The Tin Man (Patrick McLanahan Series #7)

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
In his ten New York Times bestselling novels, Dale Brown has pitted men and technology against impossible odds, in stories so vivid and authentic you feel part of the action. Now the undisputed master of military suspense brings back aerial combat expert Patrick McLanahan — this time at the center of an undeclared war exploding on the streets of America.

Some call him a terrorist. Others call him a vigilante hero. Dressed in carbon-filament stronger-than-steel protective armor, a mysterious figure the public has dubbed the Tin Man roams the urban landscape of Sacramento, California, on a search-and-destroy mission. Some want him dead, but others want the truth of who he is.

He's Patrick McLanahan, the nation's most heroic aerial warrior, now retired, who for 15 years risked his life for his country in the U.S. military. He is the civilian director of scientific development for a high-tech company specializing in strategic devices for the armed forces, his workplace the laboratory, not the cockpit. But when his rookie-cop brother is injured in a shootout following a bank robbery, McLanahan becomes a one-man army. The enemy is within, on the streets of his own country, and he is the avenger. His targets are international terrorist turned drug lord Gregory Townsend and his Aryan Brigade, who are masterminding the violence taking over the city.

Townsend and the Brigade, out to destroy government authority in pursuit of their racist ideology, fear nothing. But there's one thing they haven't counted on.

The Tin Man.

Wherever he goes, McLanahan's swift andviolentjustice overpowers the enemy — but at a price. Innocent lives are put in jeopardy whenever he appears, because the police lose tactical control. The more he tests the limits of his technological power — and his courage — the more he is forced to face the implications of what he is doing. Has his passion for revenge taken him over the line? Is his personal war part of the solution to the violent crime sweeping the country, or is it part of the problem?

In Patrick McLanahan, a patriot become renegade, Dale Brown has given us a hero who must ultimately decide between his own ability to single-handedly take on the forces of violence and the power of established laws to secure a peaceful society. Authoritative in its descriptions of cutting-edge technology and dazzling in its portrayal of life on the streets of America's cities, THE TIN MAN is a novel of consummate suspense.

USA Today

[Dale Brown] has the techno-thriller genre down cold.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The tag line "This time it's personal" comes to mind in Brown's 11th techno-thriller (after Fatal Terrain). Instead of foreign countries and the threat of WWIII, international terrorism hits the streets of Sacramento, Calif., in the form of Gregory Townsend, who is apparently out to unite California's motorcycle gangs and corner the amphetamine market. His one mistake is wounding the brother of Brown's series hero, veteran Patrick McLanahan, during the robbery of a mall. The resulting mayhem is a tribute to Brown's storytelling abilities; it's an unlikely but successful mix of a revenge plot, a meditation on vigilante justice and a superhero-origin story. McLanahan becomes a one-man army, known as the Tin Man, with the help of some cutting-edge technology from his current employer, a defense contractor. It turns out that Townsend's ultimate aims are not quite what they appear to be; Brown's intentions are just as slippery. While the dark side of vigilante justice has haunted pulp fiction heroes like the Avenger and comic book heroes from Batman to the Punisher, it's a rarity in thriller fiction, which usually likes to keep things black and white and far from home. Brown does the opposite in this novelhe gives this modern Batman a hard-edged twist and a dose of techno-reality, and through a neat plot twist shows how the power to survive and to commit violence is both painful and seductive. Bottom line, it's a page-turning start to a fresh new direction for both Brown and McLanahan. And now that the Tin Man is part of Brown's universe, it will be interesting to see what Brown makes of him. Major ad/promo; simultaneous BBD Audio. (May)

Library Journal

Brown technohero Patrick McLanahan vs. the Aryan Brigade.

Kirkus Reviews

Once more featuring retired USAF Colonel Patrick McLanahan, last seen helping independence-seeking Taiwan turn the tide of battle against the Peoples Republic of China (Fatal Terrain, 1997), bestseller Brown's first rocket-fueled Bantam title should lift off nicely, especially now that McLanahan—civilian director of a high-tech company making cutting-edge advancements in strategic devices for the armed forces—has become a superhumanly powerful vigilante called þThe Tin Man.þ He uses his miraculous new devices to save his brother, a rookie cop in Sacramento, who has been wounded in a bank-robbery shootout masterminded by the Aryan Brigade. Although Brown's electro-reactive collinear prose style hangs on the most effective distribution of parallel ideas per paragraph, the racing methamphetamine lift of his futuristic hardware plot remains, well, really cool.