Another enjoyable action book, taking the mild manered persona and giving it a hidden life. What I most enjoyed about this book was that so many story lines interacted to make the story complete. It travelled from a engineering soldier in Vietnam, A couple of RAF World War 2 fighter pilots, A lawyer in New York, A rich businessman in Canada, An arms dealer in Bosnia, a computer security programmer and consultant, and probably a few people I forgot in there too. It used those connections between people very to give our hero motives and to take our hero to the brink of death. Enemies from one war became friends to fight another. Our hero survives, some innocents die and ending in somewhat of a moral victory, the villains are captured to be tried by the authorities. Another book I couldn’t put down once I had started reading.

When I was growing up I was given a book of short stories written by Ray Bradbury (A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories). I remember loving it so much I read it several times over the next few years. The title Story (A sound of thunder) explored time travel and the effects a time traveller could have on the future.

Perhaps I had expectations too high for this book because of my fond memories that I found myself disappointed at the end of almost every story. There was one story that I loved when I finished. Since then a couple more have grown on me and perhaps that’s the key to this book. The stories are so unrelated, so unexpected, so ‘short'(!) that before the idea has had enough time to settle on the mind the story is over. It’s probably a book that many people will find one story in they like but I found it a little bit of a chore to work all the way through to find them.

Just over 500 pages long, this book finishes with an exquisite twist. A story of how an aging diplomat averts world war 3, we read of his past during World War 2 and are lead slowly towards the answer. In so many ways a typical spy novel but having read the first few chapters I couldn’t put it down.