Wednesday, June 16, 2021

WITHOUT SANCTION by Don Bentley

 

Publisher:      Berkley
Published:      March 3, 2020
ISBN:
     978-1984805119
Genre:     Thriller, Suspense
Format:     Print from Publisher
Reviewed by name and email address:  Gina
 myreviewbooks@aol.com

TWO HEARTS

                                                                   

Matt Drake, is a former Army Ranger and now, an analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency. But the “job” has gotten to him. He sees a dead woman when he looks at his wife and the image of a dead child is always in the back of his mind. He’s moved out of his home, telling his wife that he’s on a mission.  When an operative that is an informant for the agency has key information he needs to pass on he insists he will only deal with Matt.  When Matt refuses to answer phone calls his boss sends a team of FBI agents to the airport Matt waits at every day just to see his wife pass by in the hopes that today he’ll be all right and go home.  But he’s not ready to, even when the FBI agents handcuff him to drag him back.  After a major fight Matt is taken in and meets with his boss.  He reluctantly agrees to undertake the mission, but there are other forces and actors in play because of a pending presidential election and the politics around it.  Can Matt get in and get out with his informant before not only are they both killed, but a deadly contagion let loose on an unsuspecting world?

 

When I read the blurb for Don Bentley’s debut, WITHOUT SANCTION I just had to pick it up.  It sounded like the kind of suspense/thriller I love to read and imagined myself with a sleepless night or two while I sat up reading. I was, sadly, disappointed.

 

I’d say WITHOUT SANCTION is totally a guy’s book.  There are cut to the chase scenes that do just that—cut to the chase.  But with virtually every character being somehow broken or suffering physically, mentally and/or emotionally, it also read a bit like a women’s fiction where the “good woman” just has to go in and fix the broken guy.  Some of the political drama could have been a lot better.  And really?  The FBI sends people to airports to make them come to work? It just wasn’t believable. 

 

Maybe there is just too much sadness, illness and drama in our every day world these days that reading about people struggling just to make it through the day didn’t work for me.  I don’t mind a broken hero, or one that is struggling to get through some stuff….but when your first fifty pages are nothing but a guy who is angry at the world, lying and hiding from his wife who presumably took him for better or worse, and two other guys who have been physically disabled by war with no one being remotely okay, it’s a bit much.

 

 

This is an objective review and not an endorsement of this book.

 

 

 

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