Matthew Reilly

[FeralByNature]

Has anyone here read any of Matthew Reilly's books? Basically think Expendables but US Marines rather than mercenaries, and think twice the pace, vicious animals wanting to kill you as well as the bad guys.

Here's a word for word extract from Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves:

His eyes darted upward, searching the sky. His slow-moving cable car would be an easy target for a pair of gunships—
A savage hail of bullets slammed into the cable car, hitting it all over, shattering its windows and an Osprey shoomed by overhead.
Everyone ducked below the windowline, except for Baba, who hefted his Kord and loosed a violent burst in reply. The big gun’s supersized rounds razed the entire left side of the Osprey, sending one of its gunners sailing down into the water far below. The Osprey’s left-side engine was also hit and it flared with flames and started belching thick black smoke and peeled away as the second V-22 took its place and unleashed its own rain of gunfire, but at that moment the bullet-riddled and now windowless cable car entered the upper terminal, mercifully moving out of the line of fire.
Crouched below the windowline, Schofield’s face was now set, his jaw clenched. The Lord of Anarchy had got inside his head but he wasn’t going to let it show.
‘You talk a good game, asshole,’ he said softly into his Army of Thieves mike, ‘and you’re obviously connected to be able to get all this information. But now I know something about you: you wouldn’t be saying all this if you weren’t worried about me. And guess what?’
The cable car lurched to a halt beside the terminal’s platform.
‘I just landed on your island.’
Schofield clicked off the earpiece/mike and raced out of the cable car, guns up, setting foot for the first time on Dragon Island.

Admittedly, I'm an addict. Yes, you could rip it apart and say he writes like someone that writes fanfiction, or that it's ridiculously stupid etc, but that's the fun. You're barely introduced to the characters before they're thrown in the deep end, there's no breaks between action scenes such as in a Clancy novel, and you can read them in a couple of hours. Basically, 'airport fiction.' There's also somewhat bad jokes, and a 6'4 woman with a shaved head whose call-sign is 'Mother', which doesn't exactly stand for any motherly qualities she might have, rather a longer word that involves the F-bomb (Oh come on. That's a real call-sign.)