Scorpion Trail: A deadly mission to hunt a deadly killer...

By the time I was half way through "Scorpion Trail" I was thinking that the story was rather contrived and irritating, and that three stars would be enough. Fortunately, towards the end of the book it all came together, and the story became very exciting and appealing, and worth four stars. My reservations were due to several factors. The start of the book is rather strange and the main character seemed like he was keeping a distance from his own life. There are many coincidences that make the plot hard to swallow, and there were a few unbelievable things happening, like a foursome of top-level intelligence agents holding a summit meeting in a car. The story is set during the fighting in ex-Yugoslavia, and is about an attempt to identify a war criminal who has killed all of the inhabitants of a Moslem village. At the same time the main character and his former girlfriend smuggle an orphaned child out of ex-Yugoslavia and give her to a potential adoptive family of Americans living in Germany. But then the war criminal tracks the child down with the intention of killing her, and to top it all off the main character is being targeted by an IRA gunman. In conclusion, another solid thriller by Geoffrey Archer, although one that starts rather slowly and contains some irritating elements. Rennie Petersen