BOOK REVIEW
“The Kill List” – Frederick Forsyth - 333 pages – G. Putnam’s Sons - Reviewed by Jeb Ladouceur
Frederick Forsyth hit pay dirt with his initial military-style suspense story, “The Day of the Jackal,” more than four decades ago. In that first thriller, terrorists were bent on the assassination of French president Charles de Gaulle, and hired a professional killer (known only as The Jackal) to murder him. The book became an international bestseller, and two years later (in 1973) the British fighter pilot … turned-journalist … turned-novelist … saw his breakout story filmed.
Forsyth was further rewarded when his second work, “The Odessa File,” also sold in impressive numbers, and it too was adapted for the big screen. The same thing happened with “The Dogs of War,” set primarily in a platinum-producing country in Africa. It seemed there was no literary limit for the Brit with the nimble imagination.
Until 1999.
On the eve of the Second Millennium, Forsyth tripped, when inexplicably he penned the failed “The Phantom of Manhattan,” an intended sequel to (of all things) “The Phantom of the Opera.” The highly successful author claimed that the departure from his usual genre was undertaken because, “I had done Mercenaries, Nazis, Special Forces Soldiers, you name it, and I got to thinking, ‘…could I actually write about the human heart?’”
Sadly, the answer was “No” and he subsequently returned to modern thrillers.
But the writer who was once the toast of Publisher’s Row had clearly lost a step (or two) and nowhere in his body of work is it more evident than in his 2013 novel, “The Kill List.”
In this thriller we see a strange phenomenon demonstrated—and it is one that certainly would not have been anticipated, or believed, fifty … maybe even twenty years ago. It’s the oddity that because of the widespread and thoroughgoing nature of twenty-first century communications, there now exists the possibility that a writer can pepper his books with so much accurate research that the story becomes (dare we say it?) boring! This is so because what once might have filled readers with wonder, now has frequently become common knowledge.
Unmanned, heavily armed drones, flying so high over the Middle East that they can be neither seen nor heard at ground level, now occupy a prominent place in the lexicon of modern warfare, and their function is known to virtually every schoolchild. That these delivery devices fire rockets so accurately that they can (and do) seek and destroy a target through the window of a Somali mud hut, might once have been the stuff of science fiction … but it no longer is. Furthermore, launching and guidance of these once-awesome weapons from half a world away is now considered a given.
Indeed, as the popular commercial for life insurance quips, “Everybody knows that.” Even the most interesting character in “The Kill List”—a teenaged boy who is a reclusive electronics whiz living in an attic—is not at all surprising. Given the plethora of youthful computer hackers whose ‘miracles’ we read about every day, “What’s so special about Forsyth’s young ‘Ariel?’” we ask. “Tell us something we don’t already know.”
It’s illuminating perhaps, that in this newest Forsyth espionage thriller, the most exciting segments have to do with good, old-fashioned parachuting … drugging hungry dogs with meat soaked in knockout drops … and a key confrontation involves, not a Taser, but a dagger.
Author Frederick Forsyth (and his contemporaries) might do well to return to basics, where a showdown in Sudan seems more exciting when decided with a head-butt … as opposed to one of those multi-million-dollar gizmos triggered by some nameless expert in Nevada.
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Award-winning writer, Jeb Ladouceur is the author of nine novels, and his theater and book reviews appear in several major L.I. publications. In his newest thriller, HARVEST, an American military doctor is seized by a sinister gang of organ traffickers in The Balkans, and ordered to perform illegal surgeries.