Name: Nothing Lasts Forever (Basis for the Film Die Hard)
ISBN: 9781935169185

Roderick Thorp

Traveling to Los Angeles for Christmas, Joe Leland, a veteran cop and former war hero, stumbles upon a sensational terrorist crime in progress and is forced to quickly make hard life or death decisions.

Nothing Lasts Forever (Basis for the Film Die Hard)

Kelsey Lynn

I can't say i'm not biased when reading this book. I first saw die hard at the age of 8, nearly two decades ago and it has been a Cretcher family christmas classic ever since. So the story of John Mclain has been in my head a long time.

It wasn't until christmas of 2014 that I realized it was based on a book and I had to read it. 

So I did, with medium expectations. The result was about what I expected, but interestingly enough the movie was far more accurate to the book than most movies.

So movie and changes aside (it's his daughter instead of his wife and he's like at least 60 what?) This just wasn't the greatest book. The action was fine and the plot was actually a little more intelligent than the movie but it just was... boring for a long while. 

The first quarter of the book had so much exposistion... like so much, I know way more about Joseph Leland than I ever need to, the author seemed to feel that he constantly needed to justify his motives when he really didn't need to, I don't need to know every case that caused him to feel and act the way he does. 

The major problem is that he tried to fit way too much into each paragraph. I hate skimming, but this book made me want to skim, to skip to the relevant parts but for the 99% of fluff he'd have in a sentence or paragraph, the 1% would be enough to not know what's going on, so even without skimming I'd have to reread parts to know how he ended up doing what he was doing because somehow I had missed it.

I'm not sure if I was overly biased, or this just wasn't my type of book, or he just seemed to old to possibly be doing what he was doing, but I struggled with this.

I just didn't feel it. 

The ending satisfied me so that's something, it was morbid and depressing enough to make me happy. But for once (well twice if you include the walking dead, sorry fans of the most awfully written comic i've ever read) the filmed version was an improvement, they took the strong ideas and the few times there were strong characters and made a strong film. I just wish the book by itself had been strong.

Traveling to Los Angeles for Christmas, Joe Leland, a veteran cop and former war hero, stumbles upon a sensational terrorist crime in progress and is forced to quickly make hard life or death decisions

Nothing Lasts Forever (Basis for the Film Die Hard)

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