The author, who worked as a foreign correspondent, but also as a fighter pilot or spy (he also worked in the then communist Czechoslovakia), has adventure in his blood and his main motto is the fact that he experienced it firsthand and does not suck anything so-called from the finger.
–
The Fox is a book that has two main themes. The modern Cold War between Russia and the West and the hybrid war in cyberspace. The author understood well that hacker attacks today are replacing front lines, marching soldiers and attacking tanks.
–
The main character is former British secret agent Adrian Weston. While retired, she will receive a new assignment from Her Majesty’s Government. A hacker got into the computer network of the US Pentagon, the US National Security Agency and the CIA. Because these networks made the world’s best brains, they were considered impenetrable. That is why panic broke out at the highest level.
–
And even more frightened when officials found out that they had been transported by a barely grown teenager with Asperger’s Syndrome using equipment that a normal mortal could buy legally in a store. Weston thinks of using his genius and engaging him under the pseudonym Fox to the West in a cyber battle against totalitarian empires such as Russia or North Korea.
–
Forsyth is able to make full use of such an interestingly played plot. He uses his typical trick to do this, namely that he plays several events at once, without indicating to the reader in the course what their connection is. And to combine them in the final into a surprising whole with an unsuspected point. The second significant advantage of all his novels, including this one, is his care and meticulous sense of the smallest detail.
–
Perhaps it would be interesting to ask the creator if he has ever had a problem with members of various secret services, because he actually reveals (at least in part) their work procedures, dirty tricks and possibilities of manipulation with the public.
–
The Fox is certainly not as captivating a book as Forsyth’s most famous novel, The Day for the Jackal (1971) or The Odessa’s Writing (1972), or The Avengers (2003) and The Afghan (2006). However, the writer still proves that he does not belong to the scrap metal and that he is able to present the reader with an interesting, and above all, believable story.
—
