Khaleel Datay's Blog - Posts Tagged "spy-thriller"

Berlin Game by Len Deighton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read Berlin Game almost twenty years ago, then again a few years later. That was in a time when authors didn't sport multiple black belts and 10 years in MI6 or CIA. Since then I've read all 9 books in the triple trilogy only Deighton could pull off. Deighton writes at a sedate pace, drawing you into the personal and work life of the protagonist to create an immediate emotional connection. Bernard Samson was a former MI6 field agent sent back into the field to Germany, the land of his birth. His job was to bring in Brahms 4 to cross to the British. Samson's character is finely drawn as a son of a war hero, a public school man married to a wealthy fellow agent. Two kids and a gorgeous nanny complete the triangle very nicely. The hero's buddy, Werner, is perfectly cast as the out of shape hen-pecked slob. The two set off on an adventure to get through the Berlin Wall with an inevitable drama of the possibility that they wont make it back to the West. Communist baddies, starchy old British characters, agents sans all the gadgets and a great post war view into the hearts and minds of the British and German people.



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Heart of the Hunter by Deon Meyer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Deon Meyer does a fantastic job to bring us a truly African hero in Tiny Mpayipheli. Like many South African freedom fighters he was trained in Soviet Russia, but his special talents were quickly noticed by his trainers. Having spent years as an assassin for the East Germans, he returned to a quiet life in the post-apartheid democracy. However as so often happens, he is forced out of retirement to keep a promise to a friend. His job, get a computer hard drive to Lusaka. It comes as no surprise that there are several parties after the drive including SA Intelligence, the CIA and an unknown third party. Drawing on the great African landscapes and the rich, if tragic, history of South Africa, the author takes us along the pursuit of Mpayipheli on a BMW GS1150 motorcycle. A thrilling and suspense-filled story that will have fans of this genre begging for more. Having shown that he's a master of South African crime fiction, Meyer displays his extraordinary talents with a great spy thriller. An enjoyable read.



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Brilliant spy novel in the tradition of Deighton and Le Carre. Dont expect James Bond and Jason Bourne style fireworks. This is good old fashioned tradecraft from a master in the genre. The author weaves a fantastic story of betrayal and deceit on the back of regime change in Egypt and Libya. The core of the story revolves around a CIA analyst who discovers a connection between five random abductions of Libyan nationals opposed to the regime. He sees it as the beginning of a plan to topple Muammar Gadhaffi, a plan he had written himself many years ago. The question was, who was behind the plan? The CIA? or Was it Egypt? The analyst, Jibril Aziz, goes to see an American diplomat formerly stationed in Egypt, for help. Soon after the diplomat is killed, setting off a chain of events that leads the reader from one discovery to the next. With an illicit love affair, double dealing spies, and a wonderful history in Egyptian, Libyan and Yugoslav politics, this is story telling at its best.The Cairo Affair