Product Description

Tweed, Paula Grey and Bob Newman are on the trail of five heads of state who are conspiring to cause massive civil unrest throughout the western world. Dictatorsip will be the only acceptable form of government. Tweed knows the identity of four of the ringleaders, but who is the fifth?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #243836 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 471 pages

Customer Reviews

My first Colin Forbes and my last........
First time I have read one of Colin Forbes's books, and what a dire and unbelievable story. I am not after avid realism, but when you get some sort of technological blast that wipes out the whole of Europe's telecoms, you would expect some change in social order. I read to end because I didn't really believe it could end up as bad as it did, but of course I was wrong. I love parody, so Austin Powers' parody of James Bond, with the evil baddy's secret underground lair is right up my street. The baddy's secret island lair was in this case meant to be taken as truly believable.

What rubbish.

Painful. Actually painful to read.
Having run out of reading material, having never read Colin Forbes, and wanting something that should last me a fair amount of time, I picked up this nice thick book in a second-hand sale. It certainly lasted me a long time - I couldn't read more than three pages at most at a time. The dialogue as others have said was completely unbelievable however far your imagination can stretch.

The whole story struck me as being like a fanfic you might read on the internet with chapters written seperately and posted later - there was no flow to the story, and the use of dialogue to remind us of everything that has happened so far...that was the painful part. And the dialogue to help us, the reader (such as Paula's peculiar need to tell the head of SIS that Americans call their Foreign Secretary the Secretary of State).

Now as I said I have not read any of the previous books, so I had no idea about characters' histories. I still don't. As far as I can tell now, Tweed is the leader, Paula his girlfriend, and Monica is the Internet 'expert'. All the other characters sounded exactly the same to me. If it were not for their names being different, I'd presume they were just one person talking to himself. No depth to them at all.

I don't necessarily mind online fanfics. Indeed, some of them can be good reads. However, this wasn't one of those, and most fanfics are not 471 pages long. This is my first Colin Forbes book, and I'm not inclined to add to the list.

My last Colin Forbes book
I've read several of his books and always thought the writing style was incredibly clumsy and unnatural - forever trying to purvey information to the reader by using stilted and unbelievable dialogue, eg;
"So, my lifelong friend Colin, will you be bringing your gifted wife, the Nobel prize winning scientist and aeroplane designer, Janet, whom I've known for twenty years, to my party on Saturday?"
"Sorry Joe - my marksman mate who can shoot the eye from a low flying pigeon at 300 yards, Janet is staying at the Four Seasons Hotel, off the A61 near Hamburg for a conference on neurotoxins on Saturday."

If I had submitted work like this for my GCSE English exam, I'd have failed.
Mr Forbes' technical research, as per the earlier comments is also appalling. He shows an embarrassing lack of understanding of modern technology, especially the internet. He uses incorrect terminology and totally unbelievable plot lines. At one stage, a character also chains his motorcycle to the back bumper of a car? How many decades is it since a car bumper was a metal thing you could chain a bike to? Since the mid Eighties or earlier, they have all been integrated plastic things with nowhere to wrap a chain. At the end of the book, the main characters take an active part in the destruction of the internet, when they are supposed to uphold law and order.

Continuity is not great either, take a few examples:

1. Tweed is supposed to be able to speak German like a native (page 151), but struggles with basic German later on.

2. At the end we find out that Lisa is the daughter and soon-to-be CEO of a international bank, yet on page 180, she receives 100,000 deutschmarks, the most money she has ever seen in her life???

Take a leaf from Tom Clancy or even Chris Ryan's books - get some technical consultants to review your scenarios and English Lit lessons to make them readable. There were so many flaws in this book that I would need more pages to list them than the book has.
This was a waste of a boring plane trip.