I just finished reading Stalking The Red Bear, and I'm shocked at how painfully average the whole thing was. It's mildly interesting, and is mercifully free of technical errors, but it doesn't deliver on it's promise of being a gripping thriller. There's little character development, a lot of historical exposition, but as Cold War submarine stories go, a lot of the material in Blind Man's Bluff is so much better. I never got the impression in Stalking The Red Bear that the Blackfin was in any danger, and most of the book consists of the boat going around the Barents Sea, spying on Russian exercises, and collecting intelligence.
I think the author's rather stale writing style hurts the book more than it's subject matter. I bought it for $10, but I'd only recommend it if you stumbled across a copy at Salvation Army.
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