I picked this up on holiday because I'd read through the books I'd brought and this was the only one among the English-language secondhand paperbacks at the hotel I thought I could stand. It's okay, for what it is. Follett keeps the adrenaline going, but there's not much else here. The main characters are all impossibly good-looking and/or bursting with raw sexual energy (one can practically cast it with the appropriate Hollywood A-listers as one reads). The plot is full of twists, as one would expect, but the decision to connect it with the D-Day invasion limits the potential for suspense; I mean, we know the invasion happened and it worked, and if the destruction of this telephone exchange plays a role in it then it has to succeed, too, right? The only real question is exactly who will die along the way, and I didn't care about or believe in any of the characters enough to get too anxious about their survival, and most of the deaths were pretty predictable. The book is full of clunky writing. This is just one bad sentence in a book full of bad sentences: "Beautiful women were like the gorgeous French impressionist paintings he collected: having one did not stop you wanting another." Ugh. A stupid cliche, overloaded with adjectives, and quite typical of the book overall. If all you require is adrenalin and you don't care about character or writing or, well, anything else, it's adequate junk reading. Graham Greene and John Le Carre do spy thrillers far, far better, of course, but I'd have been pretty surprised to find a book by either of them in the stack in my Mexican hotel.