The Thieves of Legend

This is the first of Doetsch’s books reviewed in the blog, his eighth novel and the four in his “Thieves” series about Michael St. Pierre. No doubt that this is an action-packed thriller, literally starting from the first page. From that perspective, it was entertaining. Maybe it’s because I jumped into the fourth book rather than working my way through the “Thieves” series in order, but the action seemed to get so far ahead of the character development that I found the various characters to be caricatures rather than persons that I could care about. The hyper action and frequent alliance-shifting made it hard for this reader to suspend reality testing enough to believe or get excited and worried about what was happening. At times, the novel felt like an early Clive Cussler novel, but on steroids – hypertrophied, too much. I nearly abandoned the book 70 pages from the end, but I kept going until I had finished reading the ridiculous melodramatic ending.