Final Flight by Eric Anderson

source: copy for review via MerylMoss Media and Dunn Books
title: Final Flight
author: Eric Anderson
published: June 9, 2020
genre: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Political thriller
pages: 284
rated: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars

blurb:
On a clear, cold night high above Asia, a China Air passenger jet disappears from radar. An anomaly, a fluke, an unsolvable puzzle-and then a couple of hours later, it happens again.

A former member of the U.S. intelligence community, author Eric Anderson takes us to 2023 in his new book FINAL FLIGHT (Dunn Books: June 9, 2020), and picks up where real-life Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 left off. What happened to that airplane and all the people aboard?

Former Air Force maintenance officer Jason Montgomery and his erstwhile wrench-twister, Rob “Ski” Kalawski, have just landed the gig of their lives. China Air’s aging fleet of Boeing 777s now desperately needs navigation hardware and software upgrades. It’s a multimillion-dollar contract, and they’re just the guys to do it. Too easy, right?

Wrong.

The Japanese firm supplying the gear knows the Chinese will reverse-engineer and steal it, so they’ve planted a deadly navigation bug to trigger at the first sign of theft. Jason’s just the middleman, but he finds himself trapped between yakuza gangsters, a tattooed dragon-lady sales exec, and murderous Russian mobsters looking to make a profit on the missing airplanes and passengers. If these crazies don’t start behaving like moral adults, people are going to die by the hundreds . . . and they do.

FINAL FLIGHT, the latest prescient tale from the man who brought us the “New Caliphate” trilogy Osiris, Anubis and Horas as well Byte, might make you think twice before boarding the next plane.

my thoughts:

Final Flight is different from my usual reading fare. This is a story revolving around two China Air Passenger planes that went missing from radar. The book is based on real life  Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 which went missing over the ocean in China in 2014. Jason Mongomery and Ski Kawalski have been hired by China Air to install the software and hardware on their Boeing’s. However, Jason soon realizes that the Japanese company that supplies the software planted bugs on it. He just wants to get the job done and get home back to the U.S. Jason and Ski find themselves in the midst of an all out mess and are even blamed for sabotaging the software themselves. As the book goes on you are introduced to a set of several characters like Yamakita, Bao, computer programmer Yatso, the gangster tattoo artist Kanto and his love interest an executive named Sako. Side note, the dragon tattoos Kato does for Sako sound pretty intricate and bad-ass.

Goodbye Paris by Mike Bond

source: free review copy courtesy of BookTrip / Meryl Moss Media
title: Goodbye Paris
author: Mike Bond
genre: crime thriller
published: June 11, 2019
pages: 343
first line: It rose from the deep, a huge wall of roaring green that blotted out the sky and smashed me under, whacked my surfboard into my head and punched the air from my lungs.

blurb:
Special Forces veteran Pono Hawkins races from a Tahiti surfing competition to France when he learns that a terrorist he’d thought was dead, Mustafa al-Boudienne, may have a backpack nuclear weapon and plans to destroy Paris. Pono was once Mustafa’s prisoner, and is now the only one left alive to identify him.

Joining forces with former allies from US, French and Russian intelligence, and with an intrepid and brilliant French agent, Anne Ronsard, with whom he soon falls in love, Pono sets out against impossible odds to catch and kill Mustafa and his terrorist cell before they can destroy the most beautiful city on Earth.

Another in the bestselling Pono Hawkins series after Saving Paradise and Killing Maine, GOODBYE PARIS is a hallmark Mike Bond thriller: alive, tense, exciting, and full of fascinating details and places. And that will keep you up all night.

my thoughts:

As the blurb reads, Pono Hawkins is a veteran from the Special Forces who races from a surfing competition in Tahiti to France to hunt down a terrorist he believes was dead. Hawkins is surfing and in need of rescue as the book opens which I thought was pretty cool actually.

Pono Hawkins lets us know early on that he lives in the same house with three gorgeous, sexual women. They dislike each other but just loooove to sleep with him. Get it? Got it? Good. Moving on. He has been through crazy adventurous times, he recently went to jail to cover for a buddy, then he was released from jail and now he lives with three hotties.