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Summary
Summary
Attorney Calvin Dexter hangs his shingle in a quiet New Jersey town, has a reasonably successful practice, and takes the hills strong while triathalon training. But Dexter is no ordinary man.
***
The summer before he goes to college, Ricky Colenso travels to Bosnia to volunteer as an aid worker. A few weeks later, he disappears and is never heard from again. A family grieves and is offered little hope--in the fog of that horrible time and place, the killer, too, has vanished.
***
Or so it would seem. For in a world that has forgotten right and wrong, there are few like Cal Dexter who can settle the score. And so, years later, a worldwide chase is on and Dexter begins to draw a net around the killer. But this time CIA agent Paul Devereux must find a way to stop Dexter before his quest for vengeance throws the world into chaos.
***
A heart-stopping novel of murder and mystery, double-cross and triple-cross, old loyalties and new hatreds, Avenger has all of Frederick Forsyth's page-turning trademarks.
Author Notes
Frederick Forsyth was born in Ashford, England on August 25, 1938. At age seventeen, he decided he was ready to start experiencing life for himself, so he left school and traveled to Spain. While there he briefly attended the University of Granada before returning to England and joining the Royal Air Force. He served with the RAF from 1956 to 1958, earning his wings when he was just nineteen years old.
He left the RAF to become a reporter for the Eastern Daily Press, Reuters News Agency, and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). While with the BBC, he was sent to Nigeria to cover an uprising in the Biafra region. As he learned more about the conflict, he became sympathetic to the rebel cause. He was pulled from Nigeria and reassigned to London when he reported this viewpoint. Furious, he resigned and returned to Nigeria as a freelance reporter, eventually writing The Biafra Story and later, Emeka, a biography of the rebel leader Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu.
Upon his return to England in 1970, Forsyth began writing fiction. His first novel, The Day of the Jackal, won an Edgar Allan Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America. His other works include The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, The Fourth Protocol, Devil's Alternative, The Negotiator, The Deceiver, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan, The Cobra and The Fox.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Conger's coldly precise narration complements the riveting prologue to Forsyth's latest thriller, which describes the ghastly murder of a young aid worker in 1995 Bosnia; however, his impersonal approach isn't as effective during the exposition-laden first half. This plodding segment consists of an excessively detailed search for the killer, interspersed with lengthy segments describing protagonist Calvin Dexter's background, from his inception and eventual service in Vietnam to his public career as a New Jersey attorney with a sub-rosa practice as Avenger, an astonishingly capable righter of wrongs. Forsyth's considerable fan base may relish the hours devoted to the warm-up, but less patient listeners will be tempted to fast forward to the novel's second half, when Avenger is hired to find and capture Zoran Zilic, a Serbian criminal ensconced beyond the reach of free world law enforcement. Once Dexter locates Zilic's seemingly impenetrable lair, both author and reader quicken their pace. Grueling physical challenges, chilling escapes, a splendid final surprise and a plot development involving none other than Osama bin Laden compensate for the novel's less-than-thrilling early padding. Simultaneous release with the St. Martin's/Dunne hardcover (Forecasts, July 28). (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The great Forsythe of 1971's The Day of the Jackal returns (more recently, the polished tales of The Veteran, 2001), flourishing a well-researched thriller set on the world's bloodiest stages. Readers dazed by Forsyth's terrific flow of detail will wonder where it's all going as chapter after chapter floods by, diverges into a superabundant new bed of fine backgrounding that starts in WWII, passes through the blood-soaked puzzles of Vietnam, goes to the breakdown of tripartite Yugoslavia, and then to South America today. But, as Forsyth knows, when you grab a tiger by the tail, you're in business. Even so, Avenger is far less well focused than things were with Jackal out to kill De Gaulle. At heart this story turns on Pete Dexter, now 51, a bounty hunter of the most elevated and shrouded heights, supposedly a ruggedly physical small-town Pennsylvania lawyer who keeps himself in trim for a triathlon but whose real center of operations is a small dark Manhattan apartment from which he goes out after big game whenever he answers an ad in Vintage Airplane magazine: "AVENGER. Wanted. Serious offer. No price ceiling. Please call." Back in WWII, Steve Edmond, following his time as a Canadian fighter pilot with the RAF, becomes a billionaire mining magnate. Much later, his grandson, 20, stricken by TV images of starving and dying Bosnians, pays for his own passage for a summer with a relief agency feeding the Serbs, Croats and Bosnians--but is murdered by Serbs in the countryside. Pete Dexter, trained in Vietnam as a Tunnel Rat, tracking Viet Cong through hundreds of miles of pitch black tunnels, who later has become the Avenger and fulfilled many dark missions, is hired by Edmond to avenge his grandson by taking out the Serbian Zoran Zilic, Milosevich's sadistic henchman, now a gang lord in South America's Republic of San Martin. The pages burn by, leaving a haze. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The Day of the Jackal, The Dogs of War, The Odessa File--these Forsyth blockbusters helped define the international conspiracy thriller. Forsyth's newest novel, his fourteenth, could well return him to those lofty heights. Once again, his crisp narration leads readers through labyrinths of criminal and espionage plots and through land mines of warfare, historical, contemporary, and threatening (the book stops on September 10, 2001). One of the amazing features of Forsyth's writing is the way he spotlights seemingly random, unconnected events, usually involving armed conflict, and then gradually weaves them all together into a seamless plot. This time out, World War II, Vietnam, Bosnia, and Cambodia take turns commanding center stage, held together by two protagonists: a middle-aged lawyer and an aging business tycoon, who have both suffered devastating losses. The tycoon's loss, that of his grandson on a relief mission in Bosnia, becomes subsumed in the mission of attorney Calvin Dexter, grieving father and former 'Nam tunnel rat, whose mission in life is to bring justice to those who have gotten away with murder. Perhaps the most fascinating part of the book is the in-depth chronicle (based on real-life stories of surviving veterans) of the excruciating, perilous work of the tunnel rats in ferreting out the Vietcong in their vast underground lairs. Forsyth's extraordinary care with detail, his solid voice, and his exquisite pacing make this a totally engrossing thriller. --Connie Fletcher Copyright 2003 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Unassuming attorney Calvin Dexter bumps around his empty suburban home, waiting for a chance to exact horrible revenge for wrongs done to him years ago. It's up to CIA Agent Kevin McBride to stop him. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.