This is book 10 of the "The Corps" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Wheesh; number 9 in his marine series. Killer McCoy and friends take on the Korean war.

At least as a standalone, this one is actually back to good form, which I was starting to despair of. There are still the occasional annoying sloppy errors—the story of Ernie meeting McCoy is given wrong in this volume, for example. But not as many of them, nor as significant, and the story hangs together for a change.

It's funny to read about the intelligence-gathering operation at Socho-Ri without MacMillan and with Ken McCoy, though. The origin of the diesel engines in the junk is explained differently. Come to think of it, it had dual engines in the other books, didn't it? Another annoying sloppy error.

And for the first time we have one of the female characters die in the war. Pick's fiance. In a transport plane crash, the day before he's rescued, having been shot down 77 days earlier doing his locomotive shooting thing.

And it has a large color photo of the author on the dust jacket; previously he seems to have been pretty reclusive. I worry about people who wear a necktie when they don't have to, and about people who smoke cigars without removing the band, though.