The Fox

By: Frederick Forsyth

Narrated by: David Rintoul

Brought to you by Penguin

Most weapons do what you tell them. Most weapons you can control.

But what if the most dangerous weapon in the world isn't a smart missile or a stealth submarine or even an AI computer programme?What if it's a 17-year-old boy with a blisteringly brilliant mind, who can run rings around the most sophisticated security services across the globe, who can manipulate that weaponry and turn it against the superpowers themselves? How valuable would he be? And what wouldn't you do to get hold of him?

The Fox is a race-against-time thriller across continents to find and capture, or protect and save, an asset with the means to change the balance of world power. Whatever happens he must not fall into the wrong hands. Because what follows after that is unthinkable...

'Forsyth has lost none of his storytelling finesse and geopolitical grasp . . . this is Forsyth at his spellbinding best' Daily Mail

'An ingenious, expertly written and serious look at international conflicts which threaten the future of the world' Washington Post

©2018 Frederick Forsyth (P)2018 Random House Audiobooks

Critic reviews

The pages virtually turn themselves (Barry Forshaw)

Love the narrator

The story is great, although the hacking part is a byline, hardly explained. But the idea of the story is well crafted. Love the details, political viewpoints on issues.

A lively romp, but a but clunky...

Really enjoyed this story with all the ingredients of a good espionage tale. But, thinly veiled references to current government members, and a professor Baron Cohen were faintly ridiculous. David Rintoul's sonorous reading gave extra gravitas that the narrative really needed. His soft Scottish accent had echoes of the Flemming readings he has done. A pleasure to listen to. I say listen, have fun and enjoy. It's like a movie you are glad you watched, but really don't take away too much and will probably never watch again.

Entertaining

FF seemed a bit careless at times in this one ; not as tight a narrative as other works and even some quite lame and inappropriate romance. Plus the unnecessary and biased political comments that frankly made me doubt this authors overall veracity.But definitely entertaining and just disappointed there wasn’t more dimension to the story and more details of the actual hacking on which the entire narrative hangs.

Interesting lead, failure in execution.

The leading character Sir Adrian Western had me looking forward to future books, but the ending in this novel made me think of a student hitting a word limit in an academic essay. Well read by the narrator.

Truly fantastic!!

Frederick Forsyth is a master writer and this book is further proof of his excellence!!

Disappointing effort from a capable author

I view FF as a really capable author, which is why I'm so disappointed with this book. All the contemporary aspects of this book rang hollow. He still did a good job on the traditional aspects of it, e.g. tradecraft and the overall plot. But it fell apart in a few critical areas:

Technology - for a book about hacking, the tech side of it needs to be at least passable. In this book the tech is so wrong that it's just nonsense.

The Ending - Without putting any spoliers in, if you're Frederick Forsyth it is not okay to have an ending that a high school student would get in trouble for.

Contemporary Characters - This is more of a minor gripe, but there were a couple of times when a character was given some really old-fashioned stereotypical traits that just felt disconnected from reality. Also, FF decided to put Trump in the book (which is fine), but for plot reasons he couldn't make him live up to his reputation. It would have been so easy to have omitted the direct reference to "the president's book, the Art of the Deal", and not have had that contradiction. It's just sloppy.

As far as the performance went, at the start I found the narrator's accents a bit jarring, other than that it was okay.

To sum it up, I think FF did the bare minimum and is relying on his reputation to sell this.