The Lions of Lucerne

I bailed out of this just after the halfway point. I was looking for a spy thriller series to get into, but this just left me flat.

There’s some poor writing here. Don’t bother forming your own opinions about anything, because the author will simply spoonfeed you what you’re supposed to think. It’s overly dramatic and borderline cringey in places. The dialog and exposition is awful.

And I get a little tired of “ex-Navy SEAL” worship. I knew a couple of SEALs, and spent time with them in Coronado at a training exercise, and they’re amazing. But the phrase “ex-Navy SEAL” is lazy. Too much media simply tosses it out there as a catch-all “bad-ass” definition and uses it as a crutch for characterization.

(On second thought, this book was from 1994. Maybe the phrase was less saturated in ‘94? I don’t know…)

Just past halfway, I realized that I didn’t care one bit about any of the characters. There was just zero tension. I was done.