Review: One Rough Man

One Rough Man by Brad Taylor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to give Brad Taylor and this new guy Pike Logan, a 4-star review on this first installment of the series. I can't help but force myself down to a 3 for the sheer reason of main character backstory. The amount of espionage/shooter series that feature a top-tier operator who's thrown off track by losing their family, is almost laughable now. Were it not for Taylor's great story and entertaining action sequences I'm sure I would have put this one down after a few chapters. "Are you kidding me, another SF on a rampage after losing his family?"

While Pike Logan does go into rampage mode, his reaction to the brutal loss of his family is a bit different than similar titles. This is what kept me reading at the beginning, and honestly I'd say by halfway through the book I no longer cared about the "same-ole" backstory.

Co-star slash sidekick Jennifer is a great addition, I could never really tell where that relationship was going, which was a nice change and avoided predictability. I think Brad Taylor plugs in just enough of his military experience to make the reader feel they're in-the-know, without over doing it to either extreme. When I finished One Rough Man I was compelled to start #2 right away, and a large part of that was to follow the connection between Pike and Jennifer...

All and all, Pike Logan #1 is a 4-star action novel who gets a 1-point deduction due to the outrageously overused Bad-ass with a grudge backstory. In defense of the author, the book was released in 2011 and I'm not sure who spoiled this method of main character motivation first.

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