Jet

This overlooked book sat in my Kindle library for more then two years and was finally chosen after completing another book by Russell Blake. Jet is an edge of your seat international roller coaster ride. The story opens with Jet as a small town store owner on the island of Trinidad. Suddenly, Jet is attacked by a professional hit man who is part of a squad sent to kill her. Readers soon learn that she is not the demure, innocent female that others in the town believed. She, too, is a ruthless killer and former member of Mossad - the secret service of Israel. She got out of the business two years earlier by collaborating with her boss to fake her death. How did they find her and who's paying for the hit? Only two people were aware of her show more existence and location...the other was her former boss.

Jet is successful in escaping the island and heads to Israel to confront her former boss. When she arrives, she finds herself in another fight with a professional hit squad. This time, her former boss was the target and she finds him gut shot and unconscious. To save him, she has to kill all the attackers.

She soon learns that every Mossad agent who participated in their last mission - where she faked her death - were recently assassinated and only her and David remained. They finally learn who is responsible for the hits and why...it was time to plan their own hits and become "The Predators" to end this madness. The author is not making this task easy and has added some twists, turns and traps for the two of them. The journey becomes a quest for survival tinged with a touch of revenge. Don't miss this one! show less

When Maya find herself running after an unexpected attack, one question kept on playing in her mind: "Who had betrayed her?"

I had this book for so long on my Kindle that I have completely forgotten about it. After cleaning and rearranging the content, I thought to read it next.
Why I have waited so long, I cannot say, but I am glad I finally made the time.
This fast-paced story takes you from South America, to Isreal to Belize at breakneck speed while you, as the reader, are thrown into the throes of a world of espionage and mistrust.

"The rest of it—the killing, the personal danger, the flirting with death while dancing on a razor’s edge—was immaterial. And part of her hated it, she realized—a sudden revelation that explained show more why she felt so empty inside even after a successful operation. Somewhere deep down in her core, she hated herself and those who had made her this way, who had created a cold, calculating killing machine for their own selfish purposes."

The transformation of Maya to Jet was quite exceptional. The one moment is she a shopkeeper, the next a person who knows her way around weapons and the most dangerous of enemies.

“You know what this is? Of course you do. This is a soldering iron. I just plugged it in. Within thirty seconds it will get hot enough to light a cigarette. I’m going to start with your head and work my way down your torso. I’m not bluffing, and you’ll be very sorry if you decide to test me.

As you track through the countries, trying to keep up, you learn also about her softer side. Once she found David, her long-lost lover, you learn more about this twenty-eight-year-old. With only one option left, she had to trust one man... A daring game of survival in a very cruel world of espionage where second chances are only for other people.

A great read and book I can definitely recommend. show less

Book # 1, in the Jet series

This story is Hot Hot, action packed from start to finish mayhem around 50% of the book with a bit of romance thrown into a very captivating drama. What is not to like for a thrill junky as myself. “Jet” provides everything I like in this type of books: expertize in clandestine enterprises, minutia details in action, equipment and scenery, in your face action, a hot assassin and it goes on and on. Of course you need to enjoy a fast-paced story with lots of shooting, stabbing, blowing up people….the bang-bang definitely is at the driver seat….If you love spy/assassin adventure this series if for you. Prepare to start running at the opening page and not stop till the very end…

The scenes play out like show more an action movie: very visual and exciting. The prose is clear and straightforward” in all an easy read. Although the protagonist is a female the author does not go sexist or ridicule his character, her sex happens to be incidental. She is definitely a woman you don’t want to mess around with: she is lethal if you cross her and very intimidating most of the time. Jet is an ex-Mossad operative, who kicks ass in one of the best action sequences I have read in a long time.

Of course this is a heart-pounding thriller with unique twists only Mr. Blake can deliver. The scenes also combined opulence and glamour and hard hitting black ops tradecraft we will ever see.

This is definitely a humdinger of a thriller show less

I’m going to take the unusual step and combine my reviews of the five novels that presently make up the Jet series. Overall, I enjoyed the books; they were a perfect poolside read; lots of action to keep my attention, without being overly descriptive or too deep or plodding. It’s worth noting that I read all five books and did so quickly. So they were clearly good enough to hold my interest and keep me coming back for more. Please keep the preceding in mind, when reading the criticisms that follow and please recognize that none of these criticisms were enough to keep me from continuing to read the series.

And before I get to my criticisms, let me say that I really liked the heroine and, in particular, he evolving relationships with show more the men in her life and her own efforts to come to grips with where she was in the world and where she wanted to be (subject to the criticism set forth below).

