Jackdaws

Jackdaws by Ken Follett

Fiction/Spy-War/Adult/454 Pages

"Two weeks before D-Day, the French Resistance attack a chateau containing a telephone exchange vital to German communications - but the building is heavily guarded and the attack fails disastrously.

Felicity "Flick" Clairet, a young British secret agent, proposes a daring new plan: she will parachute into France with an all-woman team known as the "Jackdaws" and they will penetrate the chateau in disguise. But, unknown to Flick, Rommel has assigned a brilliant, ruthless Intelligence colonel, Dieter Franck, to crush the Resistance. And Dieter is on Flicks' trail . . ."

Review

A disappointing book on a number of levels. It reads like a B-grade movie, sort of like a female version of The Dirty Dozen, except there are only six of them and the characters aren't as deep. In the long run, a lot of the characters don't ring true, particularly that of Dieter Franck. A torturer with a moral conscience? And the relationships between the characters come across as disjointed and erratic, sort of like actors lacking direction and not knowing what to do with their hands.

Also, there is a glaring historical error, with Flick referring to her love interest as Einstein when he doesn't get that she wants him.

Over all, the book feels like it was hastily slapped together, in order to meet a deadline, or the author was just paying lip service to the story. Which, in itself, is possibly the biggest disappointment of all. Anybody familiar with Ken Follett will know his masterpiece "Eye Of The Needle", a wonderful book. Having read that, one would expect "Jackdaws" to a be lot better.

My Rating: