Cheesiest Thrillers you've read?

[willbo]

Andy Weir's latest book Project Hail Mary has some pretty cheesy dialogue, so much so I struggled reading it. And I know Matthew Reilly is pretty notorious (his books are hilarious IMO). Such as having his Australian heroes thwart Americans at every turn.
I haven't read it, but I've heard Michael Crichton's Prey is a bit of a howler, having the nanobot-cloud villain driving a car and stuff.

[SweetPomPom]

I really enjoyed Hail Mary, it was completely transparent about what it wanted to be but it did it very well.

[Keebleman]

A couple of years ago for my birthday a friend bought me Crisis, a novel by Frank Gardner, the BBC's disabled foreign correspondent.  It was his attempt to create a series in the Bond/Reacher mould and it was execrable, a wholly cynical exercise entirely without wit, tension or surprise.  I couldn't finish it, so conceivably it got better after the point where I gave up, but I truly doubt it.

[13 schoolyards]

I've always had a soft spot for the extremely demented Cain by James Byron Huggins:

When the CIA took Cain's lifeless body from the ground, they intended to create the perfect soldier. Piece by piece, they rebuilt his soulless flesh and transformed it. A team of scientists outfitted him with the most powerful muscles and the deadliest weapons that the generals could ever have wished for. Alive, Cain had been their deadliest killer; dead, he became their greatest nightmare. When Cain awakes, he is transformed: he has become the ultimate predator. His body is now inhabited by a spirit that's been wandering the earth for millennia - one of the crown princes of hell. The only force that can stop him is made up of three tragically flawed mortals - a soldier who's lost his family to a terrorist's bullets, a priest who's lost his faith, and the beautiful young scientist who created this modern Frankenstein. Together, though, they form an unstoppable team who will fight the forces of hell itself to save themselves and humankind.

The idea of the CIA creating the ultimate super-solider Frankenstein-style only to have it instantly possessed by Satan is pretty cool, though Satan's big final speech is a complete rip-off of Rutger Hauer's final speech from Blade Runner, so I guess we can add plagiarism to the Devil's evil deeds

[madhair60]

laughed out loud at the above.

please read Black Angel by Graham Masterton, cheers

[Famous Mortimer]

I've always had a soft spot for the extremely demented Cain by James Byron Huggins

That's going on my library waiting list. Nice!

[willbo]

That's going on my library waiting list. Nice!

Sounds like the kind of thing that may be lost to modern libraries...

[Famous Mortimer]

Sounds like the kind of thing that may be lost to modern libraries...

Dammit, my local library only has it as an ebook, but it gives me an excuse to fiddle with my old Kindle again.

[crispybacon]

"This United State" by Colin Forbes, from his lengthy Tweed series of thrillers. He settled into his formula a few books into the series, and I used to find them hopelessly addictive. Like the famous five, his characters never got older, despite the series spanning decades, and I'm sure his leading female character was described as "an attractive brunette" wearing a "pussy bow blouse" in nearly every book.
This one sticks out in my mind from the others because of the exceptionally ludicrous finale.

I have read and enjoyed Graham Masterton's "Black Angel" btw, so should probably give some of the other books in this thread a try.

[Bennett Brauer]

You can't go wrong with anything that follows Jeffrey Archer's Guide to Thriller Writing, especially his examples of the ideal opening and closing sentences.

'Damn your bloody guts,' said Fraser, the gun still smouldering.
...
'Funny old world,' thought Fraser, throwing down his automatic.

'To kill fifty VIPs in the space of five hours,' snarled Jackson, 'that's your task, Hamilton.'
...
Hamilton looked steely. 'I guess there are some things in this life we're just not meant to know,' he said thoughtfully.

'I've just about had all I can take of this,' barked Maxwell while the blood spurted out of the fifty-three bullet holes in his chest.
...
'I've been thinking,' exclaimed Maxwell as her blue eyes stared at him longingly. 'Two and two don't always make four, you know.'

'I'll kill anything that moves,' said KGB double-agent Yuri Yurimov, the torchlight sparkling in his two false eyes.
...
The corpse of Yurimov at last lay at his feet, a grotesque rag doll, useless and outworn. Burton thought long and hard. 'The past is the past - we must live for the present - and for the future as well.'

[Mobius]

Those can't be real

[willbo]

I read the first chapter of one of those "James Patterson branded but by another author" ones recently. The hero was some former agent who is now in security, and in the opening he's been put in charge of security of a sports stadium. So to test the current staff he pretends to be a terrorist so they arrest him. When they take him to the chief of security, he just calmly incapacitates them all, while telling them what they did wrong and sloppy, then he gets the chief in a thumb-lock while informing him he's his new boss. The guy is so hyper competent he made Jack Reacher look like Homer Simpson.

[Keebleman]

I work in security and if any undercover hero had to tell the shower that is my team what we had done "wrong and sloppy" on any given day it would fill a whole volume by itself.

It wouldn't take any great skill to incapacitate them either.  Most are barely capacitated to begin with.

[Dr Rock]

[Vodkafone]

A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away by Christopher Brookmyre. A poor book, his hot take appears to be that terrorists, right, are not, on the whole, the loveliest of people.

There's also a too-long denouement fight scene with pages of 'and then he did this, and so he moved over there, but then the other one did that' and I just completely lost track of who was where and doing what.

[Mister Six]

I haven't read it get, but I won a Kindle copy of "The Trade Experiment" (book 2 of The China Affairs) by Brad Good on Goodreads. I am clearly the wrong audience for it, but when I read the summary below (my bold) I couldn't resist...

Jack Gold has done the impossible: he has penetrated the China's Control Center and broadcast a message of both personal and economic freedom to the country's 1.4 billion citizens. With a new president and an opening of the information that citizens have access to, Jack hopes that China will transform into the country he has always known it can be.

But change does not come easily and Jack finds his newfound fame difficult to deal with, especially when his main focus now is on trying to repair the damage to his relationship with Jojo.

China isn't done with Jack yet, though, and Jojo's father, Wang Yang, the new head of state in China, needs Jack's help in carving out a new trade deal that is acceptable to both China and the United States. It's a staggeringly tall order, but it is just the sort of challenge Jack could never turn down, no matter the cost to his personal well-being.

Yet his involvement stokes angers no one had anticipated, putting both Jack's life and his relationship with Jojo in danger. From Beijing to DC, from Vegas to Cabo, Jack is up against a myriad of forces that want nothing more than to see him fail and will go to extreme lengths to ensure that happens.

Written by Brad Good, who started living and working in the People's Republic of China in 1988, THE CHINA AFFAIRS is a series of four novels that take place in China. Good brings rare on-the-ground knowledge of contemporary Chinese political, social, and cultural issues, and associated international affairs.

Jack Gold is an American in China who is recruited by an Israeli agent to penetrate the Control Center, China's broadcasting hub. (Book 1) Next, at great personal threat, China and the United States solicit his leadership in creating a new trade deal between the countries. (Book 2) Jack is then recruited by the President of China, with the use of artificial intelligence, to transform China and the lives of its citizens. (Book 3) After China elects a new president who returns the country to Communism, the President of the United States calls on Jack to lead a dangerous plan to fight back. (Book 4)

Love the description of book 4, in which our hero must "fight back" because China has exercised its newfound democracy by choosing a president the US doesn't like.

[Keebleman]

I suppose Jack Gold's work with Quentin Crisp must come in Book 5.

[PlanktonSideburns]

lost his family to a terrorist's bullets

Perfect turn off phrase 👌