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As an ex-special forces operator, Gore is enjoying his life as a police officer when a drunken mob boss kills his wife and three children in an automobile accident. Gore gets a huge civil settlement out of the situation as well as a price on his head from the mob. When he survives an assassination attempt a couple of years later, he decides retirement and a change of scenery will do him good. He buys a large, custom-built boat and heads to the Texas coast. Shortly after his arrival, his old Green Beret boss sets up an ambush to see if he still has what it takes to handle even more secretive work than he did before. Gore passes the test and soon runs a team from his boat, working to take down a Florida crime boss who is working with terrorists. Gore is also attempting to leave his hard-nosed assassin personality behind and embrace Christianity. He decides to lean into prayer more than bloodthirst, but when the bad guys come after him and his group, his small team is more than capable of leaving a lot of bodies cold.
There are several similarities and parallels that can be drawn to connect Hawk's novel. His protagonist provides an interesting character to counter Ian Fleming's James Bond. Both are ruggedly handsome and more than capable of overcoming their enemies with violence. However, Hawk purposely makes Gore wish he could find more peaceful ways to overcome his foes and follows a strict code of conduct when it comes to females and the power of prayer. In contrast, Bond leans into the violence and is much less cerebral when it comes to killing. He uses womanizing and heavy drinking to overcome any doubts he may have about his conduct, which are few. To find more similar characters to Gore, one could look at Dirk Pitt from Clive Cussler's novels. Still, the most similar characters and tones to those of Hawk's protagonist and his crew are likely found in the eighties television show, The A-Team. The characters in that series were former special forces soldiers who made a point of not killing the antagonists while using custom-made equipment and humor to accomplish their goals. Although Hawk's characters kill many bad guys throughout, they hint at feeling remorse and sometimes pray as they dump the bodies.
Hawk's military adventure novel is setting entertainment as its top priority. The action is fast, cinematic, and extravagant. The bad guys are numerous and incompetent, while the heroes are charismatic, inventive, and unquestionably the good guys. Everything that could go wrong does, and the heroes still find a way to make it out—lucky, battered, and with their quips intact. Despite a few grammatical errors and awkward repetitions, Hawk's prose reads quickly and easily, and he never drags down the narrative with information dumps. The narrative clearly finds joy in the action-packed deaths of so many henchmen despite the Christian remorse exhibited, and both the humor and plans for the military operations of the group are varied in quality. However, Hawk's intent never wavers as he delivers a guns-blazing, summer movie of an action novel to fans of military adventure.