Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #866068 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Customer Reviews

Predictable yet intriguing
It's 1941. Half of the British bombers attacking Germany are being shot out of the skies, tracked down by new technology called radar. With the Nazis invading Russia and a fierce British bombing campaign only days away, it comes down to the Danish Resistance -- and ultimately to an 18-year-old Dane named Harald Olufsen and a headstrong young Jewish ballet dancer -- to locate the source of this radar, record its operation, and alert England before it's too late. In opposition is of course Germany, but also a Danish police officer consumed with doing his duty and poisoned by the tragic maiming of his wife and the long-time grudge he holds against Harald's family.

Perhaps because it's remarkably easy to read, HORNET FLIGHT is so simplistic and predictable it feels in places more like a children's novel than an adult suspense thriller. There's seldom any doubt about what will happen next, and even the deaths along the way don't evoke much sorrow. Although the final getaway does keep the pages turning, the only question raised is how the obvious outcome will be achieved. The techniques used to create suspense read exactly like what they are -- plot props. I found it disconcerting to be always one step ahead of the author and I wanted to scream at the characters to get their heads out of the clouds and make use of their brains. By the time their lightbulbs flash on, the reader has been bearing the burden of knowledge for fifty pages.

Where HORNET FLIGHT wins its four stars, however, is in the incredibly real setting. Never does the narrative read like a textbook, never is information included simply for the sake of being information. The life of the Danish in their captured country is penned with such an apparently effortless accuracy that I kept forgetting Follett hadn't been there to observe it all.

Suspenseful? No. But well written, interesting, and informative -- HORNET FLIGHT is definitely all that.

Ladies - this book is for you too!
This is the first Ken Follett I read - I am now hooked.

It was on my boyfriend's "future reading" pile after he'd purchased it at the airport on our last holiday. I started flicking through it and thought "oh, it's not just a war book".

Follett's characters are so real that you get involved in not just the main plot but also the lives of the characters. Although not the main subject of the book there is a degree of romance which is enough to grip the ladies without putting off the men.

These strong characters are a feature of Follett's books and I am now hooked. I would particularly recommend "The Third Twin". Very different from this book but equally gripping.

Enjoy!

hard long flight
Ken Follett dominates the art or the technique of making best sellers and their novels are usually very discernible from these of another authors. Hornet Flight happens during WW II and isn’t a exception. The personages are basically an hero and a counterhero, figure this late who interests me more than the others because he’s someone able and intelligent but to which the destiny, life, chance or as you want to say, has located in the wrong side, in the side of evil and that can happen to everybody. This is the case of Peter Flemming, the Danish policeman, collaborator of the Nazis. Of course we must understand in this novels history is counted from the side of the winners. The plots of Follett are also very well documented and have a strong taste of reality, material, historical and geographical, and furthermore these protagonists are surrounded by a wide variety of credible secondaries, wives, lovers, friends, brothers, enemies, who I think requires big mastery to assemble. This novel deals with an action of espionage of a mysterious German source of radio detection located at Denmark that guides the Luftwaffe to destroy systematically the British bombers in the critical year of 1941 at the zenith of Nazi power, and follows with fidelity the patron of the author. You must try and decide if you like this class of novels. If you taste them, Hornet Flight won’t defraud you.