Frederick Forsyth (1938–2025)

John Preston is a civil servant working fro MI5. As a relative newcomer to the service having previously been in the military, he doesn't fit well with the old boy network and finds himself at odds with his boss. Having been shifted to a more obscure and less exciting department Preston suddenly finds himself at the sharp end of a Russian plot to destabilise the UK on the eve of the 1987 General Election. However, Preston does not know the nature of the plot, which is probably just as well, show more as the plan is to detonate a nuke on British soil.
I must confess that I have lived my life accompanied by a high amount of literary snobbishness meaning that a number of bestselling authors have not made it on to my reading list. Over the last few years I have learned my lesson with John Le Carre and Robert Harris, and now Frederick Forsyth. The Day of the Jackal was a good book, but The Fourth Protocol is in a different league. This is a fine piece of work with a complex, realistic and compelling plot and good character development. It had me hooked from the beginning and I would rate it up there with any other thriller that I've ever read. The outcome was in doubt right up until the end of the novel making it really exciting, but at the same time it was delivered in the same sort of British stiff upper lip manner that Le Carre uses.There is some heavy politics mixed in with spycraft, interdepartmental tensions, nods to history and good storytelling. Highly recommended if you've not read it.
The Lady show less

This book was a re-read for me. I read it about 40 years ago, and it set me onto the path of reading and enjoying thrillers. This book was the start of thrillers as we know them today. Forsythe’s skill as an author is awe-inspiring! There is never a dropped storyline or even an extraneous clue. Every word is a building block of this remarkable story and every word jacks up the tension. Nothing that happens is expected or really even guessed at. I wish I was more like Charles Lebel, the show more dogged, intelligent investigator who will do anything to get his man and he never gives up. The technology in the book is a bit dated since the story is set in the summer of 1963. This was before computers, cell phones, sophisticated listening equipment and the internet. Everything had to be done the old-fashioned way, which, it turns out, if spearheaded by the right commanding officer, can be pretty effective. As before, I was rooting for the Jackal all the way through. He was cool-headed and had a brilliant mind. He was a man without a soul or a conscience. Also, he was a man with dogged determination, and a man who would go to any lengths to achieve his goal. The book is perfect in every way, and I am glad I decided to read it again. I appreciated it more the second time around. Re-reading old classics is never a waste of time. show less

Peter Miller is a young German journalist in 1963 who stumbles upon the diary of a Holocaust survivor Salomon Tauber who has just committed suicide in despair due to the fact that surviving Nazis have escaped justice for so long and that there seem to be no serious efforts by West German authorities to unearth them. Miller determines to find the Nazi commandant in Riga, Eduardo Roschmann (a real historical figure) and bring him to justice. This involves penetrating the organisation ODESSA, a show more supposed shadowy organisation set up near the end of the war to provide an escape route for former SS members fleeing justice. He is quickly exposed but manages to escape and after getting out of further scrapes eventually finds and confronts Roschmann - but there is a twist in the tale in Miller's motives for exposing the SS man. All this takes place against the backdrop of an incredibly sinister plot by Roschmann and other surviving SS members to give nuclear technology to Nasser's Egypt to use in its fight against Israel and thus perpetrate a second, and even more total Holocaust. This plot is foiled by Miller's actions, but he is casually unaware of this. Throughout Miller's motives seemed a little unclear and the twist in his story provides some explanation for this, but nevertheless I found him a slightly less than convincing character. At a more philosophical level, the novel, being written in the early 70s and set a decade earlier, explores via Miller the angst of the post-war generation of Germans, and their frustration and anger against their parents who "let Nazism happen" - these events were still so much raw and recent then, of course. Another guilt-related theme in the narrative is the now discredited idea that the atrocities were all down to the SS, and that the Wehrmacht basically behaved honourably, which has now been shown not to be the case. A very good thriller, though not as tight as Day of the Jackal. show less

It never gets old listening to or reading a Frederick Forsyth book. Although written in 1972, The Odessa File is just as new and thrilling as the day it was released. This book examines post WWII Germany and Israel. Have you ever wondered what really happened to the ex-Nazi's after Hitler killed himself and the war ended? We all know that a lot escaped to Venezuela, and some have been found and put on trial at The Hague since then, but not nearly enough. Many are still alive or their show more descendants are, and, just maybe, hatching more Nazi plots. This book examines the post-Reich era in Germany itself. The SS and other Nazi men made a life for themselves with new identities and legitimate jobs, but were still plotting, plotting, plotting. The book moves along at a furious pace as we we track a young German journalist who has assigned himself the task of tracing down the man known as The Butcher of Riga. This man's numerous crimes and mass killings has been brought to the attention of a young journalist called Peter Miller after he was handed a book written by a Jewish prisoner who had been held in Riga for most of the war. With Forsyth's unburnished prose, and based on his actual knowledge of this time (early 60's Germany) which he had experienced first as a journalist covering the area, this story of mass destruction comes alive in his hands. He uses real-life characters mixed with his fictional ones, and it seems that we're reading this story from a newspaper expose. My journey with re-visiting Forsyth's backlist has been just as thrilling s my original readings of his works was. show less