Blow the House Down

A superb read....and a VERY believable and viable account of what might really have happened....fiction??....you be the judge.

A very different and unique kind of espionage thriller. What is true and what is invention: Only Mr. Baer knows for sure. The first 35 pages were strange and sometimes hard to get through then the book took off and I simply could not put it down. Read the entire book in 2 nights. Mr. Baer's style is interesting in his use of wit and drama. The plot reads like a who's who of the world of Islamo-fascism international espionage during the pre-9/11 days. Mr. Baer deftly weaves common everyday news makers into a tight story of Middle Eastern Diplomacy and duplicity. He is so compelling at times that you begin to wonder what is real and what is fiction; and what is conspiracy and what is coincidence or simply storytelling. All this makes for an extremely interesting and fast paced suspense novel. Character development was average and could have used a little more depth to the main characters. Although the publicly known figures were handled very well. No gratuitous violence or sex. A very good use of contemporary facts and speculation. Highly recommended for an interesting story on additional insights into the world of Islamo terrorism.

During a television interview on the Daily Show Baer was asked if any of the book is true. He said due to the clearances he has to get with the CIA before publishing such material he has to add some fiction so that any suspecting details can be wholy written off as if they did not happen. He clearly states his opinion during the interview that we went to the wrong country to begin with but based on oil dependencies we had to go to Iraq to begin a plan of middle east control. Funny how every online store synopsis fails to give any of the information the author gave very openly during the interview. People are more fascinated with the Davinci Code than events that are taking place during this generation.

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.

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.