Customer Reviews

Marching Season Pb

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Against the backdrop of the Good Friday Accords of 1998, this 1999 thriller explores several groups which have reason to want the peace process to fail so that they can accomplish their own agendas. Partisans of the Republic and partisans of the Union have come to an agreement regarding peace and power-sharing, but the new Ulster Freedom Brigade believes that all sides have sold out, and they are willing to murder Catholics and Protestants alike as they continue the sectarian violence. At the same time an international group, the secret Society for International Development and Cooperation, consisting of powerful business and security officials from around the world, decides to use the uncertainties in Ulster to further their own business interests.

Michael Osbourne, formerly with the CIA, is lured out of retirement to promote the peace process and to guard his father-in-law, Douglas Cannon, who has just been appointed US ambassador to the Court of St. James. Osbourne has experienced personal danger, having escaped an assassination attempt the previous year, and he knows his way around Ireland. The Society, however, contacts the man who previously tried to kill him, a Russian known only as October, and hires him to stop Osbourne and the Ambassador and end the peace process.

Though the mystery associated with Ulster is exciting and filled with authentic detail, including some of the real characters associated with the Accords, the novel wanders into other, unrelated areas. The Society for International Development and Cooperation includes powerful and amoral renegades in high positions in the US, Israel, the UK, and other countries, and as the action shifts to Egypt, France, Greece, and other countries, the subplots shift the focus away from Ireland and into an international netherworld.

The staccato sentence structure, while effective for conveying action, gets wearisome here because there is so much action, not all of it related to Ireland, and Silva's descriptive abilities, so obvious in some of his other novels, are subordinated here to the action. One gets some insight into October and how he became the assassin he is, but Osbourne, while clever, remains somewhat indistinct from other thriller "heroes." This Silva novel lacks the unity and intense characterization one associates with the Gabriel Allon series, and Ari Shamron, Allon's mentor, is a sinister SIDC character here. Still, the novel is fun to read, a fast-paced thriller which does give some insights into the complexities of Ulster and the difficulties of the peace process. Mary Whipple

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