Flight of the Intruder, by Stephen Coonts

Jake Grafton Series, by Stephen Coonts

(Stephen Coonts' suggested reading order)
  • Flight of the Intruder (1986)
  • The Intruders (1994)
  • Final Flight (1986)
  • The Minotaur (1989)
  • Under Siege (1990)
  • The Red Horseman (1993)
  • Cuba (1999)
  • Hong Kong (2000),
  • America (2001)
  • Liberty (2003)
See also our reviews of the books in Coonts' Carmellini series, and Stephen Coonts' own website - real nice!

This, to my mind, is one of the most stunning military fiction novels I had ever encountered. Flight of the Intruder is was Stephen Coonts' first book, published in 1986. The setting is the Vietnam War. The year is 1972, a time when the war was still raging but negotiations were under way and it was becoming increasingly obvious that the USA was going to pull out sooner or later.

Flight of the Intruder, by Stephen Coonts Flight of the Intruder tells the story of fighter pilot Jake Grafton. He is a young naval aviator, very respected by his peers, but still slowly coming apart under the pressures of flying an endless series of extremely hazardous yet useless missions over hostile territory in Vietnam in his A-6 Intruder, a carrier-based attack bomber. This, of course, is exactly what Stephen Coonts himself was doing at that time. So Coonts knows what he is writing about from the inside, and this makes the story and the descriptions sound and feel totally authentic.

Flight of the Intruder is a stunningly honest book. Stephen Coonts really puts the reader inside the very hearts and minds of the pilots drive these powerful, hi-tech machines. To me, he revealed a whole world totally unknown unknown to me about the naval aviators' fraternity. The book really goes deep beneath the glamorous surface and examines the psychological tolls of war. We meet memorable characters like the young Jake Grafton and his buddies Tiger Cole, The Boxman, Sammy Lundeen, and New Guy. We get a lot of technical information about the A-6 as well as the thinking of pilots in combat situations. We are in the cockpit.

Flight of the Intruder is a story of heroes, with a great plot and lots of drive. A wonderful book which later also became a great movie.

Amazon carries the movie from 1991 with Willem Dafoe and Danny Glover: Flight of the Intruder. Or, if you prefer, from amazon UK: Flight Of The Intruder [1991].

The Intruders, by Stephen Coonts

The Intruders is the sequel to Flight of the Intruder – one of the best flight combat aviation novels from the Vietnam War, which stayed on the New York Times hardcover bestseller lists for 28 weeks. Flight of the Intruder was published in 1986, and The Intruders was published in 1994 following the publishing of four other Jake Grafton books: Final Flight (1988), The Minotaur (1989), Under Siege (1990) and The Red Horseman (1993).

Stephen Coonts

Coonts published his first book, Flight of the Intruder, in 1986 (made into a movie, Flight of the Intruder, in 1991). The star character of that book, Jake Grafton, was for a long time the main character in a series of ten books.

Ever since I came across Flight of the Intruder, Stephen Coonts has been on my radar, and I have read most of his books. Partly, I think, because I loved his Jake Grafton character. Partly, also, because I love international thrillers and techno-thrillers. Stephen Coonts' books I consider to be "the thinking man's thriller", good, crafty, smartly written books.

The Intruders brings back fighter pilot Jake Grafton. The year is 1973. The skies over Vietnam have finally gone silent. America has pulled out, and the war is over.

The Intruders, Stephen CoontsFor Lieutenant Jake Grafton, USN, fresh from two combat cruises and a harrowing shoot-down over Laos, the personal battle is just beginning. He, like many others, finds that his country has not welcomed him home with open arms, but with closed minds and closed fists. When his girlfriend's father called him a murderer, Jake walked away. But when a stranger in a bar challenged his honor, the man was not so lucky – he landed in the hospital, and Jake in jail.

Grafton's shore-duty commander, who bailed him out, has devised the perfect punishment for his ace flight instructor: an eight-month cruise on the aircraft carrier Columbia teaching jarheads - Marines - the nuances of carrier aviation. Flying missions over Vietnam was a living hell; now Grafton's about to discover another world of fresh hell.

The Marines may be made of tempered steel and brass balls, but taking off and landing from a slippery flight deck, on a choppy sea in a pitch-black night, there is no margin for error or for animosity. And men like Marine Captain Flap Le Beau, his bombardier and navigator, have a real gift for pushing Jake's buttons. They belong to the same society of warriors, they fought in the same war, and they drink the same whiskey to toast fallen comrades. Now they must fly together in the same cockpit, must lock into each other and into their million-dollar machine, and make the split-second decisions which will insure that, tonight, their fellow pilots won't raise a glass to them.

The Intruders is a good book, and interesting for readers of the Jack Grafton series. But the plot is weak. We follow Jake Grafton through a set of isolated episodes spanning an eight-month period, rather than a single continuous plot. The strengths of the book lie in its excellent descriptions of how naval aviation works, and Stephen Coonts’ writing, full of wit and intelligence. It is even so one of the weaker novels in this series.

Links to books by Stephen Coonts at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN. Se også Bokkilden.

Final Flight, by Stephen Coonts

In this daring and suspenseful Final Flight, by Stephen Coontsthriller – probably the best thriller published in 1988 - Navy jet pilot Jake "Cool Hand" Grafton returns. This time he is wing commander on a new US carrier – the super-carrier USS United States.

Many things about Final Flight are fascinating. The descriptions of how a modern aircraft carrier functions are one of them. A huge powerful ship like this is incredible complicated and there are so many things that must be right for it to function at peak efficiency. Stephen Coonts descriptions, in great detail, of the various key procedures, such as those involved in launching and recovering the airplanes, are excellent and very interesting.

The final flight of Capt. Jake Grafton will keep readers riveted. Now Grafton’s night-flying days are over, thanks to failing eyesight. But the fate of the Middle East is hanging in the balance when his F-14 tears off into Mediterranean airspace. Grafton finds himself in the bulls-eye of an Arab plot to steal the carrier's nuclear weapons.

Sure. This sounds absurd, as Coonts intends. But the plot's mastermind, one Col. Qazi, is an unequaled artisan in the guild of espionage and terrorism. Qazi has devised a scheme whose twists and turns alternately eludes and thwart Grafton and more than one intelligence agency in their attempts to figure out what he's up to. By the time it's clear, Qazi is pitted against the carrier's crew, and the odds are believably on his side. The backdrop is Naples, and the well-detailed lives of Navy pilots.

Final Flight is wonderful. The plot may seem strange but it actually works real well. And the book is written in a way that creates suspense very early on in the book. The assault on the aircraft carrier by a group of ruthless terrorists, and its defense by the seamen and marines, made great reading. It was an excellent thriller when it was published more than twenty years ago, and rereading it, I found that it still is!

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