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After a successful career in law enforcement as a field officer, explosives detection K-9 handler, and fatality traffic investigator, Angel Giacomo gravitated into writing. She has a degree in Political Science and History. A big believer in helping veterans, Angel supports a number of veteran organizations. Her first book, a military thriller, The Jackson MacKenzie Chronicles: In the Eye of the Storm was published in 2020.
Reviewed by Tom Gauthier for Readers' Favorite
Opening with the now-retired military protagonist, Jackson Joseph MacKenzie, suffering from a potentially deadly snakebite, Forged in Fire and Blood is a flashback to his extraordinary career, from the teenage soldier in combat in Korea to his appointment to the U. S. Military Academy at West Point. We meet MacKenzie's entire family, also serving and who are mostly senior officers. Angel Giacomo has written a story that delightfully comes at you like drinking water from a fire hose. Picture Audie Murphy partnered with Forrest Gump in a staccato-paced delivery of action, wounds, decorations, return to action, and an improbable but plausible series of interactions with commanders at high levels. That being said, it is not a comic book. Forged in Fire and Blood is a no-holds-barred crawl through the muck of Korean War combat, overlaid with the coming-of-age of young Jackson, delivered in shocking event after shocking event. We follow the struggles and decisions of this boy who builds his own identity under the loving shadow of heroic parents and relatives.
Forged in Fire and Blood is a veteran's book, a soldier's book, delivered at a pace reflective of Drill Sergeant's command or battlefield maneuver orders. Succinct, no wasted words or emotions. Angel Giacomo tells this story with the pulsating cadence of a marching unit, mixing the action with the mental struggles of a boy forced into manhood as the title foretells. Giacomo does not waste words on long descriptions of characters or detailed technical explanations, yet never leaves you in the dark as to who they are or what's being used. This is a full-out attack on the action, the wounds, the decorations, and each time they return to action. The interactions of young MacKenzie with commanders at high levels seem improbable from a veteran's point of view, but fully plausible in the context written.
As a veteran, trained by the very generation of soldiers pictured in this story, I could feel, smell, and taste everything Giacomo wrote. My very real bias came from the fact that I served in Combat Intelligence and my "final examination exercise" in school was the simulation of manning the CP of a unit about to come under attack by the Communist Chinese in Seoul, Korea, receiving the same reports from the field in the same sequence over a twenty-four-hour period. Though I missed MacKenzie's war by six years, Angel Giacomo delivered memories that took me back sixty-four years. Giacomo's Forged in Fire and Blood is militarily correct, humanly sensitive, skillfully written, and pure pleasure for this old veteran to read. My recommendation of his work could not be higher.
