QUICK SHOTS: Seven Days to Disaster by Jonas (Paul Glen Neuman) Flagg and Geoffrey Graves

Major is one of my favorite paperback publishers. As a publisher they always seemed to make offbeat choices though, I don't know if it was deliberate or just lack of oversight, but out of them you get series like Kirby Carr's Hitman, or attempted series like Joseph Gillman's "Operation Nazi- USA." So, who knows sometimes being loose and goofy is an asset. 

That brings us to "Seven Days to Disaster" by Jonas Flagg and Geoffery Graves. Jonas Flagg was really Paul Glen Neuman who also worked on "Black Eagles," "They Call Me the Mercenary" and "The Phoenix Force." He has a handy-dandy website where you can find out that this was indeed planned to be another series for Manor, but the folded before that could happen, though there are two other books already written. I couldn't track much down about Geoffrey Graves though.

Hadrian Whipp (love it) is our hero. He works for one of those shadowy peacekeeping/crime-busting outfits who need someone with the skill and guts to tackle the dangerous problems without the fuss of the legal system. The disaster in "Seven Days to Disaster" is a hidden atomic bomb in L.A. and Whipp is sent down to take care of it. 

In a refreshing change of pace, the villains on the novel aren't the cookie-cutter Bond-ish villians. No, just regular working stiff who's after losing a government contract decide that the best course of action is to highjack plutonium and ransom Los Angles. Those whacky bad guys. For their trouble they get Whipp on their tail and what that leads to lots of murders, car chases, colorful side characters, explosions and the like. Whipp is an interesting lead, he's a smart-ass but he also REALLY likes his job shooting bad guys, imagine a lighter Richard Camellion, which is funny because also on his website Neuman says that he wrote a screenplay for a "Death Merchant" movie. Now that's something I'd like to see.

For all the murders and derring-do this is a pretty light novel with nice humor, and it works to its advantage, the pages breeze by. There's a little too much backstory for random characters and asides, which is pretty common for an early book. I would have preferred to spend more time with Whipp then some of the rest. That being said I had a lot of fun with it, it's not reinventing the wheel but takes it for a pleasantly bloody turn.