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Average rating3.3
"The best suspense writer to put pen to paper since Alistair MacLean" (Stephen Coonts) follows up the international bestselling Firewall with the most gripping and timely Nick Stone mission yet. LAST LIGHT Top-secret operative Nick Stone has just aborted an officially sanctioned assassination attempt at the Houses of Parliament. Once he saw who his intended target was, he instinctively pulled out. Now Stone is in a world of trouble. His bosses have handed him a chilling ultimatum: fly to Panama and finish the job he just botched, or Kelly, the young orphan in his guardianship, will be killed. Deep in the sweltering jungle of Central America on an assignment that makes little sense to him, Stone quickly finds himself up to his neck in high-stakes action as he closes in on the key players in a lethal conspiracy involving Colombian guerrillas, the U.S. government, and Chinese big business. Only Stone can stop an international crisis and salvage Western interests, but first there is a critically injured friend to rescue, as well as miles of dense rainforest to navigate. In the explosive finale at the Panama Canal, with countless innocent lives hanging in the balance, Stone is forced to make the toughest decision of his life. Drawing on his experiences as a member of Britain's legendary Special Air Service, world-renowned thriller writer Andy McNab "delivers authenticity in spades" (Publishers Weekly). "McNab's greatest asset," according to London's Sunday Times, "is that the heart of his fiction is not fiction: other thriller writers do their research, but he has actually been there."
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Nick Stone is the main fictional character in a series of books written by Andy McNab, who is an ex-member of British Army regiment the SAS. Andy McNab has written about Nick Stone in nineteen different books, with this being Book #4 in the series.Nick has undertaken many missions including kidnapping a powerful Russian Mafia lord and killing a money-laundering Algerian businessman. Nick Stone left the SAS in 1988, soon after the shooting of three IRA volunteers in Gibraltar. Once working for British Intelligence as a ‘K' on deniable operations, he also briefly worked for an American agency. Now he roams the world as somewhat of a mercenary just trying to keep his head above water. Early novels are accounts of assassination and intrigue filled with tradecraft and detail. Later novels, while still detailed, deal with more social topics such as White slavery/prostitution, government corruption, war profiteering, Human rights and torture with Nick never having answers to these complicated topics, but normally just bearing witness.The book starts off with the a flashback to a previous mission of Stone's Last Light. And then we learn that Stone has to take down the son of a Chinese businessman with apparent ties to Colombian guerrillas. But as Nick gets closer to grasping the plot that led a legitimate government to hire an assassin, he becomes the hunted as well as the hunter. While traipsing through Central American jungles, he is haunted by the image of his loved ones being in danger, motivating him to make some tough choices.The first few chapters are very promising. But as the book progresses I found that it lost its pace, and its excitement. Indeed this is probably the least gripping of the Andy McNab books I've read so far. It meandered on occasions and from time to time never really seemed to going anywhere with the plotline and story. Lots of sections were Stone travelling from one location to the next, or were descriptions of him preparing for the next scene. This didn't really move the story along. Plus the climax was a bit of a damp squib, and somehow seemed to be tacked on to the story.If you're a McNab fan, you'll still enjoy it as it is still a decent action thriller. You always know what you're going to get with a McNab novel; a nice easy read with a few action scenes thrown in to keep you interested. But for new fans there are better McNab books to read than this, for example: [b:Firewall 666675 Firewall (Nick Stone, #3) Andy McNab https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1345565905s/666675.jpg 1864112].
Featured Series
20 primary booksNick Stone is a 20-book series with 20 primary works first released in 1997 with contributions by Andy McNab, Isabella Ragazzi, and 3 others.