring to movies and TV shows quite often. At one point Stryker watches “the great television series Star Trek,” and later on Crawford even mentions Dennis Hopper. 

Well anyway, Stryker goes around town and beats up various men and women. A lot of it is repetitious from every other Crawford novel I’ve reviewed here. Stryker just bashes heads for info, usually not using his own head. There’s a part where he goes into a bar run by a black guy he beat up in prison, and Styrker realizes too late he’s unarmed and outnumbered. Then someone puts a gun to Stryker’s back, but our hero delivers a merciless beatdown despite the odds. He’ll learn this guy, a young black man, was hired to kill him. Cue another brutal torture sequence as Stryker drives the guy out into the countryside and beats him to pulp to find out who hired him. But Stryker has a soft side, folks; he feels bad for the kid and gives him some money and tells him to get the hell out of New Mexico! 

Given the nature of the villains this time, the novel is filled with sermons against the left, particularly the radical movement – “It wasn’t what the world was coming to, but the kind of people now living in the world.” The left-wing terrorists Stryker faces are a hate-filled lot of drug-using freaks, led by a black man who is stoned out of his gourd most of the time (ie, “He blasted hash for breakfast,” and etc) and who just fumbles through the usual speeches to his mindless but dangerous lackeys. There are of course many parallels to today throughout this sequence, with the caveat that Crawford was writing in a more rational world: the Federal agencies, we know from Stryker’s various asides, are staffed with lawmen just itching to get their hands on these left-wing radicals. 

In addition to the radical movement, the terrorists are also heavily into heroin. Stryker gets wind of this soon enough, following the drug pipeline until it takes him to a pair of girls, one white and one black, who are users. Stryker beats the living shit out of both of them in a sequence that was probably unsettling in ’74, let alone today. The white girl is fat and we get lots of stuff about her being so unattractive to begin with, let alone her heroin addiction and how it makes her willing to do anything. But she has info on the radicals and she’s the one Stryker really sets in on – she’s also the character who shits herself this time, right in Stryker’s car. Luckily this happens off-page, but we’re to understand that, due to her cold turkey heroin withdrawal, the girl barfs and shits all over the interior of Stryker’s car…and just as he’s hosing it down he’s taken captive himself by the very radicals he seeks. 

They call themselves the National Alliance of Liberationists and ostensibly they’re led by Lynlee McGuire, the so-called “Fied Marshall,” but really it’s an American Indian girl named Carolina who runs the show. A “Reservation cousin” of Paul Stalking Deer, she was sent to college thanks to money Stryker’s mom raised for her, but she pays this back with hatred and resentment, having been fed endless propaganda about America’s racism and whatnot. Honestly the whole thing is dispiritedly tiresome in our current era, but at least Crawford pokes holes in their propaganda – Stryker’s comments in particular starting on page 156 are basically an indictment of what is now referred to as “systemic racism,” Stryker arguing that blanket accusations against an entire society make for an easy copout for one’s own individual shortcomings. 

Carolina is especially loathsome and there’s none of the “sexy villainess” stuff I generally demand in my pulp. She’s just a stone cold whackjob and so committed to her radicalism that she’s chomping at the bit to kill Stryker. Oh and it develops that they’ve targeted him because they want Stryker’s mom to sell her ranch so they can use the money for the movement or somesuch. The plan is to abduct Stryker and get his mom to pay for his ransom via selling the ranch. Stryker goes along with it, tied up and slapped around, as usually happens to every Crawford protagonist is in the final pages. But he himself is determined to kill Carolina – and gets his opportunity when he’s condemned to death after a kangaroo trial with the Field Marshall presiding. 

But the crazy thing is, Crawford jumps to the epilogue just as Stryker has his chance to fight back. The struggle with Carolina is tense and brutal, and after which Stryker realizes he’s surrounded by several armed radicals. Crawford for whatever reason blows through all this, serving up an anticlimactic finale of Stryker blasting away with an AR-15 and showing these punks what terror’s all about. That said, there’s a great bit where the Field Marshall trots in, using a nude girl as a human shield, and Stryker shoots her in the thigh to get her out of the way! But after this it’s a quick flash-forward to after the melee, and Stryker’s safe at home back at the ranch. 

