Krishna
The book starts off explosively, and has interesting characters based on real life. Saddam Hussain and the climate in Iraq following his invasion of Kuwait and subsequent defeat, but before his overthrow by American forces.
I was thrilled with the way the story began and especially, the way he had dealt with the political climate subsequent to Saddam Hussain’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Since he called it ‘fiction’ he was pretty free to conjecture on the political intrigue and make the reader wonder whether it – or something close to it – was really what happened.
But the delight, unfortunately, does not last long: the story flounders pretty quickly and degenerates into a cloak and dagger story of the usual kind. In itself this is not an issue because what else would you expect from Frederick Forsyth’s pen?
The issue is that it is not even upto the standards of his own previous masterpieces like ‘No comebacks‘ or the incredible ‘Day of the Jackal’. I felt that the description of the machinery of war was excessive and that he kept moving the hero in and (especially) out of danger without any reason at all.
There is a real twist in the identity of ‘Jericho’ and also in the way the Mossad’s covert operations are described but it is not sufficient to lift the story out of the mire that it had dug itself in.
If I were to be fair, I cannot award it anything more than a 4/10.
— Krishna