The Polaris Protocol by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton Adult on January 14, 2014

Reading a Taskforce novel is an adrenalin rush. While that could be said of many action novels, Brad Taylor's Taskforce novels have the additional virtue of being intelligent. Taylor has a clear, cliché-free writing style that helps the story move swiftly. Plentiful action scenes contribute to the pace, but Taylor avoids the overdone and over-the-top nonsense that pervades so many action novels. The plots are farfetched but plausible enough for fun escapist fiction. I keep waiting for Taylor to stumble, given the speed at which he is churning out Taskforce novels, but the quality continues to be consistent.

The Polaris Protocol begins with the Taskforce chasing a bad guy in Turkmenistan while different bad guys in Mexico are messing with the GPS system. The reader knows that it's only a matter of time before the Taskforce takes on the new threat to national security. As is always true in a Taskforce novel, everything that can go wrong does ... until the end, of course, when Pike Logan and his team clean up the mess. It's a formula, but it works.

Another part of Taylor's successful formula has been: Pike wants to do something to defeat a menace; Pike is ordered not to do it; Pike does it anyway, saving the world (or at least some part of it) in the process. Taylor varies that formula a bit in The Polaris Protocol. This time Pike is giving the orders and Jennifer is disregarding them. As always, Taylor strikes a workable balance between action and character development, while the addition of friction between Pike and Jennifer adds interest to the story.

The friction arises because Jennifer's brother Jack, a journalist investigating a Mexican drug cartel, accidentally discovers a bigger story that leads to his kidnapping. Jennifer goes to his aid, abandoning the Turkmenistan mission (with Pike's consent), which cheeses off some of her Taskforce teammates. Knuckles is more cheesed at Pike than at Jennifer, particularly when he learns that Pike and Jennifer have been slipping between the sheets during their off-duty hours. That subplot has been developing over the course of the series and it's starting to pay dividends as Jack recognizes the division of his loyalty to Jennifer and to the Taskforce and its mission.

An old nemesis of Pike resurfaces in The Polaris Protocol, but the most interesting character is a different psychopathic killer. Remorseless killers are standard fare in thrillers, but Taylor fashions this one with subtlety. I'm not sure I quite buy the notion of a philosophical psychopath, but he's more entertaining than the usual mindless grunt-and-kill evildoer. Character creation is one of Taylor's skills, particularly his ability to depict both good guys and bad guys in a nuanced way. Pike engages in appalling behavior at the novel's end for a reason that seems justifiable to Pike (covering up all the laws he's broken in this and earlier novels) and perhaps to the reader, although the notion that good guys obey the law is out the window in these novels. Pike muses that Americans want a black-and-white world in which people and governments are either good or evil, but that isn't the world in which we live. Pike understands that and, fortunately for his readers, so does Taylor. None of his good guys are entirely good, just as his bad guys are not entirely evil. That's one reason I enjoy these novels.

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