Pierce Hunt has been fired by the DEA (In the previous book). He went off the rails in response to a cartel's kidnapping his daughter and her friend. Despite a successful resolution, his daughter is still seriously shook up. Doesn't help that Hunt was helped out by the daughter of the Garcia cartel's boss.

Hunt and Anna Garcia have since become an item as she makes the steady move to legitimize the Garcia's business. Some underlings, still loyal to daddy Garcia's criminal ways, don't like the direction taken by Anna and are plotting to return things to the way they were. And they have a new product. A heroin-derivative that promises performance enhancing effects. Local Florida high school football players are turning up critically incapacitated or dead. Including the star QB of the high school where Hunt's daughter attends.

Hunt and his team weren't unemployed for long. As soon as the President demanded Hunt's head (previous book), the DEA quietly hired the team as contractors. Tracing that heroin-derivative back to Afghanistan takes Hunt's team to the small villages that is the source of the unique variant of poppy. Anna is dealing with her disloyal younger brother who is trying to kill her. When it turns out that the old Garcia distribution network is where this new drug has hit Florida, the DEA then tells her to stop the subversive network or all previously promised protections will cease immediately. After Afghanistan, Hunt heads back to the US before being inserted into Venezuela before finally returning back to Tampa to help Anna deal with her brother.

Gervais' rep is that of a quality thriller/action author whose pre-literary life dealt with the military, intelligence, and law enforcement. He knows of what he writes. Earlier books of his have been reviewed here. What ensues is a highly believable and realistic presentation of the investigation and subsequent battles. Good old testosterone-based thriller. Doubt many women will pick this up. Need a suggestion for a holiday gift for the (male) reader in your life? This would be a good place to start.

Available November 2019.

Trained to Hunt by Simon Gervais
Pierce Hunt Series #2

Hard-hitting, action-packed thrill ride from beginning to end. This author holds nothing back allowing the reader insight in how things work under cover, chasing down bad guys, being on missions, the thinking of both good and bad guys and also gives us a taste of what it takes to get the job done and the sacrifices that must be made.

In book one of this series Hunt’s daughter is kidnapped and he spends most of the book doing what has to be done to bring her home. He meets a woman he loved and lost and much of his backstory is shared. In this book he is sent out to bring in a man that might have information relevant to the Black Tosca Cartel’s higher value targets that might have had something to do with his daughter’s kidnapping.

After that first hair raising beginning he is sent on a mission related to information sussed out from the captured man. One thing leads to another and Hunt ends up moving around the globe from South America to the Middle East and back to the USA with some visits to these countries made more than once. The story is told from multiple perspectives and includes a number of people but I never had trouble following the story.he st

What I liked:
* The realness of tory
* The plotting
* The action sequences
* Hunt’s relationship with those he worked with and cared about
* Really liked it from beginning to end
* Finding out who “Queen Bee” really was

What I didn’t like:
* What I was not supposed to like – the bad guys, of course.

This book ended well and the story was complete but left me wanting to read book three because I want to find out how Hunt will save his friend and who will go along with him to do so.

Thank you to NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer for the ARC – This is my honest review

5 Stars

A very fast action thriller; well written and with very good characters. As this is book two in the series, I would recommend reading the first book first, but you can still enjoy this one as a stand alone.

Black Tosca, Garcia crime syndicate these are some of the problems for Pierce Hunt. Oh, and his relationship with his daughter, ex wife and new girlfriend. Despite this he can't keep away from leaving home to hunt. Hunt people who are out to do no good. I must thank #Thomasand Mercer and #Netgalley for letting me read Trained to Hunt this wonderful action packed second installment in the series about Pierce Hunt by Simon Gervais.

