One Rough Man: A Pike Logan Thriller

An outstanding debut novel, Brad Taylor draws on his experience as a Delta Force commander to deliver an action-packed thriller. The realism and attention to detail makes this a must read for fans of Vince Flynn and Brad Thor. Pike Logan is a flawed hero who I found myself rooting for time and time again. Authorized by the President, the Taskforce was formed to operate outside the law and without sanction from congressional oversight in order to deal with the increasing presence of terrorists. Pike Logan was the best of the best, and as team leader never failed to complete a mission successfully. At his best when the plans started to break down, Pike was known for his quick thinking and decisive action. Finally succumbing to his wife's repeated requests to retire from his job, Pike was on his last mission when tragedy struck his family. Unable to deal with the guilt of being away when his family needed him most, Pike went on a downward spiral and sought solace in the bottom of a bottle. Meanwhile, Professor John Cahill was in the Guatemalan jungle searching for his mythical Temple of the Priests. When his guides refused to go any further into the jungle, two young natives seeking treasure stole his GPS and found the Temple. They also found a white powder which quickly killed one of the boys while the other made it back to tell the story. Cahill, ever cautious, embedded the GPS coordinates in some music mp3 files and e-mailed them to his niece Jennifer, who was a student at the College of Charleston. He then deleted all information from his laptop and GPS. Miguel, who was a very successful smuggler, was in negotiations with two Arabs to smuggle certain items into the United States when the young boy from the jungle told the tale of finding the Temple and the ensuing death of his friend from the mysterious white powder. Feigning ignorance of the Spanish language, the two Arab terrorists became interested in the powder as a source for a WMD. Miguel, also known as "Machete," was more interested in the treasure and potential wealth it may bring. Machete ordered his henchmen to pick up Professor Cahill in hopes of finding the location of the Temple. Cahill told Machete that he had FedExed the GPS to his niece in Charleston, South Carolina. Professor Cahill died as Machete was torturing him to find out additional information about the GPS. The two terrorists found the key to the embedded mp3 files on a thumb drive amid Cahill's possessions and were able to obtain the deadly powder. Machete sent a team to Charleston to retrieve the GPS from Jennifer and as luck would have it, Pike was able to thwart the attack and kill the mobsters. Pike did not want to be looking over his shoulder from the Machete's agents for the rest of his life, so he agreed to go to Guatemala and deliver the non-existent GPS. Jennifer went with Pike and they formed a somewhat tenuous and unlikely partnership. It was in Guatemala that Pike and Jennifer learned of the terrorist's possession of the WMD and they decided they had to stop the attack in order to prevent widespread death and panic. In Washington DC, a member of the government also learned of the terrorist's intentions and decided to delete all known references to the attack in order for him to play the part of hero and savior, thus catapulting him to a higher position in the government. He wanted no loose ends and ordered Pike and Jennifer to be killed. Therefore the dynamic duo found themselves chasing the terrorists and dodging multiple assassination attempts. This was a very good debut novel with an interesting plot and in depth knowledge of special forces operations. If you enjoy action packed novels as I do, then this is the book for you. I look forward to reading the future adventures of Pike Logan and Jennifer Cahill.

Fast paced, great action, few discrepancies that didn’t make but overall enjoyable read. Misspelled POTUS last name in one section. Bugs place in Hale’s phone implausible. Those phones and pagers are scanned constantly, would have been discovered. Still enjoyed the book.

I had a one week (non action packed) vacation. Couldn’t put this book down. Great read, just bought the second installment in this series.

