Honor Bound

Honor Bound, Book 1

By: W. E. B. Griffin

Narrated by: Dick Hill

Length: 21 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

It's 1942. A Marine aviator, an Army paratrooper and demolitions expert, and a non-com radio man are on an impossible mission for the OSS - sabotaging the resupply of German ships and submarines by any means necessary!

First Lieutenant Cletus Frade is fresh from Guadalcanal. He teams up with Second Lieutenant Anthony Pelosi and Sergeant David Ettinger for the most critical OSS operation of the war.

Under the direction of the mysterious Colonel Loman, they venture into a simmering stew of German and Allied agents, collaborators, and government security thugs, of men and women hiding their pasts and plotting their futures - all in supposedly neutral city of Buenos Aires.

©2008 W. E. B. Griffin (P)2008 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Griffin's reconstruction of upper-class Argentine society in the 1940s provides an exotic and credible setting for a tautly written story whose twists and turns will keep readers guessing until the last page." ( Publishers Weekly)

The beginning of another great WWII series

W.E.B. GRIFFIN has another very good series in Honor Bound. I am looking forward to the next book. Try it

Honor Bound

What did you love best about Honor Bound?

Great Story, enjoyed it a lot. moved and never got bored with it.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Cletis

Which character – as performed by Dick Hill – was your favorite?

All of them

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes

Any additional comments?

Narrater did a great job, drew you into the story.

An excellent military thriller!

86 year old William Edward Butterworth III has been authoring or coauthoring military thrillers under his own name and various pseudonyms for 57 years. During that period he has released over 160 novels about one-third of which are available in audiobook format. Butterworth's best known pseudonym is W.E.B. Griffin. Honor Bound is one of many military thrillers released under the Griffin pseudonym; some are coauthored with his son William Edward Butterworth IV. The best of the books are written by Griffin alone.

Honor Bound is an excellent military thriller with outstanding narration by Dick Hill. I highly recommend all of the W.E.B. Griffin novels written without a coauthor. Most of the novels are narrated by either Dick Hill, Scott Brick, or Eric G. Dove who are three of the very best.

Great listen

Classic story but unique perspective, this is the first and best of the series. Good narrator as well

Great story

Very well done and played out as I remember the book I read years ago

A good book

I thought the book was great, the premise and such, but it could have been better without the echo chamber every time one of the characters thought to themselves, and could do without the phony Texas accent, sounded like Kevin Spacey and his phoney Georgian accent in that Washington DC series on tv.

Worth the listen

The book started slowly but as you listen you begin to like the main characters, father, son, and the other characters linked to them. I'm not normally a fan of military based novels but will puchase other books in the series by this author. I would have given this book 4.5 to 5 stars with the exception that it ended a bit abruptly. I would have liked a bit more follow up on the relationships the author developed throughout the novel but still well worth listening to.

A s Spanish speaking lover of web griffin's books.

It was a good listen. I enjoyed it. However, for a book set in Argentina, the narrator had poor Spanish pronunciation.

An excellent read

I really like Griffin, but I think this book is one of my favorites. It has everything - character development, emotion, depth, politics, suspense and military strategy. The main character, Lieutenant Cletus Frade is a Charlie Castillo kind of personality although perhaps not as outsized. The back drop of Argentina and "neutrality" in WWII gives some perspective on the complexity of that war. If you like the Presidential Agent Series (but perhaps have given up once Griffin son-in-law took the pen), read this one - it's fun and gripping. The Corps series needs to be read as a series and the depth of it comes both from the growth of some of the recurring characters and the history (WWII in the Pacific); Honor Bound seems to be the only one of the Honor Bound series that has the magic combination of Dick Hill + Griffin.

Great New Series

Argentina played a role during World War II that was similar to that of Berlin during the Cold War. As a neutral country favoring the Nazi regime, it was the focus of a great deal of clandestine activity during the war as it struggled to maintain its neutrality while both the Axis and the Allies maneuvered on its territory. This is the backdrop to W.E.B. Griffin’s Honor Bound series as he continues to explore the fascinating realm of intelligence work during World War II. The hero of this book is Cletus Frade, a marine aviator called home from Guadalcanal to take on a covert mission in Argentina to blow up a neutral vessel that is refueling Nazi submarines in Argentinian waters.

Clete is totally unqualified for this mission, as are the two men assigned to him. None have any training as spies and while one is an expert in demolitions, none of them really have a clue as to what they are doing. The one thing Clete might have going for him is that his father, Jorge Guillermo Frade, is one of the most important and influential men in Argentina. Unfortunately, Clete has never met him and everything he knows about the man (coming from his maternal grandfather) is that he is the SOB responsible for Clete’s mother’s death.

It's the slow development of the relationship between father and son that makes this such a powerful book. Griffin has never been particularly interested in “action” in the conventional sense. There are occasional spurts of it, but Griffin has always been much more concerned with the nuts and bolts about how missions are planned and information is gathered. In this novel, he gets to play with multiple cultures as well—Argentinian, German, Nazi (yes, I know those last two should be the same but Griffin paints them differently), and American. It all blends together into a fascinating look at Argentina through the eyes of an outsider at a critical moment in their history.
The mission to destroy that tanker is the heart of the story. To emphasize the danger, Griffin lets the reader know that the previous team sent on this mission has simply disappeared. Clete’s mission is opposed by both the Argentinians and the Nazis, but also by elements within the American Office of Strategic Services who believe that Clete would be of better use to them if he were dead by German hands. They figure that his father would be more likely to help the Allies if he had a personal reason to hate the Nazis.

This is a wonderful and exciting book. I read it the first time roughly twenty years ago and enjoyed it just as much on this latest reading. Yet, I want to stress that it is not a typical military novel filled with battles and fights to the death. That sort of action is the exception here, not the rule. Truth is, Honor Bound doesn’t need it.