Thursday, December 26, 2013

William Brown’s “Aim True, My Brothers”


Ibrahim Al-Bari is highly skilled terrorist, trained in Afghanistan and Iraq. His last operation in Israel was both a success for attacking a bus in a rural area but also a failure for the death of his brothers. He’s determined to punish America. He wants to do it in as a spectacular way as possible. And so he arrives in America via Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., and implementation of his plan gets underway. He’s barely through U.S. Customs when he makes his first killing. Al-Bari knows how to use an ice pick

Because of his connections with security at the Egyptian Embassy, FBI agent Eddie Barnett learns that Al-Bari is in the country under an assumed name (and passport). He teams up with Moustapha Khalidi, chief of security for the embassy, and they begin looking for the needle in the haystack that is Al-Bari in America.

Barnett and Khalidi are joined by Rachel Ullman, a colonel in the Israeli army and an agent for Mossad. Ullman, scarred by the deaths of her husband and daughter, has become a lethal killing machine.

The three don’t have much time. The target is the President, and the plan is to launch the attack while he’s making a major (and televised) speech at Yorktown. But they don’t know that; they only know an operation is planned.

And so writer William Brown swerves another espionage thriller in Aim True, My Brothers.
And this one is just as “hang on by your fingernails” a suspense story as his The Undertaker, Winner Lose All, Thursday at Noon, and Amongst My Enemies. I’ve read them all and they’re all riveting works.

Brown swiftly moves the story from the back streets of Washington, D.C., northern Israel, to Boston, the White House, and historic Virginia. The reader is given the story through the action of Al-Bari the terrorist as he moves toward the culmination of his plan and how the three agents begin to track him. And Brown mixes in international politics and a nice dose of betrayal.

Aim True, My Brothers is fast-paced and well written, with a sense of immediacy and a story that could have been taken from today’s headlines.


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Photograph: Yorktown Visitors Center, Yorktown, Virginia.

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