My Review of the Book, Edge of Battle, by Dale Brown

Dale Brown has written some great novels over the years, but unfortunately this isn't one of them. Edge of Battle is such a bad book, in my opinion, that its only saving grace is that it is a quick read.

The plot of this book is that terrorists have infiltrated the US-Mexican border and as a result of that there are calls to have the border violated, a Mexican militant named "Commandante Veracruz" calls for rebellion in the southwest, and Mexico has a female president with a scheming interior minister who is working with the Russian terrorists.

This book brings back Jason Richter and the military units of CIDs (Cybernetic Infantry Devices) are deployed to stem the tide of illegal immigration and stop the terrorists. This is where it gets bad. Somehow, this one military unit is supposed to patrol the entire US-Mexican border and stop millions from crossing.

The action heats up with a Mexican shoot down of a civilian helicopter, the CIDs accidentally killing some of the illegal immigrants and the interior minister overthrowing the Mexican president to then get killed a few moments later by the terrorists.

Dale Brown relies heavily on his fictional advances in technology to move the story along. Normally this involved some high tech bomber that can take on hundreds of fighters and always comes out undamaged. Mr. Brown used to be in the Air Force so he's a bit biased towards them. In this instance though, it's almost as if Mr. Brown expects you suspend your belief in physics with these new solders. He has them flying around with superhuman strength and are able to stop all sorts of high explosives.

This book has a predictable ending. The terrorists end up losing, the good guys stop the bad Mexicans; everyone's happy. The final end result, which would never happen in real life, was that Mexican citizens were now able to travel back and forth over the border freely provided they ingest a tracking pill.

In my opinion, this is his worst book yet. This scenario is 100% implausible and the fact that he relies on science fiction like weapons to advance the plot shows that his writing is going down in recent years. The characters are weak and not memorable at all. The bad guys are predictable and scripted as well.

I would not recommend this book at all. The only way one could read this book would be on a flight or if you're just bored.

Overall grade: F.