এসপিওনাজ এজেন্টরা কীভাবে কাজ করে, কীভাবে তথ্য সংগ্রহ করে ঘুষ কিংবা হুমকি প্রদশর্নের মাধ্যমে এবং প্রতিপক্ষ সেটা কীভাবে কাউন্টার দেয় তার কনক্রিট বর্ণনা আছে বইটায়।

এই করতে গিয়ে বইটা হয়ে গেছে একটু স্লো। তবে তা ধর্তব্যের মধ্যে না আনলেও চলবে৷ এসপিওনাজ প্রসেসগুলো আসলেই এরকম স্লো হওয়াই স্বাভাবিক।

মাসুদ রানা, জেমস বন্ড বা জেসন বর্ন যেরকম ঘাপাঘাপ তথ্য পেয়ে যায়, পেয়ে বর্ণিল একশনে নেমে পড়ে; বাস্তবে কি আসলেই এত সহজ এসপিওনাজ জগৎ??

না, এত সহজ নয়। একেকটা ইন্টেলের জন্য অপেক্ষা করতে হয়, দিনের পর দিন ওৎ পেতে থাকতে হয় কিংবা নজরে রাখতে হয় কোনো মানুষকে। এরপর ফাঁদ পেতে ধরার পরে যদি দেখা যায় ভুল লোককে ধরা হয়েছে, তবে পুরো প্রক্রিয়া আবার শুরু থেকে শুরু করতে হবে।

দ্বিতীয় বিশ্বযুদ্ধে ৪৪ দিনের যুদ্ধে পরাজয় ঘটে হেভিওয়েট তকমা নিয়ে দাপট দেখানো ফ্রান্সের। নাজিদের হাতে পরাজিত ফ্রান্স তখন একরকম নাজিদের ঘরবাড়িই হয়ে গেছে। সেইন্ট সেসিল শ্যাতো একসময় ফরাসি অভিজাতদের জন্য বানানো হলেও এখন সেটি জার্মানদের টেলিফোন এক্সচেঞ্জ। ফ্রান্সে আসা সমস্ত টেলিফোন কল অপারেট করা হয় এই এক্সচেঞ্জের মাধ্যমে। এই শ্যাতো উড়িয়ে দেয়া তাই মিত্রবাহিনীর জন্য গুরুত্বপূর্ণ, কারণ এগিয়ে আসছে নরমান্ডি ইনভেশনের দিন। সেসিল শ্যাতো গুড়িয়ে দিতে পারলে জার্মানদের কোমর ভেঙ্গে দেয়া যাবে।

অপারেশনের দায়িত্বে ফিমেল এজেন্ট ফেলিসিটি ক্লারিয়েট। আর তার অপোনেন্ট জার্মান মেজর ফ্রাঙ্ক ডিটার। কাহিনির বিস্তারিত আলোচনা করতে চাই না।

ফেলিসিটি ক্লারিয়েট ওরফে ফ্লিক পুরো উপন্যাস জুড়েই দারুণ উপস্থিতি দেখিয়েছে। তবে প্রোটাগনিস্ট হিসেবেই বোধহয় লেখক কিছু জায়গায় তাকে ওভারেটেড বানিয়েছেন।

মেজর ফ্রাঙ্ক ডিটার, এন্টাগনিস্ট হিসেবে আর কোনো চরিত্র মনে হয় এতোটা প্রভাব বিস্তার করতে পারতো না! স্বভাবগত জার্মান বুদ্ধিমত্তা, ধূর্ততা, রিমান্ডে তার সুকৌশলী হিংস্রতা, প্রখর ডিটেকটিভ মাইন্ড সব মিলিয়ে এই চরিত্রটিই বেশি ভালো লেগেছে।

স্পয়লার এলার্ট অন:
বইয়ের শেষে ডিটার যেভাবে হেরে যায় ফ্লিকের কাছে, এটা একদম অবাস্তব হয়েছে। যেম স্রেফ ভিলেনকে হারতে হবে, ডিটার তাই হারলো। ডিটারের পতন আরেকটু বাস্তবসম্মত করাই যেত।

স্পয়লার এলার্ট অফ।

অনুবাদ প্রসঙ্গে বলতে হয় অত্যন্ত সুন্দর অনুবাদ। ইমতিয়াজ আজাদের অনুবাদ নিয়ে সন্দেহ বা আপত্তির কোনো জায়গা নেই। অনুবাদ ৫/৫

A top-notch spy thriller - a team of badass chicks and a high-stakes mission where so much more can go wrong than right. Historical fiction doesn't get any better than this.

