"the Day of the Jackal," by Fredrick Forsyth - Book Review

It is a suspense/thriller. Forsyth wrote it more than thirty years ago. This highly acclaimed thriller won the 1972 Edgar Award for Mystery Fiction a year after it was first published. I usually do not read such books and my harsh review might be partly due to my distaste for these types of novels. The basic plot is as follows. Charles DeGualle is the much hated president of France in 1963. He has many enemies who make various attempts to kill him. However, after much failure, they hire the Jackal. This is a mysterious assassin who is notorious for his work. the Jackal devises a plan and we are glued to our seats to find out exactly how his plan will work. He is always one step ahead of the detectives . This is the best part of the story. The plan is cold, calculated and stunningly brilliant. The jackal demonstrates why he is best in his field.

There are some parts of the story, however, that seem a bit unbelievable. First, none of his political enemies are able to kill the French president. I realize that this must be a fact to set the story into motion, yet seems a bit unrealistic. From a psychological standpoint, the Jackal's behavior is quite disturbing. There is absolutely no emotion from him throughout the entire book. I catch myself asking such questions as: "What is he thinking? What is he feeling?" I did not enjoy the end of the book. Forsyth did an excellent job at building on the suspense, yet the exact outcome left me disappointed at its simplicity. I knew all along that he would not achieve success, however, since the Jackal was such a master planner, it seems a bit unlike him that the failure would happen in the way that it did. There still were brilliant parts of the book and although I did not like the main character and had many questions for and about him, I was interested enough to read the entire book in a short timeframe. Thus, it gets a 3.7* review from me. I probably won't read many suspense/thriller spy espionage type of books, because my interests lie elsewhere. However, I am glad that I read this book. It was quite interesting, just not enough to entice me into reading similar books.