Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : F : Forsyth, Frederic

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The Day of the Jackal

Frederick Forsyth
The Afghan

Frederick Forsyth
The Odessa File

Frederick Forsyth
The Negotiator

Frederick Forsyth
No Comebacks

Frederick Forsyth
The Shepherd

Frederick Forsyth
Avenger

Frederick Forsyth

Avenger is the latest international thriller by Frederick Forsyth, who needs no introduction: his past bestsellers in this vein include The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File.
The avenger is Calvin Dexter, outwardly a small-town US lawyer, who was shaped into a formidable killing machine by Vietnam. There are horrific flashbacks to his war career as a "Tunnel Rat", fighting the Vietcong at close quarters in their own deadly underground labyrinths. After taking the law into his own hands for a bitter personal revenge on a Central American mobster, Dexter hires out his expertise to grab untouchable criminals from safe havens and deliver them into the clutches of US justice.
His latest assignment is the toughest of all. A young American aid worker in fractured Yugoslavia met a revolting death at the hands of an ethnic-cleansing squad led by a Serbian war criminal. The boy's billionaire grandfather can afford an expensive revenge, but the trail seems cold... until, step by step, face-to-face investigation, lucky breaks, unstinting bribery and advanced computer hacking techniques trace the links from Serbia to the United Arab Emirates, a private plane, and a corrupt banana republic where the now very rich villain has the president and secret police on his payroll. Assaulting his massively guarded fortress--whose layers of defence include piranha, attack dogs and sharks deliberately given a taste for blood--would be one hell of a job even if Dexter had surprise on his side. But there are complications in high places. The CIA wants to use that Serbian killer as a stalking-horse in an elaborate operation against Al Qaeda, and issues an urgent warning that the avenger is coming...
Dexter plans an elegant, witty and almost bloodless coup, a sting in the style of Leslie Charteris's Saint rather than a Bond-type frontal assault. With the whole country mobilised against him, though, what chance does he have? Dexter, and Forsyth, may surprise you. The author has a knack for making background information vitally interesting: potted life histories of the characters (including big wheels in the FBI and CIA) are almost as compulsively readable as the major action scenes. Surprises and unmaskings continue until the final pages of this superior thriller. --David Langford
Biafra Story

Frederick Forsyth
The Fist of God

Frederick Forsyth
The Dogs of War

Frederick Forsyth
The Deceiver

Frederick Forsyth
Icon

Frederick Forsyth
Snipers

Craig Cabell, Richard Brown
The Veteran

Frederick Forsyth

Frederick Forsyth has been in danger recently of becoming better known for his splenetic political tirades than for his superlative thrillers, and it's to be hoped that he'll spend more time turning out books as gripping as The Veteran than cultivating his image as a radio pundit. After all, this is what he does best.
Forsyth changed the face of the modern thriller with The Day of the Jackal, and the marriage of brilliantly realised detail and tight-as-a-drum narrative has become the industry standard ever since. This collection of five tales shows he has not lost his skill, and each reads like a perfectly turned mini-novel, rich in sharply drawn protagonists and wasting nary a word in delivering the goods. In the title tale, a canny lawyer finds himself acting for guilty men after a savage inner-city killing; in The Art of the Matter, destructive double-dealing is dispensed within the plush board rooms of a prestigious auction house; and in The Miracle a traveller en route to the brutal experience of the Palio horse race in Siena has his life changed by a supernatural incident. The range of these pieces is wide (even including a tale about a survivor of the massacre of Custer's troops at Little Bighorn), but all are brought off with the effortless skill that has always been the author's trademark:
From even closer range a Sioux warrior rose from the long grass, pointed an ancient flintlock musket at Craig and fired. He had clearly used too much black powder in an effort to achieve the increased range. Worse, he had forgotten to remove the ramrod. The breech exploded with a roar and a sheet of flame, shattering the man's right hand to pulp. If he had been firing from the shoulder he would have lost most of his head...
--Barry Forshaw
The Fourth Protocol

Frederick Forsyth
The Devil's Alternative

Frederick Forsyth
SAS Heroes: Remarkable Soldiers, Extraordinary Men (General Military): Remarkable Soldiers, Extraordinary Men (General Military)

Pete Scholey, Frederick Forsyth
The Phantom of Manhattan

Frederick Forsyth

"It was a man, standing quite motionless and staring down. He wore a broad-brimmed hat and was otherwise wrapped in a flowing cloak that flapped about him in the wind." Making a departure from his bestselling political thrillers, Fredrick Forsyth takes a literary leap in The Phantom of Manahattan, the sequel to Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera.
Inspired by a meeting with Andrew Lloyd Webber, who longed for a sequel to his world-renowned musical, Forsyth decided after extensively researching the subject to rekindle the legend. The story opens in 1906, 12 years after the Phantom escapes a bloodthirsty mob at L'Opera in Paris and mysteriously vanishes without a trace. On her death bed, the Mistress of the Chorus, Madame Anionette Giry, confesses that she plucked a horrifically deformed boy from a carnival prison and spirited him away to live in recesses of L'Opera: "[His] face was distorted down one side as if struck long ago by monstrous hammer and the flesh of this visage was raw and shapeless like molten candle wax. The eyes were deep-set in sockets puckered and misshapen." Keeping to the shadowy nooks of the opera house, Erik Mulhiem, became known as the Phantom, living a mysterious, solitary existence. However, that abruptly ended when he fell in love with a beautiful diva, Christine Daae. Unable to control his obsession, he flees to America with the help of Madame Giry. There, after years of destitution and misery, he builds a vast empire and devises a plan to ensnare his beloved Christine.
Along with the legendary staples, the delightful cast of supporting characters--from the refined, French lawyer with a pinched disposition, to Cholly Bloom, a street-wise New York hack--appears in chapter vignettes enriching the plot and propelling the scenes, so that it reads in documentary form. And preface-skippers be warned: The introduction gives essential background to the sequel, as well as interesting tidbits about the architecture and history of L'Opera. For example, did you know there is buried lake underneath that is biannually maintained? Or that almost half of its 17 floors are subterranean and were once used for grisly tortures and imprisonment during a military coup in the early 1870s? In fact, that, coupled with reports of ghostly sightings and unexplained accidents fed Leroux's imagination and led to his classic creation.
A marvellous continuation of a timeless tale, The Phantom of Manhattan is a premium insurance policy on a long-lived love story. --Rebekah Warren
Great Flying Stories
The Afghan

Frederick Forsyth