The Annihilators

Hamilton packs enough plot for three adventures into this one. Being one of helm's girlfriends is a hazardous position, even if you haven't been seen in 3 or 4 books. Matt's girl from Adventure 15 is held hostage by kidnappers with a tie to a character from Adventure 6. The hostage situation and its outcome force Matt back to the Central American country of costa Verde, where he previously ousted a banana republic strongman on a long ago mission (the Ambushers). Helm joins an archaeological expedition in hopes of pulling off his latest assignment. Along the way, he has a "past lives" type vision of himself as an ancient warrior. It's a relatively short passage, but it is jarring in a usually down to earth series.

Annihilators is the twentieth of 27 books in the Matt Helm series that first came out 23 years earlier in 1960 at the height of the Cold War. It is an espionage series that is quite different from the debonair Bond world of secret gadgets and world class mischief. Instead, Hamilton gives us a realistic view of a trained assassin who bleeds and feels. As Helm seems to note over and over again, it's like Nicholson says in A Few Good Men that there are those men and women guarding our civilization and doing things to protect us that maybe we don't want to know about, but they have to be done.
Here, Helm races between Chicago and a war-torn Latin American dictatorship where he demonstrates what it is to be a professional agent who won't give show more in to blackmail and draws a striking contrast with members of an archeological expedition who are reluctant to stand up to terrorist kidnappers and have to figure out what to do to survive and what they have to sacrifice to do so. Overall, it is another excellent Helm story, although the pacing on this one did seem a bit slow, perhaps because Helm's mission in the Central American jungles was not always perfectly clear. show less

This book stands out because Hamilton injects some ESP (paranormal) elements into the story. He's touched on the Bermuda Triangle & UFO's in other books. They turned out to be fakes or natural causes, although he left the 'green ball' UFO's open. In this book, he goes a bit further. I'm not sure how much I liked it since it really doesn't play well with Helm's hard logic. In some ways, that actually makes it better - it's a contrast that shakes this world up a bit.

Helm's hallmark is his cold logic, always tempered by just a bit of sentimentality that usually causes him trouble. The basis of this book is Helm's sentimental gesture to a friend. Of course, being Helm, there is plenty of action involved. Without creating a spoiler, I will show more note that he is becoming quite Machiavellian, almost as bad as his boss, Mac.

On to the next, [b:The Infiltrators|658906|The Infiltrators (Matt Helm, #21)|Donald Hamilton|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51XIP1%2BfEsL._SL75_.jpg|644987]! show less