REVIEW: PRIMAL Mirza by Jack Silkstone
Publishing information: Kindle
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services; 22 May 15
ASIN: B00KIAMGDQ
Copy: Out of Pocket
Reviewer: Tyson
Amazon
Synopsis: "PRIMAL Mirza is a prequel in the PRIMAL series. It reveals the back-story of Mirza Mansoor, a former Indian Special Forces soldier turned PRIMAL operative. It is approximately 150 pages long.
The year is 1999 and tensions between Pakistan and India are at breaking point. When critical intelligence prompts a cross border raid Indian Para Commandos arrive too late to prevent the deployment of a team of Lashkar terrorists. Mirza Mansoor, a Special Group operative and his partner Himesh Arjun, are all that stands between highly trained jihadists and their sinister objectives. As they track their quarry from the mountains of Kashmir to India’s capital they realize that terrorism is not the only threat they face. In the poverty-stricken slums of New Delhi crime and terror have free reign, greed is king, life is cheap, and heroes are few and far between.
This story is set just after the Kargil war between India and Pakistan, the closest these two nuclear-armed states have come to full-scale conflict. Having been defeated at Kargil, ISI and terrorist proxies escalated operations against India, which culminated in the 2008 Mumbai attack, resulting in over 600 casualties. During this time, the NSG, India’s lead counter-terrorism response unit, was severely under-resourced and -equipped. It’s in this setting of extreme contrasts, corruption, and terrorist threat that I’ve crafted a backstory for one of PRIMAL’s favorite characters."
It has been awhile since I last read Silkstone's PRIMAL series, they are action-paced and quick reads that always seem to satisfy my needs when I want to read a military thriller. This time Silkstone has decided to provide readers with a little more insight into how one of his characters, Mirza Mansoor, was forged into the warrior he has become.
The book starts out by showing that Mirza isn't a cold-hearted warrior, that he cares for the men around him and because of this compassion, he finds himself being recruited for a very secretive group within India's special forces. Once he joins this task force he is on the hunt for terrorists coming from Pakistan to cause death and destruction on India's population.
While I like the PRIMAL series, Mirza has to be the weakest book in the series as not much insight is gained on Mirza. It doesn't feel like a PRIMAL book because it is almost a detective story where Mirza and his partner are chasing down the suspects and always one step behind until the final moments when everything comes together. We never really see him as he is written in the other PRIMAL books and we gain no insight into why he left his military career and joined PRIMAL. While it is a prequel of sorts it never really gives us much beyond how he was inducted into the special forces and how he did in one of his early missions. Beyond that it is a very straight forward story that has all the markings of Silkstone.
I would have loved to have learned Mirza's motivation for leaving his country's military and joining PRIMAL but instead we get a very short action story featuring a PRIMAL operative. Not what I was expecting.
Overall 6.5/10
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