While Deadly Alliance was the last volume, Crawford clearly had another installment in mind: the novel ends with Frazier convincing Styrker to head into New York City and bust up some dirty cops. Stryker is definitely interested, but obviously readers weren’t, as there were no further volumes. It seems at this point Crawford’s tenure with Pinnacle came to an end, even though at one point he was so prolific for the publisher that they ran full-page ads for his novels. After this he was back to penning pseudonymous novels for book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel. Moral of the story: If you want a long-running action series, at least make your protagonist somewhat likable.

Thursday, May 7, 2020

Stryker #3: Drug Run


Stryker #3: Drug Run, by William Crawford
October, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Now this is more like it – with the third volume of StrykerWilliam Crawford finally figures out how to write a fast-paced, violent ‘70s crime paperback; reduced – but not gone – are the random asides, arbitrary digressions, and incessant POV-hopping that mired his previous books. Same goes for the overwriting; Drug Run is a mere 146 pages, of pretty big print.

But the good stuff Crawford’s always done is here, and thus undimmed by the usual excess baggage: a hard-bitten bastard of a hero, moments of gory (but realistic) violence, and of course, characters puking and shitting themselves (a Crawford staple if there ever was one). Oh and lots of “flying fiction,” another Crawford staple, but not as pages-consuming as say The Assassin.

It’s some unstated time after the second volume; long enough for Stryker to go into “temporary retirement,” living on the family ranch with his mother. But Colin Stryker’s no ranch-hand mama’s boy like Dakota; within the first page he’s decided to go back out into the world and kick some ass. (Oh and it’s revealed this time that his mother’s sort of a witch…and that Stryker inherited a bit of a sixth sense from her!) The memory of Kitty Tiel, the pretty young blonde who overdosed in the previous book, enslaved into drugs and whoredom and whatnot by unscrupulous drug-runners, is what pulls Stryker back into his newfound role of vengeance-dispensing.

Stryker hops on his Cessna and heads on over to the little town in New Mexico where Kitty’s mom and dad live – only to find the dad dead via shotgun suicide and the mom about to OD on drugs. The same bastards have gotten hold of the parents; Kitty was forced to pose for “pornographic photos,” and these were sent to mom and pop, provoking the latter into suicide and the former into the squalor of drugs…which were provided to her by the very same sadists who got Kitty hooked. And, just as with Kitty, they’ve got mom turning tricks – in her own home! Stryker quickly displays that he’s not your average good samaritan action hero; he slaps Mrs. Tiel around, forces a water spicket down her throat, then stands by as she pukes several times – Crawford quickly developing his “someone will puke” theme.

Stryker also soon displays his bad-assery when it comes to his opponents; when two thugs come by Mrs. Riel’s place to ensure she’s dead from an OD, Stryker so savagely hits one of them that his jaw is broken in three places, and later guts him with an icepick. The surviving thug gets a molar ripped out and his face bashed to pieces, but Stryker’s true to his word and lets him live in exchange for info. Kitty, a promising actress, was ensnared by Hollywood players who were in reality drug runners; they hooked her on heroin and had her in porn flicks and turning tricks. So Stryker decides to just smash the heroin pipeline itself.

This entails that other Crawford staple – a long sequence set in Mexico. In fact, practically the entirety of Drug Run occurs in Mexico. Stryker learns of a major kingpin in the siera mountains, and looks to an old colleague named Flok – a former Mexican cop – for info. Stryker discovers the kingpin is named Villa, and heads into the mountains to snuff him out. He’s promptly captured, another mainstay of Crawford’s fiction; stripped naked and held in a pitch-black cave, his only cellmate a screeching bat. This is definitely a hackle-raising sequence, and Crawford skillfully plays out the tension and creepiness.

Stryker’s interrogated by two of Villa’s men, one a big brute and the other a cane-wielding sadist. This sequence plays out unexpectedly, thanks to the presence of the elderly female cook employed by Villa; Stryker gets one look at her and realizes she is a witch on the level of his mother. There’s a strange supernatural element here with Stryker getting a quick whiff of some unholy stench (which of course causes him to barf), and later it’s intimated that this was the ghostly stink of the woman’s long-dead husband and son, both of whom were apparently killed by the brutish thug. It’s not explained, left as a mystery, but it all works in Stryker’s favor – a bit unsatisfying so far as the genre goes (an action-series protagonist should never get out of a jam thanks to supernatural mumbo-jumbo), but it’s at least played mostly on the level.

