The Wrecking Crew

The Wrecking Crew Taylor Zajonc

The book starts with a plane full of scientists being shot down whilst they are investigating a mysterious red kelp off the Horn of Africa, continues with a prison escape, luxury yatch theft and that’s just the first few pages.

Are the uber-rich causing the pollution in the gulf fro their mega-structure in the sea? One mans greed and vision has created a land that belongs to no kingdom but is it working as well as he thinks it is.

Dr Fatima Nassir was that crashed. Her son breaks Jonah Blackwell out of prison to help him find justice for his mother and to recover her research.

Blackwell is one of the most complex characters of have encountered recently in a book, but what a character a cross between Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne. That alone is worth reading this book for.

Every good adventure thriller needs a bad guy, and it’s easy to dislike Charles Bettencourt from the start. Rich, obnoxious, corrupt and outright nasty, the perfect villain

This book has everything a Clive Cussler fan would like, at times I forgot I was reading a book and was transported back to the boys own tales of the Warlord comic I used to read in the 60’s and 70’s.

Did I like this book? Yes.

Would I recommend this book? Yes but, I think it’s a male thing, and without being sexist I really don’t see many of my female friends liking it.

Mr Zajonc I look forward to your next book.

This was an interesting story with nicely woven plots and action mixed with some comedic moments (at least for me). The characters had interested, dimensional personalities that keep you engaged.

I was provided a galley Copy of The Wrecking Crew and to be honest was slow to get to it, due to being behind on my own writing. But once I picked it up I couldn't put it down. I love techno-thrillers, aircraft, ships, and submarines are fantastic sets. But it is the character development that ultimately was the hook. Great juxtaposition of shaded good and evil with out being tripe. I enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to Zajonc's next.

I picked up The Wrecking Crew as a free pre-publication copy via NetGalley without much in the way of anticipation. It was very much one of those 'what the hell' picks where the plot sounded vaguely interesting so I added it to my request list. Once it had arrived it then sat on my Kindle for several weeks until, for want of anything else to read one day, I decided to give it a try.

I have to admit that I am pleased I did. Whilst by no-means perfect, The Wrecking Crew is a highly entertaining piece of action-adventure fiction. It’s also one of the more original works in this well-worn genre that I have come across in recent times.

The debut novel of real life diver and sub-sea explorer Taylor Zajonc, The Wrecking Crew is likely to be compared with the works of Clive Cussler due to its maritime theme. However, it really couldn’t be further from Cussler’s Dirk Pitt novel in both tone and subject matter.

Yes, it’s an escapist adventure featuring (fictional) man-made island cities, submarines, pirates, billionaire bad-guys and their psychopathic henchmen, but that’s about as much as it has in common with Cussler. Whilst ostensible hero Jonah Blackwell is the hyper-capable, all-action type he’s by no-means the square jawed do-gooder typically found at the heart of this type of story. His motivations are primarily focused on self-preservation and personal enrichment, at least initially, and he’s a prickly, had to love character at times.

Indeed outside the chief bad-guy, his hulking lead henchman and their army of supporting-henchpersons, who all remain very one-dimensional throughout, The Wrecking Crew nimbly avoids character stereotyping and almost seems to revel in upending the readers’ assumptions about individuals’ personalities and motivations. As a result a Moroccan doctor who initially appears to be a representative of an oppressive regime turns out to have entirely altruistic motivations, a young female engineer from Texas who initially seems to be have been included in the story solely to act as a convenient love interest for Blackwell turns out to have eyes for someone else and a Russian submariner and a Somali pirate form a very unexpected bond.

All this skewering of expectations when it comes to characters is mirrored in the plot itself, which also manages to upend convention in a number of ways. For a start, despite Blackwell being the ostensible hero of the novel, this is very much an ensemble piece, with everyone pulling their weight in one way or another. It also avoids turning anyone into an invulnerable superhero or making them infallible. In fact the opposite is the case, with the good-guys being hurt on a frequent basis and making some major, and sometimes fatal, mistakes along the way.

It all serves to lend the Wrecking Crew a sense of unpredictability that keeps you reading and wondering where Zajonc will take the story next and gives the whole book a freshness that is often lacking from more established series where every new novel seemingly tries to adhere to a standardised template.

Not the The Wrecking Crew is perfect by any means. Zajonc doesn’t always manage to get the right balance of tone, with some pretty dark moments of bloodshed and death sitting uncomfortably alongside more escapist elements. The plot also feels a little too hyperactive at times, as if the author was worried that readers would become bored if there was too long a pause between episodes of action, meaning that key moments sometime feel overly rushed and some parts of story feel strangely disjointed. And it would have been great if Zajonc had managed to develop antagonists who were as unpredictable and original as the protagonists, but instead he delivers the tired stereotypes of an evil, amoral hedge-fund manager and his psychopathic head of private security.

Some of the book’s wilder moments and concepts also fail to really convince. The bad-guys’ man-made island/tax haven works as basic concept but the idea that they would choose to locate it off the coast of Somalia doesn’t feel plausible, despite the book’s efforts to justify the decision. The apparent indestructibility of the submarine that plays such an important part in the story, and the apparent ease with which a small group of untrained individuals manage to operate it also strains at the edge of credibility.

Finally, after a great build up, the book’s dénouement comes as something of a disappointment, relying as it does on a last minute ex-machina save that results in a rather unoriginal Hollywood blockbuster style burst of epic property destruction that conveniently manage to not result in any innocent deaths.

These criticisms aside however, The Wrecking Crew remains a highly entertaining and pleasantly surprising read in a genre that produces far too many pedestrian, identikit novels written to well-worn, predictable formulae. For that reason Taylor Zajonc should be congratulated on a successful debut and I will look forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

This is a rollicking adventure set in, and off the coast of Somalia, in the near future. The story takes place on a luxury speedboat, an offshore super city and a submarine - with characters including a Moroccan doctor, his mother, a Texan engineer and dis-credited spy's son....

Its a break neck story with enough twists to keep you turning the pages.

Worth a read.

This is a story about a man who was sprung from prison. Helped by accomplices he takes on a huge corporation which has corrupt dealings. This man is a Rambo/Arnie type of guy. He is seemingly familiar with many types of weapon and can even command a submarine with a rookie crew! It is a fast paced action-all-the-way read. Implausible but quite entertaining

THE WRECKING CREW by Taylor Zajonc is a non stop action story featuring Jonah Blackwell,, an former prisoner who had been all but forgotten, who is freed by a doctor looking to rescue his mother who was doing some oceanographer research, but disappeared. The story jumps right in, quickly setting up the plot and throwing Jonah is a boat to make the rescue attempt. Jonah is a very likable character, he reminds me of a modern day Han Solo, just trade space for water and our Star Wars time for out present . The story doesn't slow down, with deviations from plot progression only to quickly introduce and understand new characters. In the end, Zajonc has created a motley band of people who now have a sub and seem to yearn for another adventure and I, for one, look to Zajonc for another book to tell the story of that adventure.
There are shades of the movies Hunt for Red October and U-571 and the suspense compares to them. I will say that there are a lot of submarine and boat terms in the book, but having only a passable knowledge of boating and submarine lingo, I still could keep up with the story.