(I read this for my History of Espionage class during my senior year of college and liked it so much more than I expected to. I guess not all professor-assigned reading is bad.)

Nikt nie rysuje postaci jak Ken Follett. Nikt nie potrafi tak samo opowiadać. To zdecydowanie coś więcej niż thriller wojenny. Kolejna książka mojego absolutnie ukochanego autora za mną.

Full video review here : http://mysterythriller.tv/jackdaws-by...

I have always found Ken Follett too verbose but this book was an excellent fast read with a great female lead character. Flick Clairet is one of a select group of women helping the French Resistance during the final years of the Second World War. She is married to a French man, the leader of the resistance in Reims and in the opening sequence we see a group of them fail to overcome a telephone exchange that is crucial to the Germans. 

Several of the local resistance members are captured, tortured and a German intelligence officer is able to start unravelling the underground team there. He is a ruthless torturer although we also see his cultured side and his love for a Jewish mistress. He even gets terrible migraines when he has to torture people so Follett manages to create a villain who is still believable and not a caricature of the evil Nazi.

After the failure of the team, Flick is determined to get back to the exchange and blow it up, creating a critical gap in communications at the same time as the Allied forces invade. The timing is crucial and the book is basically her mission back to Reims in order to accomplish this task. The only way in is to recruit other women to act as an all-female team disguised as cleaners. In that way they can get into the exchange and blow up the communications. The women Flick recruits have been rejected by other services and are generally unsuitable, a ragtag bunch including a convicted murderer, a Cockney explosives expert thief, a lesbian aristocrat and a transvestite whose lover had been killed by the Germans. The journey the women take, the danger they get into is the crux of the story. No spoilers but as in real life, they don’t all make it.

Flick is characterized as a hard soldier in that she is able to shoot a traitor and and fight in hand to hand combat, but she also has a softer side and is able to love and think about marriage. I like these types of characters and she made the story believable. She and Dieter, the Nazi interrogator are by far the strongest characters in the book and it really was a battle between these two throughout the book.

Although you know that of course the Allies will win in the end, you still don’t know until the last pages whether the team will survive. I enjoyed the book, reading it on a windy, wild Auckland day in pretty much one sitting. It’s a thriller with an intelligent female heroine. Recommended!

Excellent roman d'espionnage.

O livro possui um ritmo de narrativa muito fluido, capítulos curtos, isso faz com que o leitor leia um atrás do outro, e quando damos por si já lemos cem páginas. Há dois pontos de vista diferente: da protagonista britânica infiltrada na França, ocupada pelo exército alemão, e o ponto de vista de um oficial nazista. E isso se torna briga de cão e gato, a agente dos Aliados tentando concluir sua missão secreta, e o oficial nazista testando desvendar e interceptar o plano vigente dos Aliados, um sem conhecer o outro.
Com cenas de humor, ação, suspense, tortura e os horrores da segunda guerra mundial, inspirado numa história real, As Espiãs do D é, sem dúvida, um ótimo livro.

Une grosse déception que ce roman de Follett. À l'aube du débarquement en Normandie, on réunit en catastrophe six femmes au pedigree disparate pour aller faire sauter un centre nerveux de télécommunication nazi à Reims. Voilà, un scénario clair et précis. Cependant, au-delà du récit en tant que tel, Follet (ou ces ghost writers) néglige totalement de développer la psychologie des personnages qui en deviennent drabes et sans reliefs. Le mauvais nazi devine tout, ne rate jamais ces hypothèses basées sur pas grand chose et arrive à peine à se faire haïr par le lecteur tellement maigre est son profil humain. Au delà de l'histoire, Le Réseau Corneille n'a pas de densité littéraire et semble avoir été écrit par un programme informatique. Raté.

A team of six women are sent from England to France just before the Allied invasion of Normandy in June, 1944. Their job is to destroy a German communications system that sends information for the bad guys from France back to Germany. The problem is, it's not that easy. They are parachuted on to enemy soil and have to work very, very hard to avoid all the traps laid for them. A terrific character named Flick Claret is opposed by an evil Gestapo torture master by the name of Dieter Franck. You can count on Ken Follett for a rollicking historical fiction saga, but when compared to two of the top ten best books I have EVER read, The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End, this one just doesn't measure up. Can't quite give it four stars.

