David Ignatius

The Bank of Fear is your pretty standard spy-thriller novel, set mostly in London, and centered on Middle Eastern players and politics. There's lots and lots of money, murder, secrets, the usual.

For being 450 pages, this was really a quick read. It was easy to get into - and keep going. I also appreciated the level of information given relating to Middle Eastern politics and the computer hacking as well; Ignatius reached what - to me, at least - was a good balance between explaining enough for someone with a very modest background in the Middle East, without being too detailed or expository for the genre.

My gripe about halfway through this book was that that two main characters who have gotten tangled up in this really dangerous affair have apparently never seen a spy movie. Ever. Even though Lina knows exactly how dangerous her boss is, and Sam purportedly knows everyone in the Arab financial world - and his father was CIA - they continue to call each other on their regular phone lines, and even meet at her apartment, even after they know they're being watched. Dumb.

Also, the character focus felt unbalanced. To start with, it seemed that Lina and Sam would be even-ish protagonists, but as the story went on, Lina became the main character, and Sam was only a supporting role when he was needed. It seemed like his role wasn't fully fleshed out.… (lisätietoja)

I'd previously read "The Quantum Spy" (good/very good) and "The Director" (pretty good) by this author, but after those two, this one was a very big disappointment - poor characterisation and the idea of highly realistic video fakes, while interesting, is not explored in a very interesting way here. Felt to me a bit like the author was just churning another one out for the sake of it. I guess it depends what you want from your spy books - if you are happy with pretty standard thriller fare, then maybe this will do it for you and perhaps I am being a bit harsh on it. But what I liked about "The Quantum Spy" in particular was that it looked at aspects of the espionage world that have not been written about all that much by others (e.g. quantum computing and China's MSS) - so it felt a cut above your average espionage thriller.… (lisätietoja)