Thursday, December 4, 2014

Review: The Kill List by Frederick Forsyth

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Title: The Kill List
Author: Frederick Forsyth

Read copy: Mass Market Paperback
Published: August 5, 2014
Publisher: Signet
ISBN: 0451467639
ISBN-13: 9780451467638

In northern Virginia, a secret agency named TOSA (Technical Operations Support Activity) has one mission: to track, find, and kill those so dangerous to the United States that they are on a short, very close-held document known as the Kill List.

Now a new name has been added: a terrorist of frightening effectiveness called the Preacher, who radicalizes young Muslims living abroad to carry out assassinations. Unfortunately for him, one of his targets is a retired Marine general, whose son is TOSA’s top tracker of men.

The Preacher has made it personal—and now the hunt is on….

My rating:

This is a prime example of how a thriller should be written. The reader has to be hooked from the first paragraph and keep turning and turning the pages to see what would happen next, how it would end.

I was hooked from the first paragraph, and I would've kept turning the pages, but I had to take a break somewhere in the middle for work related reasons. What a bummer work is, don't you think?

Mr. Forsyth takes the reader on a globetrotting experience from the US to Afganistan and Pakistan, then back to the UK and over the mediterranean into Oman, Yemen, Kuwait, and Somalia. Also, everybody who is anybody in the espionage, terrorism, and anti-terrorism made an appearance - CIA, TOSA, ISI, SIS, Mossad, al-Qaeda, Somali pirates...And the hero was a Marine, born on November 10 (which also happens to be my birth date).

This was a fast-paced, page-turning, edge-of-your-seat action (toward the end) thriller with a mysterious hero (I loved it, how the author kept calling him Tracker throughout the book) in search of a radical terrorist whose "webinars" kept turning moderate Muslims into full-blown Jihadists...And when the Preacher "made it personal", I knew the fun (if I can even use that word) has just started.
The ending was predictable (no beating around the bush, there was just one way it was going to end), but I loved the unpredictability of how we got to the ending.

What I loved most of all was the narrative style. It was a very journalistic type of narration. Short sentenced, loads of information, a very "objective" author's voice, an omniscient point of view...Yet the story never dragged, it never got boring, no matter who we were seeing in a particular scene or where we were, the pages kept on turning, the story kept on flowing.

This was an amazing piece of fiction that merits its spot on my favorites shelf.

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