Ken Follet achieves the nearly impossible task of creating genuine suspense about an event that is well-known, with fresh characters, clever plotting, and surprising twists on an old story. You will enjoy this book on a long plane flight, or just sitting out on your porch during the lazy days of summer. I always enjoy Ken Follet's approach to history--crackerjack pacing, strong dialogue, and a deep desire to entertain. If only all writers cared as much about their audience's enjoyment as Follet does, TV would become obsolete.

This was terrible. The writing style reads like poor quality fan fiction. This book is rife with anachronisms, unrealistic dialogue, unnecessary (and poorly written) sex scenes, stereotypical and exploitative portrayals of LGBTQ individuals, and possibly one of the worst portrayals of British secret operations efforts during WWII that I have ever read.

I randomly came across this book because it mysteriously appeared on my Kindle thanks to an Amazon Prime freebie. Avoid.

At first sight, Jackdaws seems a historical novel, but it is more a book for youngsters. as much as "Hornet Flight" it combines known facts from WWII and fiction, but this time I have more remarks to do:
- you have to be very stupid indeed to assail the castle from Sainte-Cecile, as long as Germans are the masters of the town
- there are too many temporal coincidences, as that of Michael running from the escort and going to the bar immediately after Flick
- it's childish from Paul to suddenly let his toothbrush at the door and Flick to find it...
In any case, however, the style, the action and the characters made the book a pleasant one, so three stars are a good rating indeed.

Read for the 2024 PopSugar reading challenge. This is "The 24th book by an author," or at least it's my best guess at what was his 24th book based on my counting down by publication year on his Wikipedia page. If I was off a little bit... oops.

There's the core of a great story here. We open in media res about a week before D-Day as a cell of the French resistance launches an attack against a crucial German telephone exchange that's central to the ability to communicate back to high command when the imminently-expected Allied invasion of France finally arrives. Due to faulty intelligence, the attack is a bust and its British field agent liaison, nicknamed Flick and code named Leopardess, must return to London, report on the failure, and cobble together a desperate plan to try again, all while some members of the cell have been arrested and tortured and Flick's identity is blown.

It's not hard to catch some similarity to The Dirty Dozen but with women in the elevator pitch, especially when this includes literally going into a prison and grabbing a woman who's been accused of murder and bringing her into the military for the mission. This is the only convict who's trying for a new life, though. The remainder of the Jackdaws, as they are codenamed, are women who were, for one reason or another, rejected from either military or special operations service earlier in the war. Considering this book is published in 2001, it's much more progressive in its representation than I would have expected, as within the short time that the team is brought together, two of them whirl into an F/F romance and a third member of the team is actually a drag performer who is a gay man. Although the drag bit is mined for humor somewhat, it's not "Look at these freaks" humor, it's "Flick's heteronormative assumptions led her to make mistakes" humor.

The best parts of this book are the cat-and-mouse spy vs. spy stuff between Flick and a German counterintelligence officer who happens to be in the village at the time of the initial attack on the telephone exchange. Major Franck thinks of himself as more cultured and refined than the boorish Gestapo, but he's still a Nazi who tortures people (or directs the torture of people) to make his hay and there's no question he's evil. He's also, unfortunately, clever, which does make for a lot of tension as Flick arranges the Jackdaws and eventually carries out the second attempt at the crucial mission of sabotage. With the book being dedicated to 14 British women who lost their lives on secret missions in France during World War II, and with the last page of the book being a bit from a real history that explained women were not eligible for the combat award the Military Cross, it's clear that this is something of a passion project on Follett's part to have created a story that shows the kind of heroism that was not officially allowed to exist for women when honors were given out after the war. I think on this level it was certainly a success.

Where it gets bogged down is when it attempts to add to the stakes of the book by creating a lot of personal emotional drama of who is hot for who. None of the characters involved are particularly interesting enough to either care about who they like or who likes them. I don't think it gets the interactions within the military hierarchy quite right either. At different points in the book, Flick has a meeting that includes Monty (Field Marshal Montgomery) and Franck goes and meets with Rommel and this all feels way too casual.