The Kill List

June 17, 2013
This subpar war-on-terror thriller from Diamond Dagger Award–winner Forsyth, with its unknowable outcome, offers less suspense than his Edgar-winning debut, The Day of the Jackal, where the ending is never in doubt. A Muslim extremist, known only as the Preacher, is spreading the message of violent jihad via English-language videos, and his acolytes have begun targeting public officials in the U.S. and the U.K. The job of stopping him falls to Kit Carson, an ex-Marine now part of a super-secret agency in Virginia called Technical Operations Support Activity. Carson, who’s known as the Tracker, assembles an assortment of allies straight out of a Mission Impossible script, including a reclusive teenager who’s a master hacker employed to trace the Preacher. Some readers will wonder why Forsyth bothered to give Carson a personal incentive to complete the mission. Others will find a lack of memorable characters an obstacle to genuine engagement. Agent: Ed Victor, Ed Victor Literary Agency.

August 1, 2013
More than 40 years after he gave us the Jackal, Forsyth gives us the Preacher, a masked jihadi extremist whose videos are radicalizing Muslims in the U.S. and England into killing public officials, law enforcement officers and the like. The Preacher tops a special list of enemies marked for death by a covert U.S. government agency. The man assigned the kill is decorated former Marine general Christopher "Kit" Carson, aka The Tracker, a fluent speaker of Arabic who has experience eliminating al-Qaeda leaders. Carson has a personal investment in the operation: the Preacher was responsible for the death of his father. Having had his life saved by the Tracker several years ago in Afghanistan, the agency's director, "Gray Fox," has a special investment in him. When the government's best computer experts are unable to penetrate the Preacher's secret Internet protocol address, the Tracker recruits Roger Kendrick, an agoraphobic teenage computer whiz holed up in his room in Virginia. Drooling over the super-sophisticated equipment he's given, he quickly determines he is up against the Preacher's own computer expert, dubbed the Troll, and creates a cyber alter ego to penetrate the Preacher's fan base. From there, the kid is a few steps away from planting malware that will enable the Tracker to determine who the Preacher is and where he is based--not Pakistan, where a cohort of his operates, or Yemen, as was thought, but Somalia. Here, Forsyth is as methodical--at times as colorless--as his subjects. But he powers his plot with a clean efficiency, providing an absorbing account of the clockwork moves and split-second decisions required to close in on and dispatch the enemy. Strong descriptions of the settings add to the book's appeal. Inspired by an actual kill list, Forsyth's latest thriller is, like Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, ready-made for the screen.

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July 1, 2013
A retired marine general is gunned down by an unknown assassincollateral damage, apparently, in an attack on a U.S. senator. The general's son, code-named the Tracker, is part of a top-secret government agency responsible for locating, and eliminating (without benefit of trial), people on the so-called kill list of enemies of the U.S. The Tracker knows almost nothing about the assassin, not even his name, but he is determined to find him, no matter the cost. Imagine Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal told almost entirely from the point of view of investigator Claude Lebel, and you'll have a pretty good idea of the author's approach here: this is a procedural told in a straightforward, reportorial style. Forsyth has always been a no-nonsense writer, eschewing flashy prose in favor of documentary realism, incorporating real-world elements into his stories (the Tracker and his adversary are made up, but the government agency is based in reality). No one writes them quite like Forsyth, and this more than meets his usual high standards.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)