Plutonium Nightmare

Contrary to popular belief the time for prose heroes did not end in the 1950's when FBI Agent Dan Fowler and the Masked Rider headed off into the sunset to join Doc and the others. True, the Independent Operator seemed unwelcome in the paranoid McCarthy era. Some went even deeper undercover to work. Some retired to start families.The time is the spring of 1980. A shadowy figure known only as 'The Man' carried out a raid on the experimental breeder reactor at the Hardin Nuclear Power...
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Contrary to popular belief the time for prose heroes did not end in the 1950's when FBI Agent Dan Fowler and the Masked Rider headed off into the sunset to join Doc and the others. True, the Independent Operator seemed unwelcome in the paranoid McCarthy era. Some went even deeper undercover to work. Some retired to start families.The time is the spring of 1980. A shadowy figure known only as 'The Man' carried out a raid on the experimental breeder reactor at the Hardin Nuclear Power Plant. He planned for every possible contingency, to include leading the police around in circles. He paid off his hired muscle, the H-8's (or Hates) with an atomic bomb made from the loot. 'The Man' prepares to auction off seventy kilos of plutonium enriched nuclear fuel, secure in the belief that he has covered every angle.'The Man' has never heard of the Voice, first of a new generation of Independent Operators. Wearing an assortment of faces, the Voice deals himself into the game. Using his father's gas gun, his own custom throwing knives and a lot of raw firepower, the Voice will do anything necessary to put the radioactive genie back in the bottle.----------------About Plutonium Nightmare Ron Fortier, New Pulp writer and publisher, said, in part:Over the years, many pulp writers have toyed with the idea of what a second generation of heroes would have been like. Take some of the old classic guys like the Shadow or Doc Savage and then imagine them settling down to raise a family. What kind of people would their sons and daughters have been? And more importantly, would they have followed in their parent's footsteps and become crime-fighters too?This book attempts to answer that question in that it introduces a disguise-artist-weapons expert hero who is clearly supposed to be the son of 1930s super spy, Secret Agent X. And in that vein, it works exceedingly well. A mad villain has stolen 70 kilos of plutonium rich nuclear fuel and is going to blackmail the city for millions. If his demands are not met, he will release the lethal stuff via a dirty bomb that will contaminate thousands of people.Enter the mysterious, no-face hero known by the police and public only as The Voice. Once again the pulse-pounding beat of classic pulp adventures is sounded, only this time in a more modern setting. And it all works. Roberts obviously knows pulps and captures their break-neck pacing perfectly, while at the same time adding in a heavy doses of bloody, shoot-em-up action.