The Colonel’s Revenge follows Mateus de Silva, a brilliant but socially awkward professor whose life is pulled back into violence and buried family history when he learns that his grandfather, Colonel Juan Mateus de Silva, may still be alive after decades of captivity. The story moves between the blood-soaked terrain of 1980s Angola and a modern South African revenge plot involving old betrayals, hidden fortunes, casino schemes, and the uneasy inheritance of war. What begins as a rescue mission becomes something sharper: a reckoning with loyalty, greed, and the cost of letting vengeance become a family language.

I was struck first by the book’s velocity. Author Jeffrey K. Schmoll writes action with a hard, sunburned physicality; dust, blood, machinery, hunger, and pain all have weight here. The early Angola chapters are especially vivid, giving Colonel de Silva the mythic severity of a man carved by battlefield necessity. He is not softened for easy admiration, and that makes him more interesting. I liked how the novel lets him be both formidable and morally bruised, a soldier whose discipline has curdled into obsession.

What surprised me more was the way the book balances brutality with oddball warmth. Mateus, Tay, Muni, and the rest of the crew bring humor and camaraderie into a plot that could otherwise be all gunmetal and grimaces. The casino-heist material adds a jaunty intelligence to the story, and the mathematical mind of Mateus gives the revenge scheme a pleasingly cerebral edge. The novel’s ambition makes it sprawl, but that sprawl also gives the book its brawny charm; it wants to be a war story, a family drama, a caper, and a revenge thriller all at once.

Readers who enjoy action-adventure novels, historical fiction, revenge thrillers, military fiction, and heist novels will find plenty to savor here, especially if they like stories where old wars keep detonating in the present. Fans of Clive Cussler’s globe-trotting adventure or Nelson DeMille’s muscular suspense will recognize the appetite for danger, banter, and high-stakes plotting. The Colonel’s Revenge is a rugged and fast-moving thriller.

Pages: 262 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GYV322SV