All I can say is thank goodness that one is over.

The Aurora Australis is a luxury cruise ship heading to Antarctica. Aboard, she has a veritable who's who of passengers, including a famous singer, her equally famous actor boyfriend, a senator and a member of the House. Trident Force (a special black ops team) hears rumors that she may be a terrorist target, but they are only rumors. The matter will have to be investigated before a black ops teams blindly storms the vessel.

The writing is competent, but that's as far as I would take it. On the upside, things are clearly described. There is plenty of military slang and naval lingo used, and that made me feel like the author knew what he is talking about. Yet there isn't so much of it that it made the book unintelligible to a layman like me.

On the downside (this list is much longer) the characters aren't even two-dimensional. They are so forgettable that I couldn't remember any of the characters when they were mentioned by name. I had to have some sort of description of what they were doing to remember who was who. Thinking about it, I don't remember any of the characters having any sort of physical description at all. What was their hair color? Eye color? Were they short, tall, lanky, built? I dunno. And the dialog was really mostly just exposition with quotation marks around it.

The biggest sin of what should have been a fun, schlocky military action book is the lack of action. Honestly, the book is tedious to read through. The writing just does not convey any real tension or suspense. Its not exciting, its not thrilling, its not even particularly interesting. I'm tempted to say that the writing has no personality whatsoever. Even when something that should have been exciting does happen (a chase scene between two inflatable watercraft over the rough, frigid seas near Antarctica) the description has a cold, clinical detachment.

Also, there are six hundred passengers aboard the vessel, but we never hear about more than seven or so. I don't expect to follow all six hundred, but the author was not good at showing the number of passengers. In fact, the author really wasn't good at showing anything. It was all tell, tell, tell.

I was expecting to get a silly, action-packed tale of Trident Force frog-men creeping aboard a luxury vessel before engaging in firefights with swarthy terrorists. You know, the written equivalent of an '80's action movie, oozing testosterone and making me feel slightly guilty about liking it so much. What I got read more like a very slow and boring episode of NCIS, without the personality. Chuck Norris needs to roundhouse kick this one overboard. Awful. ( )