great detail and characters. Excellent plot development.
Highly recommend this book!
Highly recommend this book!
Setting: the Middle-East, late 60s to early 70s. International business and shipping during the unrest in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria; the radicals versus Israel. Our business magnate stumbles into a terrorist group and must extricate himself. A great story that presages John Le Carré the denouement, however, is quite different.
From the dust jacket: "Michael Howell is a classic Ambler hero. The name may sound Anglo-Saxon, but with his Lebanese-Armenian grandmother and Greek Cypriot and Syrian-born father he is only 'fractionally British.' 'Levantine mongrel' is his own preferred description of his pedigree. In conditions of extreme adversity, as he points out, mongrels are among those most likely to survive. Survival, in a most peculiar jungle, is what his story is about.
Educated as an engineer, Michael Howell ran the family business, Agence Howell, which acted as selling agents throughout the Middle East and operated a fleet of small cargo vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was a highly profitable business, with offices in Beirut, Famagusta and Alexandria, among other places. Unfortunately, among those other places was Damascus. That was where the trouble started.
Michael Howell first knew of it when he and Teresa Malandra, the Italian girl who doubled as local office manager and as his mistress, paid an unexpected night visit to a Howell factory. That was the night they encountered the P.A.F.
The Palestinian Action Force was a supermilitant group led by Salah Ghaled, an ex-El Fatah man denounced by the Palestine Liberation Organization as a criminal extortionist. This portrait of a modern terrorist, with his well-thumbed collection of atrocity photographs, is surely one of the nastiest that Ambler has ever drawn.
Forced by Ghaled to serve as an accomplice in the planning and execution of a major antiIsraeli guerrilla strike, Michael Howell attempts to extricate himself and his company. Though not, as he puts it, 'a man of violence', he is compelled eventually to behave very much as if he were."
Educated as an engineer, Michael Howell ran the family business, Agence Howell, which acted as selling agents throughout the Middle East and operated a fleet of small cargo vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was a highly profitable business, with offices in Beirut, Famagusta and Alexandria, among other places. Unfortunately, among those other places was Damascus. That was where the trouble started.
Michael Howell first knew of it when he and Teresa Malandra, the Italian girl who doubled as local office manager and as his mistress, paid an unexpected night visit to a Howell factory. That was the night they encountered the P.A.F.
The Palestinian Action Force was a supermilitant group led by Salah Ghaled, an ex-El Fatah man denounced by the Palestine Liberation Organization as a criminal extortionist. This portrait of a modern terrorist, with his well-thumbed collection of atrocity photographs, is surely one of the nastiest that Ambler has ever drawn.
Forced by Ghaled to serve as an accomplice in the planning and execution of a major antiIsraeli guerrilla strike, Michael Howell attempts to extricate himself and his company. Though not, as he puts it, 'a man of violence', he is compelled eventually to behave very much as if he were."
