Review: THE ALAMUT AMBUSH, Anthony Price - audio book

• originally published 1972, published as audio book 2012
• #2 in the David Audley series
• Narrated by: Simon Schatzberger
• Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins 
• Format: Unabridged

Synopsis (Publisher)

A brilliant young electronics expert is killed by a car bomb seemingly meant for the head of the Foreign Office's Middle-Eastern Section. Intelligence officer Hugh Roskill is sent by David Audley on an investigation that takes him from London club-land to the Hampshire countryside, and deep into the complexities of Middle Eastern politics, to find the answer to two questions: who was the real target of the bomb?

And what is Alamut? Against the backdrop of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the period before the Camp David Accords, Dr Audley and Colonel Butler are confronted with an assassin capable of turning the Middle Eastern conflict into Armageddon.

My Take

THE ALAMUT AMBUSH is probably not best read episodically as an audio book where you can't easily turn back the pages to check details.

Like the first in the series, THE LABYRINTH MAKERS, the plot starts off simply enough but soon drops into complexities involving British, European, and Middle Eastern espionage agents. The background is the apparent resolution of the Arab- Israeli conflict (1967) with a peace that appears to resolve nothing and suit nobody.

I did not particularly enjoy this novel as it, too quickly for me, became a mixture of fact and fiction, and my knowledge of the period was really too shaky for me to be able to separate the two. For an audio version of the book there are really too many foreign sounding names, and the main British manipulator David Audley does not appeal as a character.

So for me, not a satisfactory read, because far too often I was totally out of my depth. But I can understand that readers looking for espionage style fiction along the lines of John Le Carre would have found the hard print versions of this series very appealing.

My rating: 3.6

About the author

Anthony Price was born in England in 1928. He became a captain in the British Army before studying at Oxford University, then became a journalist on the Westminster Press and Oxford Times. Price is the author of nineteen novels featuring Dr David Audley and Colonel Jack Butler, which focus on a group of counter-intelligence agents.
Approximately twenty years elapse between the first and last novel in the series, and most of the plots are connected with one or more important events in military history. The first three novels were adapted into a six-part BBC TV drama in the 1980s, and THE LABYRINTH MAKERS (for which he won a CWA Silver Dagger) and Other Paths to Glory have both been produced as BBC radio dramas.

Review: THE LABYRINTH MAKERS, Anthony Price - audio book

• Written by: Anthony Price
• Narrated by: Simon Schatzberger
• Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins 
• published in 1970
• Format: Unabridged audio

Synopsis (Audible.com)


When an RAF Dakota, presumed lost at sea in 1945, is discovered in a drained lake in Lincolnshire, together with its pilot and a cargo of worthless rubble, it falls to David Audley of the MOD to puzzle out just why the Russians are so interested in the discovery - and what the plane was carrying that is important enough to kill for.


Winner of a Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagge, this is the first of a 19 title series featuring Dr David Audley.

My Take

This has many of the hallmarks of a debut title, not just the first title in the series. We need quite a bit of background about many of the characters and the book takes a while to get to the central plot. I'm not sure that I ever understood the meaning of the title properly.

At the beginning the author attempts to establish that Dr. David Audley, in his mid 30s, has been sidelined by the Ministry of Defence after what he considers to be a successful career in Middle Eastern Affairs. He thinks that he successfully predicted various events such as the Suez Crisis ahead of the pack. He doesn't take kindly to being allocated to investigate events of World War II, particularly incidents of local origin.

The date is 1969 and the plane crash occurred nearly 25 years before. But when a Russian espionage agent shows enough interest to fly to Britain to investigate the contents of the Dakota, Audley's interest is spiked. Even more when the daughter of the Dakota's pilot, a baby when her father died, turns up on his doorstep.

To reveal what the Russian thinks the plane contained would be to tell you too much of the plot, but you might want to look at this Wikipedia article.

Published in 1970, the title is an illustration of how many British authors were interested in the legacies of the Second World War, and the impact on international politics of the Cold War.Very readable thrillers were the result.

Part of the attractiveness of the book is that it is relatively short, and I liked it enough to begin reading the second in the series, THE ALAMUT AMBUSH.

My rating: 4.3