Review: “Operation Norway,” William Meikle

Pros: Very satisfying
Cons: …
Rating: 5 out of 5

William Meikle’s Operation Norway (S-Squad Book 7) tackles a new monster in this wonderful military-vs.-monsters series: the mountain troll of Norway! Just a reminder, so far the S-Squad has faced giant undersea isopods, Nazi ice zombies and UFOs, giant and aggressive resurrected ancient animals, giant Amazonian snake-shifters, and giant spiders in an archaeological site. This time, the squad is sent to check out a joint British and Norwegian research base that was active from 1949-1951. The site was abandoned overnight, and it more or less froze over. Now that the site is thawing out (presumably due to climate change) the military wants the base sanitized. And no wonder, too: they were working on a super-soldier project that went horribly wrong. When the squad blows up a cavern, something gets loose and comes after our heroes. And it turns out the project may not be as defunct as the British think it is.

Captain John Banks is still having his hunches, and thank goodness he does. They certainly help, even if things do go horribly wrong. For once the squad ends up having to do some of their hardest work in a heavily occupied area (content warning for child death), bringing new challenges to the fore. There’s also something of a mad scientist added to the monster-mix this time.

I don’t have a lot to add over my reviews of previous books–all the wonderful aspects of them are repeated here. The characters are simple-yet-interesting. The monsters are scary, with a few poignant moments mixed in. The squad spends plenty of time swearing and shooting at things, although maybe not as much shooting as in some previous books. As Wiggins himself pointed out in a previous book, this is something of a Scottish “X-Files”-like series. It’s a fairly simple genre, but Meikle carries it off unusually well.

I truly hope Meikle plans to publish more books in this series–I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for them!