First things first – Jay S Bell’s debut novel Welcome to Cottonmouth is a ridiculous, over-the-top book based on a far-fetched premise. But for all of those reasons it is also an enjoyable action thriller. Cottonmouth is a small Texas town where former secret agents are retired and kept in a form of witness protection. They are a United Nations of professional killers living ordinary lives as mechanics, hotel managers and short order cooks. They may be retired but it turns out that they can spring into action when needed.
The centre of this little gang is Devlin Mahoney, former US spy and survivor or a Serbian torture prison and now in charge of the Cottonmouth Motel. Mahoney not only does not do well with authority but he feels like he still owes the world for all of the bad that he has done. So when a woman and child turn up at his hotel and are threatened by a couple of thugs Devlin springs into wise-cracking action to protect them. Only it turns out the thugs are in the employ of a nasty, well connected criminal who sends increasingly more dangerous people to retrieve his “property”.
Welcome to Cottonmouth opens with an action scene and then proceeds to top that with a series of escalating set pieces with more enemies and more guns. On Devlin’s side is a ragtag bunch of ex-agents – including Russian sniper, Korean soldier, Israeli undercover agent, British explosives expert and German assassin. They take a fair amount of punishment but it is hard to keep them down.
This is one of those books that is full of “toys” – cars, guns, explosives – all lovingly described in passages like this:
He strapped a NOD- night optical device – over his head, but he left the goggles up and off. He then connected up a PRC-126 two way radio with an earwig and throat mic… From his duffel, he removed an FN SCAR 17 automatic rifle, chambered in 5.56x45mm NATO.
But it is fairly easy to just blip over these parts. The rest is fast moving, high octane, explosive (literally) multi-pov, well written action scenes. So that as long as readers come to Welcome to Cottonmouth ready to suspend your disbelief and just enjoy the action they are likely to have a good time.
Welcome to Cottonmouth by Jay S Bell
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