Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15345 in Books
• Published on: 1980-07-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Customer Reviews

Top notch adventure from a master of the craft
This was the first Wilbur Smith novel I read. I was aged about 15 or 16 and had a long train journey home ahead of me. I stopped off at a newsagents just outside the railway station and selected this from a selection of about 10 other novels in the shop. My reading habbits were never to be the same again. That train journey home was one of the shortest seven hours of my life, from the first page I was gripped and hardly glanced up and the English country side flashing past the train window. This was the first time I had been so gripped by a novel that the outside world faded into almost non existense. A top thriller featuring enough set pieces for a dozen books from lesser authors. Even now 23 years later I find myself waiting impatiently for the next Wilbur Smith.

Smith at his best
Wild Justice is as fast a book as only Smith can write it. The action and the sequence of events is so quick and unpredictable that literally doesn't let you take a breath. Smith has this ability to drag you in the center of the action, to make you read as if yourself were a hero of the story. Wild Justice is worth reading for the sake of it. It is definitely not the book that will make you think afterwards but anything you read will remain in your memory as if it was real, as if you were one of the book's heroes. This is Smith's power and that's why most people read his books. In Wild Justice you will be especially fascinated from the love affair that develops between the main characters and its twists. Also, since it is a book about the fight against terrorism, I think it is a very relevant reading in relation to the tragic events in New York last September.

Peerless
This is Wilbur Smith's only thriller, but with this one book he has surpassed all other writers in the genre. It is peerless, nobody else comes near him. It also marks the beginning of his most fertile period. Anybody who likes this book should go on to read A Falcon Flies and the other books in the Ballantyne series, and then everything else he wrote in the following years. His account of the Matabele wars in the Ballantyne books must be as close as it's possible to get to Homer in modern times; doubtless being born in Zambia helped, nobody growing up in Europe could achieve that epic tone. In his most recent books, sadly, he has fallen off. He still spins a good yarn, but the power and depth have gone. In fact, I wouldn't recommend anything from River God onwards. But to go back to Wild Justice and the following books, if you haven't read them yet, then I envy you: you have hundreds of hours of the most intense reading pleasure ahead.