SACRIFICE OF ISAAC

Rating:
Summary: No Carravagio
Review: RE: AUDIO CASSETTE VERSION. I don't demand Clancy action from a "LeCarre thriller" but this novel is peopled with soul-less characters waiting...and waiting.... Each seems to have been allocated one bold action then, having exhausted the quota, spends the remainer of the story speaking in trailing-off sentences. After slogging through all this slow motion until you want to slap them silly, the sins-of-the-fathers dark secret payoff has long since lost any impact. The two readers of the audio version only add to the tedium with the female contributing an unconvincing German accent.

Rating:
Summary: A mystery-thriller with a larger purpose
Review: This book is much more than a mystery-thriller, even though it satisfies completely on that level. Gordon uses the thriller form to probe the history of modern Isreal and the political and personal choices that have been made by the Jewish people since World War II. While the Characters are fictional, the historical issues are real, and Gordon's insights and ability to explore both sides of a political situation are superb. His use of classic elements of the suspense genre is a brilliant method for probing the larger historical drama. His extended metaphor from the title, which is set in a religious and art history context, is very powerful. This is one of the few times I have made a point to remember a first author's name, so that I would be aware if he wrote another book. I look forward to reading Gordon's second book, which has just been released (September 1998).