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sandin954's review against another edition
3.0
When the American Ambassador to Yugoslavia is kidnapped the State department calls on professional go-between Philip St. Ives to handle the exchange. Smoothly written with just the right amount of cynicism and action.
hpuphd's review against another edition
5.0
This 1971 mostly forgotten thriller about politics and international intrigue is a grade-A example of how care and intelligence can elevate a premise. Ross Thomas puts imagination into seemingly every sentence: “They stood near the Pan Am counter at Kennedy International, their eyes protected from the dark February night by sunglasses, and talked to each other without moving their lips, like a couple of tired old cons in a prison run by Warner Brothers.” And: “They really should try as hard to keep sensitive people out of public relations as they do to keep embezzlers out of banks.” This care extends to the personalities of the characters, the mapping of the plot, and the humor, all of which are constantly surprising. But the best dimension may be the recurrent idea that “the system” under which the USA and other countries operate (a veneer of respectability hiding rampant rascality) is a corruption to resist at all costs and one that will probably still harm you. It occurred to me while reading this smart novel that some will certainly dislike it (as I would have at a younger age) for all the reasons that commend it. A book that embraces rather than avoids the easiest clichés of popular fiction, if written competently, can provide the Linus-blanket comfort of unreflective reading. Fortunately, that is not what we have here.
wampusreynolds's review against another edition
4.0
Intrigue, double crosses, McGuffins and dated atttitudes abound. The setting of Tito-era Yugoslavia for a delivery of a ransom to a kidnapping (did that transfer happen?) was nice to illuminate the simmering tensions between its now different countries/ethnic groups and no one does wry prose like Ross Thomas. Ultimately it's second-tier Thomas which is still a great read.
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