I ran across another of Brad Taylor's Pike Logan books and liked it so much that I wanted to back track to the beginning of the series. This makes one of the best first novels that I have read in a long time. Taylor has a close expertise in the deadly world of special operations and he shows that in his descriptions of hand to hand combat. More than that, he gets us inside the head of his hero as Pike Logan tries to figure out how to stay alive and how to prevail in his many fights. The fights are top of the line thriller fodder, they make the book. He has invented a quick moving plot that we can not only follow but that we can believe. He takes us from Central America to Norway to Bosnia with enough description that Taylor might have been at these locations. He surely did his homework if he hasn't been there in person. We suffer no ambiguity in this story. The good guys are good and the bad guys are bad. We do receive a nicely calibrated dose of bad guy motivation, which is nice to have. The baddies might be totally bad but they are not simple cartoons. They do what they do for their own reasons and we know and understand those reasons without having to agree with them. The good guys are not all drawn with as much care. We don't know much about the team mates, including knowing what they look like. In a fast paced thriller this might not be necessary but it prevents the coveted five star thriller rating. On the strength of reading the book further along in the series, I ordered out three or four more Pike Logan thrillers. I expect to devour them as fast as I did One Rough Man.

I literally just finished reading "One Rough Man" and couldn't wait to get on here and review it. I was extremely impressed with Brad Taylor's first novel in the Pike Logan series. I read a lot of thrillers; with Brad Thor, Vince Flynn, and Dalton Fury rounding out my favorites. One thing I can say about this book that also goes for Dalton Fury's first offering "Black Site" is that prior Delta guys can sure paint a picture of special operations warfare. This book has it all! Great character development, excellent detail and descriptions of what's happening in each scenario, and a great character in Logan. I really liked that all of Logan's portions of the book were in the first person perspective. I hadn't read a book like this before and thought it added a lot to the overall experience. I also liked how personable and multidimensional the main character was. I could actually see him saying these things and got a better feel for what facial expressions and body language he would be displaying in real life. I also thought the plot and story line was outstanding. There were a myriad of dynamics to this story and it kept me hooked from the very first page. I'm looking forward to starting Mr. Taylor's next book "All Necessary Force" and hope he continues this awesome series.