Nevertheless, as much as I had fun reading the Jet books, they were far from perfect. My criticisms are general to the series as a whole, rather than to individual books; hence my decision to write this single combined review.

In the introduction to the first (and several of the other books), Blake notes that his books shouldn’t be held to a standard of accuracy; rather, he tells the reader to just have fun. And that’s OK, I guess. But it’s also an unnecessary crutch. If Blake doesn’t want me to worry too much about fieldcraft or proper organization at Mossad or CIA or other such things, I can accept that. This is an action read, not a treatise. But there were just too many small things that jumped out as being … well … lazy. Things that Blake could have easily gotten right (or more right, at least), to make the story feel just a touch more realistic. This is a bad example, but I think that it gives an idea: At one point, several characters go into a restaurant in a small South American city and there is a child’s menu with pasta and chicken fingers. Really? I don’t know. Perhaps South American restaurants to have those sorts of things on a child’s menu, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the sequence based on the author’s experiences in the US (and Mexico, I suppose), rather than the places where the story was taking place. Like I said, that may be a bad example, but it’s the best one I can remember right now. But as I read, I scratched my head at this sort of things more than once.

A bigger problem is the fact that our heroine is Israeli … but never seems to reflect upon that or upon the fact that she is (I presume) Jewish. It’s as if being Israeli is sort of … I don’t know … plain vanilla? Only once or twice over the course of 5 books does the author even acknowledge the heroine speaking Hebrew. She does reflect that if she leaves Mossad, she’ll be leaving others to defend Israel but that doesn’t really seem to make an impact on her and she doesn’t seem to have any attachment, at all, to the land of her birth or the country for which she acted for all of those years. Somehow, I have a hard time believing that after everything that she gave, she would be so willing, not to walk away from Mossad, but to walk away both from Israel and from being Jewish.

We also learn that the heroine has never been to the US but when she does finally come to the US, she has no difficulty fitting in. Does she speak English with both American and English accents? This sort of detail would have been a nice addition.

I was also very troubled (and this is a much more substantive criticism) of the actions that she takes at the beginning of the 2nd book with regard to information revealed at the end of the 1st book (sorry, no spoilers). While the reader understands her acts, they aren’t very heroic. I can live with that. But given everything else the character goes through, the fact that there was absolutely no self-reflection over the development of following story arcs with regard to those actions was extremely troubling, especially given that her acts continue to put an innocent in harm’s way.

I guess my final criticism would be that both the story and the action sequences were a bit repetitive. It seems that by the end of 5 books, our heroine has fought her way through virtually every building under construction in every corner of the globe. But I’m nitpicking.
Yes, the books were flawed. No, they won’t be winning any Nobel’s or Pulitzer’s . But in the end, I enjoyed them enough to keep coming back. And if Blake writes Jet VI, I’ll certainly read it too. show less

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Jet by Russell Blake is the first book in a series about a former Israeli Mossad assassin. Mr. Blake is an international best selling author of action/adventure novels.

Jet is a 28 year old ex-Mossad agent who was a lethal assassin before faking her own death to “retire”. But with a past like Jet, retirement is not as easy as it sounds.

I enjoyed reading Jet by Russell Blake, a fast and violent book with a female protagonist. Even though it is exciting, the plot felt formulaic with no big surprises. I thought the author used the same shtick as many other authors to humanize a female protagonist in many other books.

The protagonist is has an abusive past, but show more someone is still tagged as “assassin material”. I haven’t met many assassins or spies during my life, but people who become work in that field don’t usually come from that kind of past – the best spies don’t look like models, but those that can melt in the background and disappear.
They’re also not full with rage, or they’ll last one assignment, at the most.

I really liked the idea of the novel though, a tough lady, retired from intelligence apparatus by faking her death, than being sucked back in. strangely, for a foreigner living in a foreign land, Jet doesn’t seem to miss her culture. Usually people try and seek out something that will remind them of their past, whether it’s a movie, food, or even just listening to tourists talk. For Jet, however, this doesn’t apply. I thought the whole story would have been much more authentic if some of those elements were incorporated.

The author, to his credit, does say that he wrote the book for fun and didn’t get bogged down with accuracy too much. I agree with the author, it was a lot of fun to read, stimulating and thrilling. show less

Whilst quite well written with some very good descriptive passages, I found the action sequences a little too simple for our heroine, and there was rather too much gore involved for my liking. I did find myself wanting to know how things turned out for her, but not enough to make me want to read the sequels to find out - there are too many other books that hold greater interest for me.

lots of extreme and graphic violence. The story was okay and kept my attention. the cliff hanger was predictable but well constructed. in not sure if i we’ll continue with the series- it’s a little too gory for me.. but it is a good story so perhaps...