FWIW, I just finished
Ghost Fleet. It was OK, but it's no Red Storm Rising. AFAIK, this is Singer and Cole's first crack at fiction, and it shows. Fairly predictable (formulaic?) story arc with characters that lacked any real complexity or interesting attributes the reader could connect with. As a point of comparison, I always felt intellectually and emotionally invested in the Jack Ryan/Jim Greer/John Clark characters, but not so much with those in Ghost Fleet. The book is just too short to really flesh out much of anything. No surprises, no plot twists, just kind of bland. The military action sequences were interesting, but you could tell it was written by guys with no first hand experience. Nothing too glaring, but a lot of the lingo and dialogue was just a bit off.
Another annoyance was that the story was full of "we told you so" moments. "Remember when we told you that our military is overly reliant on networks/technology/satellites/GPS, etc? Well, guess what, it came back to bite us in the story." "Remember when we said we shouldn't buy microchips from China and put them in our military equipment? Well, guess what..." Climate change, blurred gender roles/same sex relationships, cybercrime, etcetera, ad nauseum - you get the picture.
I felt like every other page greeted me with a vision of Eddie Murphy from Coming to America - wagging his finger at me and saying "ahh haa!"
Finally, this book has so many references to technology and hardware that the authors decided to use end notes with hyperlinks. While this was initially interesting, it became a distraction from the flow of the story and fueled my (our culture's) short attention span and need for constant stream of novelty.
All in all, not a bad read, but knowing what I know now, I would have placed it pretty far down on my ever-expanding reading list. Honestly, the idea of another Red Storm Rising was what motived me to buy it. If you go into it with a similar mindset, prepare to be disappointed.