The second in the series starring former Army Ranger Pierce Hunt, this high-testosterone thriller finds him on temporary duty as a contract assassin for the CIA aimed at a south American cartel with troubling connections to Afghanistan. Upping the ante is Hunta's inamorata Anna, who has inherited her late husband's business, which happens to be distributing the cartel's newest and most dangerous product - a drug that kills over a dozen teenage football players, one of whom Anna's was Anna's daughter's boyfriend. And that same young girl happens to be Hunt's own daughter's best friend..An unnecessarily convoluted web of improbable plotting confuses what's essentially a basic get- the bad-guys genre novel.

This is pretty standard thriller fare as Pierce Hunt returns as a "consultant" for the DEA with a girlfriend trying to take her crime syndicate legit. I enjoyed the previous book (Hunt Them Down), but was less impressed with Trained to Hunt. This was okay as thrillers go, but nothing that really got me excited. It ranged all over the place--Miami, Afghanistan, Valenzuela--and never seemed to establish a flow.

I received this book thru Read Now on Net Galley. This is the 1st story that I have read by this author and I enjoyed it a great deal.

The story begins with Pierce in New Orleans trying to capture a member of Black Tosca, a cartel that he was previously involved with rescuing his daughter and her friend Sophia. Through his efforts, they discovered information about a meeting in Paraguay between Jorge Ramirez and members of the Black Tosca cartel. . He was dispatched to assist CIA members in gathering information and they were able to obtain a laptop which had valuable information. Once the CIA had recovered the data from the laptop, Pierce was then sent to Afghanistan to locate drug labs. During his search, he discovered that the labs had been shut down earlier and meeting up with a source from a prior adventure, he learned about Operation Butterfly.

Operation Butterfly was a program being run by General Peraza who was located in Venezuela. This had Pierce then traveling to Venezuela to recover data from a flash drive.

All of the activities seemed to tie back to Pierce's girlfriend, Anna, who was attempting to divest the activities of the Garcia Family. There was a great deal of action involving this effort.

If you want to find out how Pierce handled this, then I recommend that you read the book. The ending is well worth it.

From a NETGALLEY ARC copy

If Simon says "Read" you should consider it. 2 books down and the action is still hopping throughout. I am enjoying the series.

This book was not as good as the first book in the series. The action scenes were excellent but the development of the subject matter did not hold my interest. I really like the protagonist, and I will read other books in the series.

Drug cartels, DEA, football; South America, Asia, Miami; families, broken families, back-stabbing families—all the ingredients in this fast-paced action thriller from Simon Gervais. Anna is trying to get her family out of the drug business, but others would rather take over. Boyfriend/DEA contractor Pierce Hunt comes to the rescue.

This was OK. It had its moments, but it was a little dark for me and seemed over-written at times. Some of the characters were fully formed, but much of the dialog was not. Plenty of action for those fans. Probably enjoyed it less since I didn't read the previous book.

I really appreciate the comp copy for an honest review!!

“Trained to Hunt” has my mind spinning with a dilemma, which is how to present an honest and fair review of a novel I struggled to finish. The second book in Simon Gervais’ Pierce Hunt series is an action-adventure thriller that finds Hunt and his buddy Carter in Venezuela and Afghanistan. Since I didn’t read the first book of the series some vital information was either missing or the author assumed all readers of the second in a series had read the first book. Not true. It took me all the way to Chapter 25 before the author revealed Leila’s age. I was trying to get a bead on her level of brattiness and age should be factored in and acknowledged. Pierce Hunt is a complex tortured soul who can kill with swift brutality and folds into a sniveling mass of humanity when faced with the possibility of disappointing his daughter, yet again.

The plot is overlong and especially brutal in its depiction of stereotypical South American revolutionary military and paramilitary forces of drug cartels, crime lords, corrupt politicians, and your run-of-the-mill bad guys. The dialogue frequently lacks authenticity, as do some of the situations. That said, I did get caught up in a few of the intense fire-fighting scenes. From a grammatical standpoint Gervais needs to learn how to avoid the dangers of “dangling construction”. All told, “Trained to Hunt” is an okay read, sure to be adored by those looking for action-adventure types but somewhat lacking for those with higher expectations. Three stars.
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