Wednesday, March 9, 2016

William Brown’s “Burke’s Gamble”


Bob Burke ostensibly runs a telecommunications company in Chicago. He’s celebrating three weeks being married when he gets a call – a former fellow Delta Force colleague is in trouble with a casino in Atlantic City. The casino is tied into the New York Mafia crime families. By the time Bob arrives in Atlantic City with $300,000 to pay off the debt, someone has tossed the colleague from a fifth-floor window.

It’s not nice to mess with Bob Burke. The casino sends three “security men” after Bob to Chicago to collect what’s owed. It’s stupid to mess with Burke a second time, as the three thugs soon discover.

At the colleague's funeral in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the casino’s payback is plotted out. And then the fun begins.

William Brown’s Burke’s Gamble is the second in the Bob Burke Action Thriller Series, the first being Burke’s War. The narrative occasionally goes longer than a page without concerted force being applied, but it’s rare. Action ripples across the story so fast that a close read is mandatory to keep track of how fast things move. The pace is wild and riveting.

William Brown
Prior to beginning the Bob Burke series, Brown write several action-packed suspense novels. All of them are exciting reads, but it’s with Burke that Brown has hit his stride. Deftly combining threads of big-stakes gambling, Mafia control, and special forces action with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, he weaves a highly entertaining story. A new wrinkle is added with the arrival of former special forces from the Netherlands and Germany whoa re now full-blown mercenaries, and a hunt for purloined gold artifacts stolen from the chaos of the war in Iraq.

Like I said, Burke’s Gamble is one wild story.

Related - My reviews of Brown’s previous books:








Photograph of Atlantic City by Tim Emerich via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

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