Peter Cave (1) (1940–)

Set in the years just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this adventure sees an SAS patrol heading out to the winter steppes of Kazakhstan on the trail of a research base hidden there since the darkest days of the Cold War. In the interests of international co-operation, th Chinese have agreed to help infiltrate the patrol into Kazakhstan but nothing is quite as the patrol briefings had led them to believe and when they're left days away from their intended drop zone, the patrol has to show more find hidden strength from their training.

Overal, this is a pretty standard adventure book with a degree of attempted depth to the characters but it ends with a fairly rushed denoument with the supposedly invulnerable base assualted and taken in barely half a dozen pages. show less

I love the classic TV series The Avengers and the sequel The New Avengers. So when, years ago, I saw this novelisation of a New Avengers episode in a second hand bookshop in London, I bought it in the anticipation that it would be an enjoyable read. since then I've begun to read this book half a dozen times, but I've never managed to get beyond chapter 3. The plot probably works better on TV than in a book, but a capable writer should be able to make us care about what happens to the show more characters nevertheless. Here the writer is going through the motions of describing what's happening without being able to bring any life into the characters or the narrative. Maybe that is the point of a novelisation, that it simply tells the story without bringing any emotion into it. In that case the writer succeeded, but it fails to hold my attention. show less