Stryker gets himself an M-1 carbine and a couple horses and heads out of the mountains before Villa and his men can return. This leads to another nice action scene, where Stryker walks into an ambush but again turns the tables. Crawford’s action scenes never have the bigscale vibe of other men’s adventure novels of the era, operating more on a personal, as I say realistic, level, but when they hit they hit pretty hard. So here we have heads blown into gory mush and a dude soiling his britches when Stryker gets his grips on him. This leads to another good bit, where Stryker stages a raid on Villa’s place, gets the man himself, and tosses him out of his Cessna – a sequence only ruined by unnecessarily-technical flying description.

Curiously the book seems to end here, but limps on for an unspectacular final quarter as Stryker heads to LA, looking to take out at least one of the runners who got their heroin from Villa’s pipeline…heroin they’d use to prey on naïve starlets and hook them into whoredom. The book is on the same level of drug-paranoia as Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve; Stryker (and Crawford) isn’t just against heroin – he thinks marijuana is a tool of the devil, as well. But then as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a lot of similarity between the writing styles of Crawford and Martin Caidin; both have incredibly reactionary tones along with interminable “flying” sequences.

Unfortunately all this comes off like anticlimax after the material with Villa. Stryker sets his sights on a former actor turned drug runner; he might not be the guy who got Kitty, but he’ll just represent the whole damned group and suffer for it regardless. But instead of gun-blazing action, Stryker goes about an elaborate sting operation where he poses as the “new Villa” and tries to get this guy to go in with him, intending to set him up and burn him. Unfortunately the guy’s guard is a heroin junkie himself and decides to take matters into his own hands – a tense scene which has the ludicrous climax of Stryker bad-mouthing the guy until he puts down his gun!

Crawford here develops a subplot that a lawyer wants to help Stryker get all the charges from the first volume dropped, so Stryker can “go home,” ie be a cop again. The novel ends with Stryker back on the ranch with his mom and blinded daughter (who humorously has yet to get a single line of dialog in the series), planning to give the lawyer a call. There was only one more volume, so perhaps it will serve as an actual resolution to the series. Crawford was poised to be Pinnacle’s “house” writer – as William W. Johnstone later was – but it seems that his involvement with the publisher came to a sudden end in 1974. His last publications were pseudonymous novels for book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel. I’d still like to know more about the guy, but my assumption is he passed away sometime in the late ‘70s.

Monday, June 25, 2018

Stryker #2: Cop-Kill


Stryker #2: Cop-Kill, by William Crawford
February, 1974  Pinnacle Books

As Marty McKee so succinctly put it, in this second volume of Stryker our titular ex-cop hero “busts some fuckers up.” William Crawford once again excels in sadism and hardcore violence along the lines of Gannon, but as ever lessens the impact with arbitrary digressions and character backstories. In many ways, Cop-Kill is almost a rewrite of Crawford’s earlier The Chinese Connection; the stories share many similarities.

It's around a year after the first volume, and Colin Stryker’s gotten lean and mean from riding horses and working all day on a farm or something. But he gets word that Sapper Kell, the killer who took out his wife and blinded and crippled his daughter – and humorously enough the daughter once again spends the entirety of the novel off-page, thus robbing any sort of dramatic impact – has himself been killed in prison. This upsets Stryker greatly, as he wanted Sapper to be raped every day in prison by “spade lifers.” Have I mentioned before that Crawford’s heroes are hard, mean bastards with little of the niceties of today?

So begins Stryker’s systematic search for whoever put the hit on Sapper, a search that entails the usual Crawford sadism and Crawford plot detours. Once again the dude appears unsure how to write a novel – no matter how minor a character introduced, we get elaborate background story about him or her, most of it ultimately having nothing whatsoever to do with the novel. As Marty also noted in his review, this sloppiness extends to plot construction – the character who pulled the hit on Sapper, Johnny Cool, is elaborately built up, only to be abruptly killed off-page, never even meeting Stryker. Meanwhile Stryker spends pages beating the shit out of the guy who killed Johnny; apparently it never occurred to Crawford to combine these two characters into one.

