Another Game in the series

Book Info: Samurai Game by Christine Feehan. Published by Jove Books 2012.

This is yet another installment of a Christine Feehan series. I did not do re-read of the entire series at this time because there are only 10 books in the series and it wasn't necessary. I have read these books so many times I have lost count. I enjoy them for what they are. Paranormal/military romances that deal with some dark issues. For example, all of the heroes are in the military and have been enhanced physically and psychically by a mad scientist who is in hiding. The heroines have undergone the same procedures, but years earlier. Sadly, all of the women were purchased from orphanages around the world as small children and experimented on. While these stories deal with the alpha male mentality found in the military, they are thrown up against the abused women who have had to learn to fend for themselves against a mad man.

As usual, Feehan creates a parallel world for her series. Running over these 10 novels she sets up the fact that the good guys are formed into 4 different teams. The women seem to have no set location. Some of them are controlled by the bad guys in facilities. Others were adopted out to families, though they are still controlled in some ways by the bad guys. The heroine of this book was thrown away by the bad guys and left for dead. The novels jump from team to team and you never know which one the next story will be about. Lucky for us, in this book, we get to go back to our first team and get an HEA for a character we have known for a while.

Yet, there were some problems with this book that I didn't have with the others. With a mad scientist running loose and military men, you can only image the technical jargon that is thrown around. I am a History and English Lit major. I took my required Biology and Astronomy and called it quits on the sciences. But I have been reading military histories since I was a teenager so the language and acronyms of soldiers were not new to me. There were times I had to look some of the military things up but I usually let the science techno babble go over my head as it was usually explained to the soldiers in a way I could understand. In this book, however, it is obvious that the author now has someone that she can discuss real world ops with. In her acknowledgements she specifically mentions that she discussed the military scenes with someone from the Rangers. While I am all for using real world terms etc, I think this caused a few problems in the story itself. The scenes I am thinking of are towards the end of the novel. The soldiers receive orders to go into the jungle and...  Well, so as not to give anything away,  let's just say they are going to do some stuff. The men gather in the "war room" and plan. Which one would expect. Yet, here we get a does of military jargon that readers haven't ever had in Feehan's novels. Which means a lot of acronyms that have to be explained. Now I am all for explaining things that might be unclear... such as the difference between a HALO and HAHO. But in the middle of the war room, no leader would have to make such an explanation. And to have it in the background breaks the flow of the story.  For example, taken from page 310:

     "You'll make a HALO insertion from a CIA Gulstream C-11. The crew will be squawking a Yemen business transponder code to cover us."
      A HALO was a high altitude low opening jump.
      "Normal business men you are," Gator snickered.

The use of the acronym HALO would be considered normal for this type of meeting and, because everyone there knew it's meaning, it wouldn't need to be explained. Yet, some readers might not understand and therefore the explanation is added. Unfortunately, it pulls the reader from the meeting and then tries to throw them right back in with Gator's comment. That doesn't work. The reader is stuck trying to jump between reality and story and in the end just stays in reality. The struggle continues with references to the TOT, DZ, PZ and RP. (Time over Target, Drop Zone, Pickup Zone and Rally Points respectively.) She also includes the descriptions of what each man is carrying. Now I imagine that this scene might be fairly accurate for a military meeting but it is not consistent with the world she has created in the 9 previous books. If she had started using these acronyms or this type of set up in her first books, readers would be comfortable with them by this point. But to add them at this late a date means you have to add the explanations which kills the story. Yet, how to fix this problem is definitely a dilemma. I guess she could do what other authors have done and add a glossary of military terms. That way readers can look them up if they have questions. (I believe she has done this with her Dark Series as well.) Or maybe include a character that these things needs to be explained to like she did with the science and computer stuff. Either way would have created a better flow to the story then the odd explanations dropped into the storyline.

While I didn't enjoy this book as much as the others in the series, I will probably still continue to read the novels. For now I will just have to skim over the explanations of the military jargon. In the end, I give her bonus points for accuracy but dock her points for the inclusions of the explanations into the storyline.