Blow the House Down: A Novel
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Product Description
Former CIA operative Robert Baer pushes fiction to the absolute limit in this riveting and unnervingly plausible alternative history of 9/11.
Veteran CIA officer Max Waller has long been obsessed with the abduction and murder of his Agency mentor. Though years of digging yield the name of a suspect—an Iranian math genius turned terrorist—the trail seems too cold to justify further effort. Then Max turns up a photograph of the man standing alongside Osama bin Laden and a mysterious westerner whose face has been cut out, feeding Max’s suspicion. When the first official to whom Max shows the photo winds up dead, the out-of-favor agent suddenly finds himself the target of dark forces within the intelligence community who are desperate to muzzle him.
Eluding a global surveillance net, Max—in the summer of 2001—begins tracking the spore of a complex conspiracy, meeting clandestinely with suicide bombers and Arab royalty and ultimately realizing the Iranian he’d sought for a decades-old crime is actually at the nexus of a terrifying plot.
Showing off dazzling tradecraft and an array of richly textured backdrops, and filled with real names and events, Blow the House Down deftly balances fact and possibility to become the first great thriller to spring from the war on terrorism.
Also available as a Random House AudioBook and an eBook
From the Hardcover edition.
Veteran CIA officer Max Waller has long been obsessed with the abduction and murder of his Agency mentor. Though years of digging yield the name of a suspect—an Iranian math genius turned terrorist—the trail seems too cold to justify further effort. Then Max turns up a photograph of the man standing alongside Osama bin Laden and a mysterious westerner whose face has been cut out, feeding Max’s suspicion. When the first official to whom Max shows the photo winds up dead, the out-of-favor agent suddenly finds himself the target of dark forces within the intelligence community who are desperate to muzzle him.
Eluding a global surveillance net, Max—in the summer of 2001—begins tracking the spore of a complex conspiracy, meeting clandestinely with suicide bombers and Arab royalty and ultimately realizing the Iranian he’d sought for a decades-old crime is actually at the nexus of a terrifying plot.
Showing off dazzling tradecraft and an array of richly textured backdrops, and filled with real names and events, Blow the House Down deftly balances fact and possibility to become the first great thriller to spring from the war on terrorism.
Also available as a Random House AudioBook and an eBook
From the Hardcover edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The strength of this story comes from the author's in depth knowledge of the subject. Just as many of the best spy novel writers, Baer was a "spook" himself. The tangled web of intrigue stitches together real and imaginary links in the complex relationship between the CIA, national governments and terrorist groups. The chimera of middle east politics leads our hero to a situation where his friends are his enemies and vice versa. There is enough Bond like action to make it fun, while asking deeper questions of the "Realpolitik" of the middle east and the CIA's role there.
8 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book is superb! Robert Baer showed us he could write thrilling and un-put-downable non-fiction in his two previous books. Now, he has written a novel which marks him as one of the great intelligence thriller writers. John Le Carre, your nemesis has arrived!
If you liked the movie "Syriana" (based on Baer's earlier books), then you should love this book.
And the best thing is: there's enough left untied at the end for multiple sequels with the same characters! Let's hope Baer is working on them as we speak.
If you liked the movie "Syriana" (based on Baer's earlier books), then you should love this book.
And the best thing is: there's enough left untied at the end for multiple sequels with the same characters! Let's hope Baer is working on them as we speak.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
47 reviews
55 of 61 people found the following review helpful
fun to read, a few forgivable flaws
30 May 2006
Format:Hardcover
I've read Baer's two non-fiction books so I was very curious to see if he could bring this off. Overall, it's good for a first novel and fun to read--worth buying as a light summer adventure/spy novel. Briefly, the plot involves Max, a CIA case officer (whose code name is Lone Wolf) who has indeed lived up to his code name in his career and it has finally cost him; he's been put in a nothing desk job to kill time until retirement.
He has an obscession over the kidnapping and murder of Bill Buckley, the actual CIA chief in Beirut and Max's mentor back when he was early in his career (a digression: Buckley and some others mentioned in the book are real people). When he learns of an old photo showing Osama with three others, one of whom he suspects killed Buckley and another whose face has been cut out of the picture, this sets the plot in motion.
Then come many events involving the CIA turning against him, trying to frame him, and a trail of shadowy characters in the Mid-East, Switzerland, and Washington DC. Others want the photo very badly; Max wants to know the identy of the faceless person, chasing the overwhelming need to find Buckley's murderer.
Readers of this genre will like the book. The author clearly knows his territory, topically and geographically, and there is much mention of tradecraft such as spotting and evading surveillance. Weaknesses for me were a large number of characters who were introduced briefly, but not well enough to remember them when they appeared later in the plot. There were also many instances where Max is shown to have developed traits, habits, and instincts over the years which kept him alive, only to have these things fail him in lapses that were hard to swallow in such an experienced operator. And there were some small logical gaps in the plot which didn't really hurt.
The author's note at the end is almost worth the price alone. Buy the book; you'll enjoy it and can pass it on to someone else. I hope Baer keeps this up; I'm sure he'll get better.
He has an obscession over the kidnapping and murder of Bill Buckley, the actual CIA chief in Beirut and Max's mentor back when he was early in his career (a digression: Buckley and some others mentioned in the book are real people). When he learns of an old photo showing Osama with three others, one of whom he suspects killed Buckley and another whose face has been cut out of the picture, this sets the plot in motion.
