Al-Qaeda Strikes Again [Paperback]

I'm not usually a negative guy. I like many different types of books, and I enjoy different genres and story lines. I'm not an unsympathetic individual when it comes to flaws or things that are poorly done, provided they're not the center of what I'm reading. Believe me, I'm not usually the only negative reviewer of something.

This book is an attempt at a suspense novel, written by a guy who spent his life in the business world. He seems earnest, and a nice guy, and he sent me a copy of this book for free. That of course creates an obligation on my part towards him. Nice thing for him to do, but unfortunately the book he sent is pretty bad.

First, the author has had this book produced (I presume) by a self-published press, and either he or they chose an odd, sans serif font that's rather hard to read.

Second we get to the story. I couldn't follow what was going on very well, but it seems that there are murky al Qaeda types lurking around, and they commit suicide when they are about to be caught. The methods of the suicides are improbably, and this is just the beginning of the implausibility of the plot and character's actions. The author seems to think it would be fun to have Arab terrorists act as if they were Soviet spies from the Cold War (only more competent). For the most part, from what I've read, that's not the case.

Premise aside, this still isn't a good book. A premise of this sort doesn't by itself kill a book. Ken Goddard's classic "Balefire" used a variant of the same premise a quarter century ago, and is a very good book. The difference is that Goddard wrote reasonably good dialog and action, and so the book was a joy to read. Binkley, by contrast, has wooden dialog, cardboard cut-out characters, and a prose style that sort of runs together and assumes you know things. Alternatively, he repeats things when he doesn't need to. There's an episode where someone records a series of phone conversations, and the author sees fit to repeat those conversations not once, or twice, but three times before he has one of the characters replay the recordings again without reprising them. The writing is so bad that at one point he uses the word accommodations when he clearly meant (from context) commendations. Apparently there wasn't an editor around.

The characters are ridiculous, and poorly conceived, poorly portrayed, and they don't act as people would in real life. The dialog is wooden and unbelievable, and people say things that they wouldn't in normal life, discuss things with people that they normally wouldn't, etc. One of the main characters is a guy who works for the NSA in a Top Secret facility, and on a first date he tells his new girlfriend. Now this might be because he's an idiot, but the girlfriend, of course, is a terrorist, and of course things deteriorate from there.

Bad dialog, bad characters, poorly constructed plot, bad unbelievable premise...you get the idea. I didn't see anything here worth recommending to anyone.

I usually read British mystery books, but I had been told by more than a few people al-Qaeda Strikes Again is a 'must read'.
This book has everything going on. There's murder, assassination plots, suicide, terrorists, the C.I.A., the F.B.I., romance and is sometimes funny.
At first the events seem random but soon it all pulls together, the result is an exciting and entertaining book.

Will terrorists strike the U.S. again? Experts say yes. Will we stop them? Maybe.

Bill Binkley's debut thriller, "al-Queda Strikes Again," challenges America's top analysts and FBI agents to solve that problem. Failure is not an option.

"al-Qaeda Strikes Again" reminds me a lot of Frederick Forsyth's first novel, "The Day of the Jackal" (one of my all-time favorites). Forsyth's police Inspector Claude Lebel and the "old boys' network" of foreign intelligence and police contacts must stop the assassination of French president, Charles de Gaulle, without knowing who, when, where or how. In Binkley's book, it's the Jackal times twenty.

Twenty U.S. cities are targeted for catastrophe that will make 9/11 pale in comparison and all U.S. intelligence has is the list of cities. It will take everything that crack analyst Rennie Jordon and Special Agent Wayne Kelly and their teams can figure out and do to stop the devastation from happening.

The book has flaws, but these never stop "al-Qaeda Stikes Again" from beating a rhythmic tattoo (like the theme from "Jaws") toward an exciting, page-flipping, it-could-happen climax.