This is the author's debut novel, which means that I fully expected the storytelling to have problems when I began reading it. Parts of this novel deserved 2-stars or less. Other parts deserved 3-stars. In the end, I decided to give it 3-stars instead of 2, but my real grade would've been 2.5-stars. The Bad Guys are ex-U.S. Special Forces I found it interesting that most of the really bad guys in this novel, the ones who do all the killings for the bad guys, are said to be ex-SEALs, or ex-Rangers, or ex-U.S. Special Forces. Which would appear to be saying that the guys the U.S. government trains to protect America, eventually become amoral mercenaries after they get out of the military and that they have no compulsion about killing American citizens. I don't know if that was the author's intended communication, but it seems to support the idea that the men who sign up for special forces don't really give a damn about their country, they just want to play with guns and kill people. I hope that's not true. Way Too Many Coincidences... which resulted in the loss of verisimilitude The main plot, in order for it to work, required far too many coincidences. The appearance or semblance of truth (verisimilitude) is what makes these kind of thrillers fun to read. As such, when that verisimilitude is damaged, some of the enjoyment is also damaged, and one of the most common ways to undermine a story's verisimilitude is to rely on one or more coincidences in order to make the plot work. And another problem with coincidences is that once an author uses them once in the beginning of the story, the author will most likely continue to use them in later parts of the story. There are many coincidences in this story, but here is just one example: Coincidence #1: Pike Logan is conveniently hanging out at a popular local bar, The Windjammer, that is 4-5 miles from his boat basin. He rode his bike. Okay, somewhat believable. Coincidence #2: Jennifer Cahill (28 yrs old) makes the rare decision to go out for a night of partying with a girlfriend and she goes to The Windjammer. Okay, again somewhat believable, but putting Pike and Jennifer in the same bar on the same night was definitely coincidental. However, if either coincidence #1 or coincidence #2 does not happen, then the remainder of the story's plot is totally lost. Coincidence #3: Pike has gotten into a bar fight with someone Jennifer knows, and Jennifer decides to defend the drunken Pike Logan. But wait! Pike's not drunk... he's just faking it. Gee, I wonder what the author is up to? Coincidcence #4: Hey, surprise, Pike is not really drunk, he's just faking it. Everything up to this point in the story tells us that Pike, in mourning his wife's & daughter's murder, has turned to drinking. The old man at the marina who has been casually spying on Pike for two months tells us that Pike frequently "stank of liquor, the foul smell wafting out of his pores like a frog" and that the old man considered Pike a drunk. But as we soon discover, on this one particular night, Pike is just faking that he is drunk. Gee, how convenient... and just the type of coincidence that the story needs in order for the plot to work. If Pike had been drunk, then he would not have been in a condition to fight off the two men who intercept Jennifer at the marina. The coincidences are starting to pile up. Coincidence #5: The two badass bad guys decide to intercept Jennifer at Pike's marina. This is the most significant unbelievable and contrived coincidence. Miguel Portilla, the bad guy from Mexico, has asked his American partners in crime to get a FedEx package from Jennifer Cahill. They send two guys to get the package. But what happens? These two guys, who've been sent to get a FedEx package, decide to intercept Jennifer just as she is leaving Pike's boat. Huh? Huh? Why there? They've been following her, so they know she's not carrying "a package" with her. And besides, she lives alone ("a one-bedroom apartment in a row house on Pitt Street, two blocks from the College of Charleston"). There are so many obvious better choices for when to intercept Jennifer. Heck, they could have used her trip to Isle of Palms as a perfect opportunity to break into her apartment and search for the package... or to wait for her to come home alone after her weekend at the beach. And as we discover, all of these contrived coincidences result in Pike defending Jennifer from the two bad guys (he even kills both of them because he's not really drunk), and now he and Jennifer are linked (which is the whole objective of all these coincidences), and Jennifer can now tell Pike about the trouble her uncle has seemingly gotten into. IMO: Too many contrived coincidences for my liking in order to make the plot work. Another huge coincidence: Lucas Kane, the mercenary who killed Pike's wife and kid, just so happens to be working for Harold Standish later in the story. Omniscient POV The main reason for giving this novel a 3-star rating and not higher is the author's poor use of POV. It's supposed to be a Pike Logan novel, but it's not really a Pike Logan novel. The author chose to use 3POV Omniscient for all of the other point of view characters (POVCs), and there are way too many other POVCs. As such, it's everybody's story and not really the protagonist's story. And as the story progresses, the author starts jumping from one character's thoughts to another character's thoughts and back again, often times happening within the span of a few paragraphs. Two Really Smart (Too Smart) Arab Terrorists - Not Unbelievable Sayyidd and Bakr went from run-of-the-mill, smuggling terrorists acting on orders, to scientific geniuses. Oh, and they also spoke at least four languages (Arabic, English, Spanish, and Serbo-Croatian). While I like smart bad guys, Sayyidd's and Bakr's range of knowledge and expertise was totally unbelievable. They were surveillance experts, electronics experts, chemical weapons experts, demolition experts, and experts in knowing the security measures used in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and every foreign country they entered. Basically, whatever problem they encountered, they magically knew exactly how to deal with it. No terrorist organization would send anyone this smart on a suicide mission. These guys were management material, the ones who would be supervising the suicidal dummies. Summary The author spends too much time in almost every character's head, the result of which is that the pace of the story slows down every time the author decides to share the inner thoughts of all these characters. Some readers may like this style, but I don't. Lots of "filler" in this story. Sharing so many different character's idle thoughts = filler. Having to rely on coincidences to make the plot work = more filler. Dragging out scenes that have no real importance to the plot = filler. Example of filler: Pike and Jennifer fly into Atlanta, on their way to Washington D.C., and the author spends more than three chapters getting them safely out of the airport after they have been tagged as suspected terrorists. The plot point was that they had been tagged as suspected terrorists and were now hunted fugitives. But the author focused on their process of getting out of the airport, which had no other purpose to the story than to show, once again, how Pike was skilled enough to evade any and all law enforcement. The author could've cut 90% of the airport scene and nothing would have been lost.

