#28 Countdown To Terror (30th Anniversary Review)

[tomswift2002]

Published: June 1989
Written By: Unknown as of January 2020

Plot: Frank and Joe fly to Halifax, Canada, to check out an insurance scam. But as they leave the airport their car is sprayed with bullets. Soon the brother detectives discover they're number one on somebody's hit list.
First a friend of their father's is seriously hurt in a bomb blast. Then one of their suspects winds up dead. What started out as a white-collar crime has become an all-out war. And unless the young sleuths track down the stunning secret behind the vicious attacks -- they'll be crossing the border in a body bag....

Review:  I meant to get this up before the New Year, but I didn't get a chance to. 

Frank and Joe are flying up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada to get some legal depositions that their father, Fenton Hardy requires in an insurance scam case.  However Joe thinks that this is Fenton's way of getting the boys out of his hair after the events of Nowhere To Run, since there is still a lot of tension in the family over what occurred in Nowhere to Run.  (Countdown To Terror seems to take place within a month of Nowhere To Run, and Frank and Joe still seem to be around 19, 20 years old).

When the boys land, their taxi is shot up on the way from the airport to their hotel, and from there on out, the boys are never out of trouble.  It seems that their contact on the Halifax police force is semi-retired, and has been investigating things on the side that his bosses at the Halifax police do not know about.  However, in this case, while his investigating does tie into what's happening to the Hardy Boys, it turns out that the Assassins have place a "Kill on site" order on the Hardy Boys, and the boys taxi was targeted because an Assassin saw the boys get off the plane at the airport.  And this all because the Hardy's live capture of Sandy White in Trouble In the Pipeline (there also seems to be a suggestion that the Assassins were behind the event of Nowhere to Run as well---possible a 4th trilogy in the Hardy Boys Casefiels?) who was a very, very high-up Assassin. 

So through out the book, the Hardy's survive no less than 3 bomb attempts on their lives!  Yes, 3 times, the Assassins try to blow up the Hardy's and each time Frank and Joe escape.  And the author makes Frank out to be the only person in the world who has managed to defeat a Fellawi loop bomb.  The bomb is named after an Assassin bomber named Fellawi (who appears in the book), and who does not use conventional bomb construction techniques, so even Fellawi is impressed in the book that Frank was able to disarm his bombs. 

This is a really great book, however, this is one story that I can see S&S not even trying to redo in the modern series.  The amount of violence in this book is incredible!  Countdown to Terror is extremely violent!  If it were a movie, it would get a PG-13 rating, maybe even an "R" rating due to the violence. 

Rating: 10/10

Here's my 20th anniversary review from 2009: https://www.hardyboyscasefiles.com/forums/index.php?topic=1708.msg38203#msg38203

[MacGyver]

I recall Countdown to Terror being a favourite as a kid mainly due to the nonstop action!