What's presented by publisher Leisure Books as a classic '70s disaster piece is actually a hard boiled, hard man action thriller! You'd think from the back copy that Colonel Malone is charged with enforcing martial law in the face of disaster, but really he's on a drunken bender through Kuna, the smallest and most fictional of the Hawaiian Islands, that just happens to intersect with a planned heist of a mob casino by the would-be revolutionaries of the Hawaiian Liberation Front ... all while that damned tsunami rushes across the Pacific at 500 miles per hour. Tyler writes with a clear eye, especially as concerns the HLF members and their doomed scheme, but the book as a whole reads like a fix-up, with the tsunami sections bolted on to push the casino plot to feature length. We get pages and pages, for example, on minor character Captain Nakamura and his impending death by tidal wave, while the actual climax is over before it's begun and several other named characters are left in limbo.
The cruelest twist of the knife involves a big, big spoiler - the big wave never arrives! Those of us with a thirst for apocalyptic destruction need look elsewhere for our fix, sadly. If you're looking for some smut though, there's a corker of a scene starting page 118!
2/4
Leisure Books, 1975