Highly recommend this book. I love reading the first book of a successful author. Fascinating to see the growth and development. Brad started out strong with this first book. You can tell he was just a few years from being in the action from special forces. It shows in every action scene. And there are many of them in this book. Get started on this Pike Logan series. You won’t regret it.

One Rough Man is entertaining, kinda like 24. It's a good read, though in hindsight, there are a few nits I want to pick. The main character, Pike, is for the most part believable. The girl, Jennifer, has some hidden skills, which make for some entertaining situations, but perhaps a little unbelievable. They bring in the neighbor (Tim?), who ends up getting himself and Heather and daughter killed by some men. They allude to Tim being involved in some dangerous business. But that is never developed further or tied to the main plot, except to explain how Heather and daughter are killed. I think he captured the Islamic jihadists well, and had an interesting explanation of how these guys rationalized becoming terrorists. Skilled in some areas, but overall not schooled in rational thinking. My one main critique is the assualt of El Machete's compound by Pike. Granted, most of the bodyguards were gone to the plaza to "meet" Pike. But how didn't anyone at the compound hear some of his initial gunshots? I don't remember anything about a silencer being used, though perhaps that was just assumed. Wouldn't El Heffe had some more protection in his office, more bodyguards, or maybe an enclosed type of panic room? It would tend to fit his type of profile. Also, it took till almost the end of the book for Pike to realize where the tracker was. That and how the tracker was put on in my mind a little unbelievable. Standish's grab for power was a little one-dimensional as well. It's like he went off the deep end. But, in spite of those small details which kinda didn't mesh, it was an entertaing book, which I finished within a week. I would've liked to see Kurt getting wise to Standish earlier, and nipping him in the bud. It would've expanded Kurt's character, which to me was interesting as well. I guess there always One Rough Man: Part 2 to expand on some of the things left hanging in this book. Maybe Standish was involved with the people who killed Heather? Or maybe Lucas? Or maybe a splinter group within the Trust (forget the name of the Organization Pike worked for) did that?

Great read looked for another author and happy I have found this one, kept me awake at night because I couldn't put it down

First time reading this author and couldn't put the book down. Pike Logan was as good as the early Mitch Rapp books and much better than the recent ones! Now off to order more of Brad's books.

Pike Logan, ehemaliger Task Force Operator, nun ein gebrochener Mann, psychisch am Ende und kurz vor einem Blackout, hat nichts mehr zu verlieren. Seine Family wurde ermordet. Sein Leben zerstört. Seine Zukunft in ein einziges tiefes pitch-black verwandelt. Erst eine diffuse terroristische Bedrohung und Jennifer "Koko" Cahill, die ihn, dem großen Pike Logan in einer Bar das Leben rettet, bringen den besten Mann der Task Force wieder ins Spiel. Pike und Jennifer werden ein Team im Team. Zusammen gehen sie auf die Jagd. Brad Taylor schreibt in der ersten Person, verbindet so den Leser mit Pike auf eine meisterliche Art und Weise. Pike Logan ist ein Mann, der auf der einen Seite durch Wände marschiert, aber auf der anderen Seite einer Frau die Tür aufhält. Er ist stur, verletzlich und kompromisslos, weiß, wie man Terroristen aufspürt, beschattet und mit Erlaubnis seines Chefs Kurt Hale auch endgültig von dieser Erde befördert. Wer einen realistischen, schnellen und punktgenauen Stil mit einer guten Portion Irony und Witz mag, ist bei Brad Taylor absolut richtig. Die Story ist gut recherchiert, die Surveillance trocken "All elements ..." und die Story führt den Leser in eine brutale Welt, in denen ein Menschenleben wenig und tote Frauen und Kinder viel bedeuten. Für mich ist dieses Buch ein gelungenes Debüt, sehr empfehlenswert und ein nächtlicher Pageturner.

Great read

Good first novel. Fast. Though the first person singular narrative is somewhat jarring