Quiller Balalaika - Hardcover

Hall, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786712651 ISBN 13: 9780786712656

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 2003

Synopsis

Facing his nineteenth and final assignment for his top-secret British intelligence agency, Quiller endeavors to infiltrate the mafiya of post-Cold War Russia in order to take out a brilliant crime lord and British national, a mission for which he must also rescue a prisoner from a believed-inescapable gulag prison.

About this title

About the Author:

Adam Hall was one of many pseudonyms for the English writer Elleston Trevor.

From Publishers Weekly:

First published in the U.K. in 1995, shortly after the pseudonymous Hall's death from cancer, the 19th book about the British secret agent known only as Quiller, set in Boris Yeltsin's Russia, contains the same reliably exciting mixture of the exotic, the erotic and especially the dangerous as its best-selling predecessors. Hall was a smooth and accomplished craftsman who could set up an action scene with a few deft strokes and then pay it off without a wasted word. Authors of some of today's bloated thrillers could learn a lot from this book's opening pages, as an extremely reluctant Quiller finds himself being coerced into taking on a British-born criminal, Basil Seckes (aka Vasyl Sakkas), who has risen to head up the Russian mafia. Slipping into a notorious Siberian labor camp to rescue the one person with the key to a mission code-named Balalaika provides Quiller's ultimate challenge. Wonderful touches abound, from fighting techniques and the internal politics of Quiller's ultrasecret outfit to the way a small mistake (using a literal Russian translation of an American phrase, "Don't miss this great opportunity") puts Quiller in great peril. Eight years doesn't seem like such a long time, but this last Quiller outing sadly reminds us of how far we've come from a golden age of adventure fiction.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0786712651
• ISBN 13: 9780786712656
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240