Product Description

A young American aid volunteer, Billy Colenso, is brutally murdered in former Yugoslavia. His grandfather, the Canadian billionaire Steven Edmond, is bent on revenge. The quest to find Billy's murderer leads Edmond to Cal Dexter, ex-Vietnam Special Forces, the one man who could bring the killer to justice. But what starts as a personal, domestic tragedy soon explodes into a terrifying drama on the centre stage of world terrorism. From the battlefield of Vietnam via war-torn Serbia to the jungles of Central America, Avenger is packed with riveting detail, breathtaking action and political suspense, while in Cal Dexter we meet an unforgettable hero in the most dynamic Forsyth tradition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #352242 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Avenger is the latest international thriller by Frederick Forsyth, who needs no introduction: his past bestsellers in this vein include The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File.

The avenger is Calvin Dexter, outwardly a small-town US lawyer, who was shaped into a formidable killing machine by Vietnam. There are horrific flashbacks to his war career as a "Tunnel Rat", fighting the Vietcong at close quarters in their own deadly underground labyrinths. After taking the law into his own hands for a bitter personal revenge on a Central American mobster, Dexter hires out his expertise to grab untouchable criminals from safe havens and deliver them into the clutches of US justice.

His latest assignment is the toughest of all. A young American aid worker in fractured Yugoslavia met a revolting death at the hands of an ethnic-cleansing squad led by a Serbian war criminal. The boy's billionaire grandfather can afford an expensive revenge, but the trail seems cold... until, step by step, face-to-face investigation, lucky breaks, unstinting bribery and advanced computer hacking techniques trace the links from Serbia to the United Arab Emirates, a private plane, and a corrupt banana republic where the now very rich villain has the president and secret police on his payroll. Assaulting his massively guarded fortress--whose layers of defence include piranha, attack dogs and sharks deliberately given a taste for blood--would be one hell of a job even if Dexter had surprise on his side. But there are complications in high places. The CIA wants to use that Serbian killer as a stalking-horse in an elaborate operation against Al Qaeda, and issues an urgent warning that the avenger is coming...

Dexter plans an elegant, witty and almost bloodless coup, a sting in the style of Leslie Charteris's Saint rather than a Bond-type frontal assault. With the whole country mobilised against him, though, what chance does he have? Dexter, and Forsyth, may surprise you. The author has a knack for making background information vitally interesting: potted life histories of the characters (including big wheels in the FBI and CIA) are almost as compulsively readable as the major action scenes. Surprises and unmaskings continue until the final pages of this superior thriller. --David Langford

Mail on Sunday
A superbly executed thriller, with more twists and turns than a slalom course

From the Back Cover
A young American aid volunteer, Ricky Colenso, is brutally murdered in former Yugoslavia. His grandfather, the Canadian billionaire Steven Edmond, is bent on revenge. The quest to find Ricky's murderer leads Edmond to Cal Dexter, ex-Vietnam Special Forces, the one man who could bring the killer to justice. But what starts as a personal, domestic tragedy soon explodes into a terrifying drama on the centre stage of world terrorism.

From the battlefield of Vietnam via war-torn Serbia to the jungles of Central America, Avenger is packed with riveting detail, breathtaking action and political suspense, while in Cal Dexter we meet an unforgettable hero in the most dynamic Forsyth tradition.

Customer Reviews

Entertaining education
This appealed to me simply because I have an interest in 'vengeance' storylines as opposed to revenge, and although I enjoyed it it didn't move me in particular, not emotionally at least. It was a tremendous odyssey however, winging its way from such unusual places as Vietnam to Canada to Dubai and on to Surinam - among many others. Chief among those others was Bosnia, and I have to admit I welcomed this history lesson about a series of conflicts that I never truly understood as well as I do now, thanks to Fred! Likewise the guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, even the Second World war - how superbly the author entwines fact with fiction and fills us with, if we're honest, a lot of unexpected knowledge on the way through this somewhat long-drawn-out mission of justice. Thanks to fascinating background on the central character of Cal Dexter, in particular his years as a 'tunnel rat' against the tactically superior Viet Cong army, we know that he is more than capable of carrying out the seemingly impossible task of finding and returning the Serbian war-lord to the paymaster who recruited him for his role of avenger. The tale contains more than passing associations with Al Qaeda too, and their 9/11 strikes, leaving the reader to wonder how it might have been avoided, or how Usama Bin Laden could have been found just days later. Not classic Forsyth I guess, but a mightily interesting tale nonetheless, and worth reading more than once.

Is the Master Storyteller's crown slipping?
The latest effort from Frederick Forsyth, whilst still being 99% better than everything his peers aspire to, turns out to be a pale watercolour rather than a vivid masterpiece.

Similar in basic plot to his earlier book 'The Negotiator', it centres on Cal Dexter's quest to trace an Eastern European war criminal. Whilst the usual components are still present - twists and turns and the usual high level of research in particular - the element of magic is missing from this one. It's as though he needed to pay the mortgage and went to the 'Big Frederick Forsyth Thriller By Numbers' manual, rather than thought up something new and imaginative.

Don't ignore it - you do so at your peril - just don't expect something as good as 'Icon' or 'Fist Of God'.

Good read with typical Forsyth strengths and weaknesses
Overall a very good read, good pace and plenty of action.

Although the leading character Cal Dexter is well written and developed the surrounding characters are paper thin and merit better descriptions.

The pursuit is good. As with other Forsyth novels his detail is immaculate. Very carefully constructed.

But the final part of the novel set in a South American banana republic and featuring an assault on a criminal hideout tends towards the James Bond school of fantasy islands and bad guys stroking cats.

The final twist in the plot is ingenious and unexpected.