The Polaris Protocol

Taskforce operators Pike Logan and Jennifer Cahill are used to putting their lives at risk, but in The Polaris Protocol it’s Jennifer’s brother and countless more innocents who face unfathomable violence and bloodshed.

Pike and Jennifer are in Turkmenistan with the Taskforce—a top-secret anti-terrorist unit that operates outside US law—when Jennifer gets a call from her brother, Jack. Working on an investigative report into the Mexican drug cartels, Jack Cahill has unknowingly gotten caught between two rival groups. His desperate call to his sister is his last before he’s kidnapped.

In their efforts to rescue Jack, Pike and Jennifer uncover a plot much more insidious than illegal drug trafficking—the cartel that put a target on Jack’s back has discovered a GPS hack with the power to effectively debilitate the United States. The hack allows a user to send false GPS signals, making it possible to manipulate everything from traffic signals and banking wire transfers to cruise missiles, but only while the system’s loophole remains in place.

With the GPS hack about to be exploited and Jack’s life at stake, Jennifer and Pike must find a way to infiltrate the cartel’s inner circle and eliminate the impending threat. The price of failure, for both the Taskforce and the country, is higher than ever

I received this book for free from in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Review by Travis Starnes

The Polaris Protocol is the 4^th book in the Pike Logan series, not counting the large number of short stories Taylor has put out, and has Pike and Jennifer headed south of the border to stop a plan to interfere with the GPS infrastructure while trying to rescue Jennifer’s brother from the hands of the Cartels.  If that sounds like a lot of stuff happening in one book, it is.  But it also works.

This is the first book I have read in this series and Taylor does really good job onboarding new readers before setting off on high adventure.  The prolog to the book has Pike and Jennifer, and the rest of the taskforce team, finishing up a mission.  Much like the start to a James Bond film this works really well as a device to introduce the characters and give a sense of their personalities and yet have something fun to read for readers who are already familiar with the series.  By the time the story started really going I had a strong sense of the characters and was ready for the story to get going.

The story itself is a bit convoluted.  It feels like a couple of different stories that Taylor wanted to tell that were meshed together.  Not that the book doesn’t work, because the stories are interconnected enough not to feel arbitrary or weird, but there are a lot of threads going on and it can get a bit much at times.

The main problem this creates is a lot of characters to focus on.  Taylor tries to do a thorough job introducing a character and their personality, which is fine until that character gets bumped off.  Then it feels like a bit of a waste of time reading all about a guy who isn’t around 30 pages later.

Still this book is well paced and exciting.  The action is very well described and this is some of the best small unit action I have read in a thriller in some time.  Fans of thrillers and adventure books should check this out.  If you haven’t read the previous books it won’t keep you from enjoying this, although it has made me go and pick up the first title in the series because I am ready for some more Pike.