Blow the House Down: A Novel [Hardcover]

Robert Baer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 30, 2006

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

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Baer, the American intelligence officer on whom the central character in the film Syriana was modeled, makes his fiction debut with this shrewd and rather alarming exploration of events surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks. To call the book an "alternate history" conjures up notions of science fiction, which this novel definitely is not, but, on the other hand, to assume that Baer is postulating that what happens here actually happened in real life is equally inappropriate. The book is a novel and a very believable one: leave it at that. The plot, which revolves around a CIA officer whose personal investigation into Osama bin Laden takes him into dark and dangerous territory, is extremely well crafted, and it certainly doesn't hurt that the author, an expert on terrorism (and on Al-Qaeda, in particular), fills the book with the kind of detail that will make readers feel as though they have completed a crash course in international intelligence. This is the kind of stuff that could make a terrific flick, but it's doubtful that a Hollywood blockbuster could capture the subtlety that Baer brings to his story. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1ST edition (May 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400098351
• ISBN-13: 978-1400098354
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #822,683 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ROBERT BAER is the author of two New York Times bestsellers: Sleeping with the Devil, about the Saudi royal family and its relationship with the United States; and See No Evil, which recounts Baer's years as a top CIA operative. See No Evil was the basis for the acclaimed film Syriana, which earned George Clooney an Oscar for his portrayal of Baer. Baer writes regularly for Time.com and has contributed to Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He is considered one of the world's foremost authorities on the Middle East.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars fun to read, a few forgivable flaws, May 30, 2006

By 

a reader (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blow the House Down: A Novel (Hardcover)

I've read Baer's two non-fiction books so I was very curious to see if he could bring this off. Overall, it's good for a first novel and fun to read--worth buying as a light summer adventure/spy novel. Briefly, the plot involves Max, a CIA case officer (whose code name is Lone Wolf) who has indeed lived up to his code name in his career and it has finally cost him; he's been put in a nothing desk job to kill time until retirement.

He has an obscession over the kidnapping and murder of Bill Buckley, the actual CIA chief in Beirut and Max's mentor back when he was early in his career (a digression: Buckley and some others mentioned in the book are real people). When he learns of an old photo showing Osama with three others, one of whom he suspects killed Buckley and another whose face has been cut out of the picture, this sets the plot in motion.

Then come many events involving the CIA turning against him, trying to frame him, and a trail of shadowy characters in the Mid-East, Switzerland, and Washington DC. Others want the photo very badly; Max wants to know the identy of the faceless person, chasing the overwhelming need to find Buckley's murderer.

Readers of this genre will like the book. The author clearly knows his territory, topically and geographically, and there is much mention of tradecraft such as spotting and evading surveillance. Weaknesses for me were a large number of characters who were introduced briefly, but not well enough to remember them when they appeared later in the plot. There were also many instances where Max is shown to have developed traits, habits, and instincts over the years which kept him alive, only to have these things fail him in lapses that were hard to swallow in such an experienced operator. And there were some small logical gaps in the plot which didn't really hurt.

The author's note at the end is almost worth the price alone. Buy the book; you'll enjoy it and can pass it on to someone else. I hope Baer keeps this up; I'm sure he'll get better.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it, couldn't put it down, June 22, 2006

By 

J. R. Heath (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blow the House Down: A Novel (Hardcover)

If you enjoyed Baer's narrative style from See No Evil and Sleeping with the Devil, I highly recommend this book. If you are looking for a great, impossible-to-put-down political thriller, I highly recommend this book. Baer picks up all the loose ends that the 9/11 Commission ignored or dismissed and paints an alternative history of WHY 9/11 happened, not WHAT happened (i.e. he doesn't say that the WTC fell due to a controlled demolition or that the Pentagon was hit by a missile). Whether you consider Baer's explanation to be plausible or not, the book highlights the lack of understanding we still have about that day and the actors involved and their motives. Furthermore, the use of real people, companies, and places (especially DC) lends an additional richness to the book.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great novel, paranoia at its best, June 18, 2006

By 

Torsten W. Krauel "Krauel" (Washington DC, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blow the House Down: A Novel (Hardcover)

A twisted plot that by and by makes the reader truly feel being watched himself, as new leads again and again leave him bracing for assessing the chance of Robert Baer's First-person character to survive. Rare are the novels of the spy thriller genre that do not convey a feeling of being already in the know about how it will all end. From the outset, Baer suggests a safe assumption to the reader, only to have him get totally lost along the way.

In the event, the hunt ends on a completely surprising note in two different ways: First, the novel's main character finds out indeed, and the truth therein comes as a huge surprise to him as well the reader. Secondly, Baer suggests Iran to have had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.

Baer's experience in the tradecraft comes as an asset. There is not that much violent action, to be sure. Instead, Baer lets us look at how it feels to walk NYC streets or travel aboard an airplane being hunted by men and women of his kind. Digesting the short episodes the novel is composed of is tantamount to a veritable roller-coaster voyage into the weird and paranoid thinking undercover agents have to be trained in. It is precisely the many small real-world details of being watched that take the reader's breath away.

If there are flaws, they are of the nature every "Me, the hero"-novel falls prey to - foremost an overstretched string of luck, of less than credible happenstances, in that the hero gets to learn about new leads by chances that seem to be way off the regular life.

For instance, Baer's hero poses as a German SPIEGEL journalist arriving out of the blue to interview a Palestinian terrorist confined in the max-security wing of Israel's max-security facility. The hero does so by having entered Israel on a stolen German passport. Now, do we believe this: Israel's authorities not being aware of whoever writes for the SPIEGEL, them not checking with that magazine (and their own services, for that matter) whether it in fact sent someone named Mr. Arends, them not checking into every database there is once someone wants to contact the most important terrorist on short notice? On top of which the purported journalist, after his prison visit, gets to talk to the most wanted Palestinian terrorist still roaming free by similar happenstance, too. Now, that is truly luck.

However, those flaws do not do the novel any real harm. To learn about what it might be like to live in the Agency's darker outer orbit, Baer did a great job to make us feel the invisible heat.