Stryker was once a decorated cop in New Mexico, but now finds that he is a “leper” when trying to talk to his fellow brothers in blue; cops go out of their way to avoid him. As mentioned before Crawford himself was a cop so he brings a lot of realism to these scenes. Stryker, who spends the majority of the text in Phoenix, keeps in frequent phone contact with his old partner Chino Bellon back in New Mexico. We also get arbitrary detours to other cop-world characters, like this page-filling bit about the FBI agent assigned to secretly monitor Stryker’s mom in case Stryker tries to contact her, given how Stryker breaks a bunch of laws in his gradual assault upon the mob and is soon wanted by the Feds.

Another missed opportunity is the character of Vic Antro, aka Vic Cave (no relation to Nick Cave, I assume), the Phoenix mobster who ordered the hit on Kell, and later the hit on Johnny Cool, ie Kell’s killer. He too is excessively built up only to be dispatched off-page, with Cave and Stryker never even meeting face-to-face. Rather, Stryker spends the majority of the novel tracking down, capturing, and torturing various Cave flunkies. But this isn’t “dark comedy” torture like in The Marksman. This is just plain dark, similar to Crawford’s other novels, in particular The Chinese Connection, with stuff like Stryker savagely stomping a guy and then nearly drowning him in a bathtub.

There’s a bit more action this time around, like an extended scene where Stryker takes out a car full of thugs who come after him – featuring a memorable hardcore bit where Stryker, knowing he’s being followed on a dark road, parks his car with the lights off in the middle of the road so that they ram right into it when they race around the blind curve. From these thugs Stryker gets some grenades and AR-15 assault rifles. These weapons are later used in an assault on a private runway, to take out Cave’s plane as it prepares for takeoff, but the mob boss isn’t on it.

Another added element this time is sex – Stryker gets laid, folks. This is courtesy Kitty, a hotbod teen(?) who was forced into prostitution by Antro’s thugs due to her heroin addiction or somesuch. I had a hard time understanding if she was still 17 or older now; Crawford isn’t very giving with the nitty-gritty details. It would appear so, as Kitty sleeps with the mobsters on demand due to incriminating photos she’s afraid will be turned over to her parents. Yet Crawford writes the character as if she’s in her 20s, with the maturity of an adult. Anyway she offers herself to Stryker after he comes through on his offer of giving her the photo negatives (which he got on one of his torture raids), so that she no longer has to worry about being blackmailed. “I know it’s been used and abused, but you’re welcome to what’s left,” she says, offering up her nude body. Stryker after a bit of uncertainty complies, leading to an off-page sex scene; Crawford, for all his sleaziness (Stryker for example has taken to calling his enemies “big cunt” this time around), always refrains from writing actual sexual material.

But otherwise the sleaze is on the level of Bronson: Blind Rage; the sick bastards Stryker is up against are ultra-creeps of the most deviant sort. In his vengeance-quest Styrker uncovers a sort of sexual slavery ring – complete with evidence of the women being tortured and mutilated as punishment – as well as a friggin’ baby-selling scheme, one that’s run by a vice cop at that. This would be Bowman, a big bad dude – “by far the toughest” man Stryker has ever fought – who is another of those minor characters who hijacks the narrative for several pages, given an overdone backstory of several pages. While Stryker is taking on this guy in a knockdown, dragout fight in a steam room – the same place where Stryker tossed the slave-ring runner onto burning rocks, leaving him there to die so that his sizzling corpse makes everyone puke – another Antro thug is on his way to New Mexico to kill Chino Bellon.

This elicits Stryker’s last run of vengeance; Crawford skillfully employs Stryker’s Scottish heritage, how his MaGregor clan was the very one ordered to be killed “by fire and sword” by the Queen. The finale features Stryker carrying out his vengeance by those very means: he sets a fire, traps his prey, and ends up decapitating him with a machete. It’s another grueling bit of darkviolence; Crawford should’ve garned a loyal following of readers who were into hardcore, no punches pulled violence, but it looks like he faded into obscurity, his final works turned out in a variety of pseudonyms for book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel. My assumption is he died in the late ‘70s, as there’s nothing by him I can find later than that.

