User Reviews

Frederick Forsyth's thrillers are always impressive for their exactness in realism, as he always knows what he is writing about, his plot precision usually being impeccably convincing and at the same time both human, questioning and amazingly skilful in their construction. The dialog is always intelligent and precise, and usually all values of the cause being fought for are being doubted and questioned. That puts him above both Ian Fleming and Alistair Maclean, whose thrillers generally suffer from artificial construction. This thriller is a typical example of Forsyth's style, made after the Libyan crisis of spring 1986, speculating in the possible retributions of colonel Khadaffi after Reagan's bomb attack on his quarters on 26th April. What the film and story does not show is the reason for the American attack, which then was published as a revenge for a night club with Americans in Berlin supposedly blown up by Libyans, but that was widely questioned and never proved. We know today that Khadaffi's revenge became the Lockerbie disaster in 1988, but that was still unknown when this story was written. We have some great actors here like David Thelfall in the lead with Alan Howard as Sam MacReady, his employer, a character he played in many films, making the MacReady character his own. The story takes us from London to Hamburg, to Vienna, to Libya and to Cyprus, while the final rendez-vous is at sea. The tension, the sustained plot constantly increasing in higher gear, the confrontations, everything is first class, although you might object against the brutality, like David Thelfall's wife does, who perhaps never wants to see him again - we shall never know, that issue is left hanging. There are more casualties than one, towards the end they are doubled, but the conflict between the Libya of Khadaffi and America was no picknick row, and we all know how it ended - at least temporarily.