Leave your thoughts, comments and reviews on The Hardy Boys Casefiles #65 Operation: Phoenix #2: No Mercy here.
Just read this book and I loved it. 8) One of the best Casefiles I've read.
No Mercy is a fitting title for this book as it's really reflective of both the villians that The Hardy Boys are fighting (in a literal sense) and for The Hardy Boys themselves in a metaphorical sense. The Hardy Boys are on a personal quest for vengeance in this book so that intensifies the importance of their investigation. And of course, they are still caught up in the underground work they're doing, trying to bring the Phoenix group to justice.
This entire trilogy of books is awesome- one of my favorites. The books with the highest stakes can be a big gamble but it seems like they usually pay off pretty well as it adds something new to the mix and makes it very suspenseful and action-packed for fans.
I remember that even though I had first read all three books around 1995, for a few years after that I was only able too read this book and the next one since we had moved from place where a library had all three too where the library had only the last two (and when I tried too order in the trilogy to buy, it turned out that #1 and 3 had gone out of print and only No Mercy was still in print). So for many years, for me, "No Mercy" was the first book in the trilogy that I read.
Plus for many years "No Mercy" was the only book of he trilogy still in print, since it didn't go out of print till 2004, while the other two books had hit the out of print listings during the summer of 1998.
I just read the first 5 chapters today, and boy, did the author every make you think that the Hardy's were either going to be knocked down to just one...Frank or Joe!
You know, re-reading the story this time I'm surprised at how many times the author had Frank and Joe get into yelling matches over stuff---and it's something which you don't normally see in the boys, and I like how the author is playing up Frank's line from he end of Chapter 1 where Frank says that this time it is personal. "No Mercy" is almost like the Hardy Boys version of the James Bond film "Licence To Kill", where Bond went on a personal mission, away from MI6. In "No Mercy" the author is really giving you that sense of hurt that the Hardy's are feeling.
Oh yeah- No Mercy is definitely one of the most emotionally intense Hardy Boys Casefiles books.