Then come many events involving the CIA turning against him, trying to frame him, and a trail of shadowy characters in the Mid-East, Switzerland, and Washington DC. Others want the photo very badly; Max wants to know the identy of the faceless person, chasing the overwhelming need to find Buckley's murderer.
Readers of this genre will like the book. The author clearly knows his territory, topically and geographically, and there is much mention of tradecraft such as spotting and evading surveillance. Weaknesses for me were a large number of characters who were introduced briefly, but not well enough to remember them when they appeared later in the plot. There were also many instances where Max is shown to have developed traits, habits, and instincts over the years which kept him alive, only to have these things fail him in lapses that were hard to swallow in such an experienced operator. And there were some small logical gaps in the plot which didn't really hurt.
The author's note at the end is almost worth the price alone. Buy the book; you'll enjoy it and can pass it on to someone else. I hope Baer keeps this up; I'm sure he'll get better.
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Loved it, couldn't put it down
22 Jun 2006
Format:Hardcover
If you enjoyed Baer's narrative style from See No Evil and Sleeping with the Devil, I highly recommend this book. If you are looking for a great, impossible-to-put-down political thriller, I highly recommend this book. Baer picks up all the loose ends that the 9/11 Commission ignored or dismissed and paints an alternative history of WHY 9/11 happened, not WHAT happened (i.e. he doesn't say that the WTC fell due to a controlled demolition or that the Pentagon was hit by a missile). Whether you consider Baer's explanation to be plausible or not, the book highlights the lack of understanding we still have about that day and the actors involved and their motives. Furthermore, the use of real people, companies, and places (especially DC) lends an additional richness to the book.
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Great novel, paranoia at its best
18 Jun 2006
Format:Hardcover
A twisted plot that by and by makes the reader truly feel being watched himself, as new leads again and again leave him bracing for assessing the chance of Robert Baer's First-person character to survive. Rare are the novels of the spy thriller genre that do not convey a feeling of being already in the know about how it will all end. From the outset, Baer suggests a safe assumption to the reader, only to have him get totally lost along the way.
In the event, the hunt ends on a completely surprising note in two different ways: First, the novel's main character finds out indeed, and the truth therein comes as a huge surprise to him as well the reader. Secondly, Baer suggests Iran to have had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.
Baer's experience in the tradecraft comes as an asset. There is not that much violent action, to be sure. Instead, Baer lets us look at how it feels to walk NYC streets or travel aboard an airplane being hunted by men and women of his kind. Digesting the short episodes the novel is composed of is tantamount to a veritable roller-coaster voyage into the weird and paranoid thinking undercover agents have to be trained in. It is precisely the many small real-world details of being watched that take the reader's breath away.
If there are flaws, they are of the nature every "Me, the hero"-novel falls prey to - foremost an overstretched string of luck, of less than credible happenstances, in that the hero gets to learn about new leads by chances that seem to be way off the regular life.
For instance, Baer's hero poses as a German SPIEGEL journalist arriving out of the blue to interview a Palestinian terrorist confined in the max-security wing of Israel's max-security facility. The hero does so by having entered Israel on a stolen German passport. Now, do we believe this: Israel's authorities not being aware of whoever writes for the SPIEGEL, them not checking with that magazine (and their own services, for that matter) whether it in fact sent someone named Mr. Arends, them not checking into every database there is once someone wants to contact the most important terrorist on short notice? On top of which the purported journalist, after his prison visit, gets to talk to the most wanted Palestinian terrorist still roaming free by similar happenstance, too. Now, that is truly luck.
However, those flaws do not do the novel any real harm. To learn about what it might be like to live in the Agency's darker outer orbit, Baer did a great job to make us feel the invisible heat.
In the event, the hunt ends on a completely surprising note in two different ways: First, the novel's main character finds out indeed, and the truth therein comes as a huge surprise to him as well the reader. Secondly, Baer suggests Iran to have had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.
Baer's experience in the tradecraft comes as an asset. There is not that much violent action, to be sure. Instead, Baer lets us look at how it feels to walk NYC streets or travel aboard an airplane being hunted by men and women of his kind. Digesting the short episodes the novel is composed of is tantamount to a veritable roller-coaster voyage into the weird and paranoid thinking undercover agents have to be trained in. It is precisely the many small real-world details of being watched that take the reader's breath away.
If there are flaws, they are of the nature every "Me, the hero"-novel falls prey to - foremost an overstretched string of luck, of less than credible happenstances, in that the hero gets to learn about new leads by chances that seem to be way off the regular life.
For instance, Baer's hero poses as a German SPIEGEL journalist arriving out of the blue to interview a Palestinian terrorist confined in the max-security wing of Israel's max-security facility. The hero does so by having entered Israel on a stolen German passport. Now, do we believe this: Israel's authorities not being aware of whoever writes for the SPIEGEL, them not checking with that magazine (and their own services, for that matter) whether it in fact sent someone named Mr. Arends, them not checking into every database there is once someone wants to contact the most important terrorist on short notice? On top of which the purported journalist, after his prison visit, gets to talk to the most wanted Palestinian terrorist still roaming free by similar happenstance, too. Now, that is truly luck.
However, those flaws do not do the novel any real harm. To learn about what it might be like to live in the Agency's darker outer orbit, Baer did a great job to make us feel the invisible heat.
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