Product Description

It is May, 1944 - a time of international tension where nothing is certain...Two weeks before D-Day, the French Resistance attack a chateau containing a telephone exchange vital to German communications - but the building is heavily guarded and the attack fails disastrously. Flick Clairet, a young British secret agent, proposes a daring new plan: she will parachute into France with an all-woman team known as the 'Jackdaws' and they will penetrate the chateau in disguise. But, unknown to Flick, Rommel has assigned a brilliant, ruthless Intelligence colonel, Dieter Franck, to crush the Resistance. And Dieter is on Flick's trail...From the master storyteller and bestselling author of Eye of the Needle and Code to Zero comes the new thriller, set against the menacing backdrop of the Second World War and crackling with suspense and action. Jackdaws is an irresistible novel of the Resistance and of love, courage and revenge...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1045556 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-07
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 2
• Binding: Audio Cassette

Review
Another plumpish thriller from the Follett factory ("Code Zero", 2000, etc.), this time featuring a sort of distaff dirty (half) dozen. They don't come any tougher, smarter, braver, or, for that matter, deadlier than Major Felicity (call her "Flick") Clairet. Quintessentially female and sexy as all get out, she kills without compunction if that's the way the mission goes. The year is 1944, ten days before the Allied assault on Normandy, and Flick, a world-class saboteur, is attached to a British special operations unit. In France, near Paris, the largest telephone exchange in Europe has to be knocked out if Nazi communications are to be as impaired as the Allies need them to be. Eager for the assignment, Flick, being Flick, is only momentarily nonplussed when she learns she has but a mere two days to recruit a team of six French-speaking Englishwomen, train them to jump out of an airplane, and pass them off as a local custodial staff. In company with Flick, they will then slip by gulled Gestapo guards and into the telephone exchange building in order to blow it to smithereens. Code-named Jackdaw, the hastily assembled team includes a convict awaiting trial for murder, an ex-safecracker with a particular affinity for gelignite, and an engineer who is also a transvestite. Opposing the Jackdaws will be fiendishly clever Major Dietrich Franck, late of Rommel's staff, who is to captured British intelligence agents what Torquemada was to suspected heathens. And now the game's afoot: jackbooted Nazis against dissembling Jackdaws, devilish Dietrich versus tricky Flick. Bullets fly and blood flows while the fate of D-day hangs, obligatorily, in the balance. Ersatz characters, featureless prose, departures from formula nil. But to the Follett faithful that's probably good news. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Ken Follett was only 27 when he wrote the award-winning novel Eye of the Needle which became an international bestseller. He has since written several equally successful novels and the non-fiction bestseller On Wings of Eagles. He lives with his family in London and Hertfordshire

Customer Reviews

An excellent historical thriller
This was my first Ken Follett's book and I could not put it down. It is basically the story of a group of women wanting to do their bit for the war. Nothing is straightforward in this story, it can be amusing at times but also very emotional. The atmosphere of the resistance is very well rendered, the pace of the book is excellent and never is the reader bored. It also has psychological qualities, the characters especially Major Dieter Frank is full of contradictions. This shows that whether one is French, German or English, one is a human being.The research is well done and the reader is made to participate to the mission in whichever character he/she might want to identify.
I cannot wait to read more from this author.
A French reader

3 stars violence
Ken Follett is no doubt a master of storyteller. He described the tortures in detail like he knows the stuff. For that I'd give it 5 stars.

But I hate violence. If I forced myself to read the whole Jackdaws I'd had nightmares. In the end I only skimmed it. So 3 stars for that.

A plot with potential but weak production
Not one of the author's best works. The concept is good and could have made a good thriller, but the actual writing is thin, far too many implausible leaps. It feels like a book written back from the ending, and suffers from it. Maybe it was actually written ready for a screenwriter to turn it into a film.