The finale sees a burned-out Stryker heading to his mother’s place for some rest…apparently his daughter is there as well, though once again we’re only told about her. Stryker has taken out everyone behind the murder of his wife and friends, but has come upon the realization that perhaps he’s been put on earth to do this sort of thing – take out sick bastards. In particular he’s riled up by those photos of tortured and beaten women he found; he’s since discovered that many of the women were murdered. He’s certain there are other such sex-slavery rings out there, and by god he’s gonna smash ‘em. I’ll try to get to the next installment a lot sooner than I got to this one.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Stryker #1


Stryker #1, by William Crawford
November, 1973  Pinnacle Books

I’ve mentioned William Crawford a few times before, how he got an injoke reference in The Penetrator #9 and also how The Penetrator #17 was dedicated to him. More importantly, he was also the “Jim Peterson” who wrote the infamous 16th volume of The Executioner, Sicilian Slaughter. The Stryker series however was published under Crawford’s own name; it ran for four volumes and was more of a “crime fiction” deal than the men’s adventure novels Pinnacle was better known for.

I’ll say up front though that I wanted to like this novel a lot more than I actually did. The back cover copy (which is actually just an excerpt from the book itself) makes Stryker #1 sound like a Gannon sort of affair, and I was hoping this was maybe Pinnacle’s response to that gory and grim Dean W. Ballenger series. But no; Stryker #1 has more in common with the Narc series or better yet the Headhunters series in how it’s more of a gutter-view spotlight on street level criminals and the overworked and underpaid cops who have to bend the rules in order to stop them. The focus is more on “true to life” than nutzoid violence.

Sgt. Colin Stryker is a veteran cop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He’s been on the force for twenty years and served in both Korea and ‘Nam (where he served two tours of duty). His partner is Chico Bellon, and we learn via prolonged backstory how the two became partners, and how they both like to bust balls and break heads. (The novel for the most part is made up of backstory, by the way; any time a character appears in the narrative, Crawford will give us several pages about them and their history.) Stryker is married and has a seven year-old daughter, but these characters are such ciphers – and so little seen – that they hardly matter in the larger scheme of things.

Meanwhile a pair of hitmen, who happen to be a romantic couple as well, are heading toward New Mexico after their latest bank heist, during which one of them blew away a young girl. This is Harmon Robey and Steve Ray; Robey is the veteran hitman who insists on bringing his lover along, but Ray is a psychotic who gets off on killing innocent passersby. They’re on their way to New Mexico because local mob boss Sam Borchia has a job for them: kill Stryker and Bellon.

It takes a long time for this to happen – seriously, the first half of the book is made up of elaborated backstories for Stryker and Bellon (in particular the cases they’ve worked on in the past) as well as meetings between various crooks. Crawford juggles a pretty big cast of characters, and he makes it confusing for us because he lacks consistency when referring to them – for example, he arbitrarily refers to Bellon as either “Chico” or “Bellon,” which is a bit bumpy when the character first appears. Even worse is a later character also hired to kill Stryker; Crawford introduces him as “Kell,” but then keeps writing “Sapper” for the next couple of pages, and you wonder who this dude is and what the hell happened to Kell! Only later do we learn that it’s “Sapper Kell.”

The first hit on Stryker and Bellon is a nice sequence, as again Harmon and Ray knock over a bank, and then attempt to kill the cops during a chase and shootout. However the hitmen lovers (rather anticlimatically) die in the skirmish, and Stryker and Bellon survive unscathed. Borschia then hires the aforementioned Sapper Kell, who makes his kills via explosives. He plants a bomb on Stryker’s house, and in the explosion Stryker’s wife is killed and his daughter is blinded and crippled. This event lacks much resonance for the reader, as these characters have been nonentities so far as the novel goes, only appearing – conveniently enough – a few pages before the bombing!

This at least serves to propel the narrative; Stryker, unhinged, goes after Borschia, beats him half to death…and then gets tossed in jail for assault! Crawford throws a definite curveball, with the final quarter of the novel concerning Stryker’s few years in prison. Meanwhile Borschia and Kell are still out there, and Bellon takes care of Stryker’s daughter, Colleen. The finale too lacks much explosive action, as instead of gunning the pair down, Stryker upon his release from prison instead concocts a plan that ends with Borschia and Kell being convicted and arrested. I would’ve preferred seeing them gunned down.

Pinnacle really promoted this series, though, heralding it as a new event in crime fiction – the back cover even features an “editor’s note,” again like Gannon, which warns readers away if they don’t like too much violence. Even the last page of the book is an ad for other Pinnacle novels by Willam Crawford. At any rate I didn’t much care for Stryker #1, but one of these days I’ll get around to the second volume, mostly because I already have it.