Pearl's Picks for October
Pearl's Picks provides monthly reading suggestions from Nancy Pearl, the most widely known librarian of our time. These richly diverse book suggestions provide great reading experiences for readers of all ages and interests.
The Unknown Soldier
by Gerald Seymour
Gerald Seymour's exciting, indeed, almost irresistible The Unknown Soldier moves the spy novel ever more decisively in the direction it's been going — no more bad Russians, good-bye le Carré's Karla, and hello terrorists.
In Seymour's case, the search for a suspected terrorist, a detainee mistakenly released from prison on Guantanamo, takes place in the Empty Quarter of the Saudi Arabian desert, a place so alien, foreign, and inherently dangerous that only the Bedouin tribesmen can exist there. But American and British agents believe that a member of Al-Qaeda is crossing the sands with a load of Stinger missiles and the murder of Westerners on his mind. Can all that superior American technology locate him in the empty vastness of the Rub' al Khali, as the desert area is known?
Like all good spy novels, this raises important ancillary issues: do two wrongs ever make a right? Is murder justified in the name of patriotism? Is it ever right to betray your country? Seymour's characters are three-dimensional, the plot moves along smartly (great for an airplane trip), and the politics are enlightening. (Another novel with the Rub' al Khali as its setting is Josephine Tey's The Singing Sands, one of my favorites of her Inspector Alan Grant mysteries — see below for another one of my favorite Tey novels.)