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Labyrinth Makers 2

THE ALAMUT AMBUSH is probably not best read episodically as an audio book where you can't easily turn back the pages to check details.

Like the first in the series, THE LABYRINTH MAKERS, the plot starts off simply enough but soon drops into complexities involving British, European, and Middle Eastern espionage agents. The background is the apparent resolution of the Arab- Israeli conflict (1967) with a peace that appears to resolve nothing and suit nobody.

I did not particularly enjoy this novel as it, too quickly for me, became a mixture of fact and fiction, and my knowledge of the period was really too shaky for me to be able to separate the two. For an audio version of the book there are really too many foreign sounding names, and the main British manipulator David Audley does not appeal as a character.

So for me, not a satisfactory read, because far too often I was totally out of my depth. But I can understand that readers looking for espionage style fiction along the lines of John Le Carre would have found the hard print versions of this series very appealing. ( )

I watched "The Prince of Persia" the other day and all the time I wondered where I first heard the name Alamut. Took me five days to remember this spy thriller and I still do not remember much about the plot, except that the main protagonist was a professor of strategic studies. I liked it well enough to continue with the other books, but in the end I threw out the entire series because I had to make room on the shelves, and the constant references to Kipling became irritating. It would seem that a total culling is unwise, one should at least keep the first book to remind oneself of the reasons why...

On re-reading this after thirty years I find that it has aged amazingly well. Of course, I misremembered lots of details, such as Audley's job: he is a history don working for British Intelligence. But the intricate plotting and the deviousness of the minds at work is better than the average spy thriller.
ETA ( )

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