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Title details for Blow the House Down by Robert Baer - Available

Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer
Paul Michael
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
2 of 2 copies available
Former CIA operative Robert Baer pushes fiction to the absolute limit in this riveting and unnervingly plausible alternative history of 9/11.
Veteran CIA officer Max Waller has long been obsessed with the abduction and murder of his Agency mentor. Though years of digging yield the name of a suspect—an Iranian math genius turned terrorist—the trail seems too cold to justify further effort. Then Max turns up a photograph of the man standing alongside Osama bin Laden and a mysterious westerner whose face has been cut out, feeding Max’s suspicion. When the first official to whom Max shows the photo winds up dead, the out-of-favor agent suddenly finds himself the target of dark forces within the intelligence community who are desperate to muzzle him.
Eluding a global surveillance net, Max—in the summer of 2001—begins tracking the spore of a complex conspiracy, meeting clandestinely with suicide bombers and Arab royalty and ultimately realizing the Iranian he’d sought for a decades-old crime is actually at the nexus of a terrifying plot.
Showing off dazzling tradecraft and an array of richly textured backdrops, and filled with real names and events, Blow the House Down deftly balances fact and possibility to become the first great thriller to spring from the war on terrorism.
Also available as a Random House AudioBook and an eBook

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 6, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415945292
      • File size: 263835 KB
      • Duration: 09:09:39

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Paul Michael blows the house down with a crisp, fast-paced reading of this thriller, which is a part-fact, part-fiction prequel to the events of 9/11. CIA operative Max Waller, who has obsessed for years over the murder of an American agent in Lebanon, uncovers a plot that involves bin Laden, Hezbollah, as well as several other radical factions from the Middle East. One of the subplots involves the attempted destruction of airliners with explosives disguised as harmless liquids. As Waller uncovers layer after layer of duplicity, Michael appropriately ratchets up the tension. His classy, melodic voice does justice to most of the characters, and his French pronunciations are near perfect. A.L.H. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 13, 2006
      Former CIA agent Baer, author of the memoir See No Evil
      (2002), which inspired the film Syriana
      , offers the same closely observed details of intelligence work and life in his first novel, a political thriller. Unfortunately, a surfeit of subplots and dozens of characters slow the action down. One day in June 2001, veteran CIA case officer Max Waller is crudely and coldly removed from his office and job in Langley, Va. On September 11, 2001, what Waller has discovered sifting through live secrets and dead agents from Washington to Tehran comes together into a plausible alternate theory of how and why the Twin Towers were targeted. Whether or not readers buy into that theory, they're sure to enjoy Baer's jaundiced view of his former employer. When Waller finds himself being trailed by some obvious outsiders, he thinks, "The FBI was capable of screwing up... but neither it nor the local police nor anyone else I could think of in this nation or abroad would be idiotic enough to field a white surveillance team in Harlem. For that, you needed incompetence on a colossal scale. Langley had to be behind it." Author tour.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      John Rubinstein is in his element performing Robert Baer's spy novel. The story of evil inside the very spy agencies charged with protecting our safety is compelling, and Rubinstein's no-nonsense delivery adds to the tension. Rubinstein captures the mood and accents of a dozen characters without making any sound like caricature. He makes it simple to follow the complex story of spies, counterspies, and plots within plots, which begin in the Middle East and may lead to 9/11. It's interesting to note that Baer is a former CIA operative who spent 20 years fighting Middle East terrorist groups. He knows what he's talking about. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 4, 2006
      Rubinstein reads Baer's first novel, aglimmer with purple prose and intelligence world double-dealing, with a tough-guy grunt and a taste for broad comic voices. Baer intends his novel as a fictionalized version of his own experiences as a career CIA officer (his memoir See No Evil
      was the inspiration for the movie Syriana
      ), incorporating real-life figures like FBI man John O'Neill (who died in the World Trade Center) into his story of a Baer-like intelligence agent who finds himself trapped in a web of global terrorist maneuvering. Rubinstein's reading is solid, but listeners will undoubtedly find that the most fascinating aspect of this audiobook is Baer's chat with author Seymour Hersh. Two experts of the shadowy intelligence underworld, they discuss the relationship between Baer's characters and real figures, and Baer's stated intention to prod the uninformed reader into learning more about the secret workings of the intelligence world. Baer and Hersh deliberately leave things vague, but their hints about the relationship between Baer's book and reality are tantalizing. Simultaneous release with the Crown hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 13).

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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