Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
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.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Three bald tires....
Customer Rating:
I enjoy and am educated by the non fiction work of Robert Baer. I am recommending that he maintain and nourish his relationship with non-fiction. The book never quite gets traction. I finally surrendered about fifty pages from the end. The peripheral characters are pointless, the plot is predictable and formulated, and there is a drought of suspense. Other than that, it was perfect.
Very interesting book
Customer Rating:
I had the feeling reading this book that I was being let in on a secret that many want to keep hidden from public consumption. That is either the case or Mr. Baer has written a very believable novel. I don't know which to believe. It was well written and compelling. One of the better spy novels written by a real spy. You couldn't ask for more. This is a book that you will have to read between the lines to fully get everything out of it.
painfully SLooooooooW
Customer Rating:
Most reviews here are concerned with is this fact or fiction.
To me the only important question is WAS IT ENJOYABLE? To that question I'd have to say barley enjoyable. It lacks action, it is dull, predictable, very slow, and the charcters are un-interesting.
Bottom line I can't recommend it, sorry.
Blow the House Down: A book that you can't put down!
Customer Rating:
Robert Baer writes the truth, in this "fictional novel", about what really happened on 9/11. He is a bold, honest individual who deeply cares about his country and the absolutely necessary job of running agents. The spy business cannot exist on satellite views and wire tapping alone. When operatives such as Baer, risk their lives for accumulating accurate national security information, there must be leaders who follow through with this information on behalf of the American public--not to enrich their own personal pockets.
Robert Baer keeps his finger on the pulse of the truth and he still works in the Middle East, to this day, as a journalist for Time. Heidi Hamilton
A blend of fiction and non-fiction in a purplish hue
Customer Rating:
Like many good novels, Robert Baer's debut blends fiction with reality (or what may have occurred if we only knew about it). His premise of what happened behind 9-11 is a timely, although already well-trodden, subject.
Mr. Baer's writing keeps the reader moving through the pages at a good clip and drags only in a few places. However, the descriptions of the protagonists and their spy tradecraft verge into the purplish and breathless variety, as is often the case in such a genre.
For another spy novel that is set in the modern-day Middle East (and in Saudi Arabia, in particular), you would probably enjoy SAUDI MATCH POINT, which is available online from Blacksmith Books. Unlike Baer's "Blow the House Down", SAUDI MATCH POINT uses a pared-down, no nonsense style of storytelling that artfully incorporates the mood and sinister setting of a foreign land. It does not resort to hyperboles ("the smartest", "the fastest", "the handsomest" etc) that frequently characterize the throw-away variety of today's thrillers.
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