Customer Reviews

Dolly and the Doctor Bird

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I beg to differ with our estimable reader who reviewed this book before me. This is a great seventies thriller, and I think would make a great movie (a la James Bond style). The part in the book about the yacht outrunning a homing bomb on a power boat is worth reading the book for alone, but the rest of the book is great too. The "doctor bird" in this book is one of Ms. Dunnett's best characters. She might appear a bit anachrinistic but this book was written in 1970 after all. B. Douglas MacRannoch is a treasure - a tough, no-nonsence girl who thought up to this time in her life, that she could manage on her own. She meets Johnson and is swept unwittingly into an espionage game that really takes her by surprise. We meet all sorts of eccentric characters - the Begum, Dr. MacRannoch's father, and a Turkish ballet dancer of all things. It's a great romp of a book, and keeps you on the edge of your seat until the end and you find out that nothing is as it seems.

This book is sometimes published as OPERATION NASSAU; all the "Dolly" series have, confusingly, alternative names. The "Dolly" series, set in present time, is a poor shadow of Dorothy Dunnett's brilliant Lymond series, or even the more convoluted and less fun Niccolo series. To be fair, she writes the lighter "Dolly" books for relaxation in between the heavy research and plotting demands of her historical novels. Nonetheless, lack of historical weight does not explain the uneven pace, inadequate characterisation and sheer absence of a "hook" which keeps a reader reading. This offering in the series is one of the worst culprits. The characters are particularly unreal. What grates with me most is the underlying assumption in this book (which plays quite a significant role in the plot) that the heroine, because she is a successful doctor, must have had a huge complex about achievement and self-worth to have been so driven as to become a professional at all. This unfortunately killed off the pleasure of what was already a fairly ho-hum reading experience for me.