A review by industrialathena
The Echelon Vendetta by David Stone

3.0

This read is more fun than it has any right to be. On the one hand it's meant to be throwaway entertainment. It's fast paced, suspenseful and sufficiently violent to keep the pages turning. But on the other hand, David Stone wants desperately to be more than a knock-off Tom Clancy and he pours a lot of effort into making sure his work reads smarter. Sometimes the effort pays off, sometimes it doesn't.

On the fail side: the prose is often overly florid and until you get immersed in the plot his excessive use of adjectives is distracting (and in a few instances laughably try-hard). On the success side: The character details make this work stand out. Rather than scribble out hyper-functional tough guy cutouts, the author has imbued the characters of this novel with real pathos. Their badass endeavors come with a personal cost that Stone doesn't gloss over. The characters read literature and occasionally quote it. They do battle with their fears and physical ailments to complete the mission.

It says more about me than the author to admit I was expecting this book to read stupidly, but surprisingly it doesn't. It's not quite a cerebral work, but it's a step in the right direction: a thinking person's action novel. The next time I'm in the mood for some lighter fiction, I will keep David Stone in mind.