The Feather Men

Product Information

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Ranulph Fiennes has published eight books, two of which have been in The Sunday Times bestseller list. If your book is intended as a gift, please let us know and we will gift wrap it free of charge with a card and any message.

Each of the assassinations was carried out in such an ingenious fashion that there would be no hint of foul play, but one clue these killings had in common was that all four victims had fought in the Arabian desert. But, again because of that, I was a bit disoriented at first, because the prelude, the initial chapters, were slow and over-detailed for that kind of fiction, almost the opposite of a page-turner. The group would be paid one million dollars for each confirmed revenge killing, which included video recording of the target being accused of the death of the appropriate son.It was written like a non-fiction work (every acronym or slightly unusual word was then explained in brackets, frequently quite unnecessarily), and the "exciting" scenes were told in a completely matter-of-fact way, losing any sense of tension.

Then—for reasons disclosed in these pages—they asked Ranulph Fiennes to reveal their spellbinding story. What Fiennes somehow manages to do is humanize everyone, even when there is no doubt which side he is on. Faint tidemarks on the page edges not affecting the text and a bump on the rear board foredge else very good in a near fine dustwrapper with internal spotting. But having passed that initial stage, I was soon captivated - both by the story itself, and by the wealth of detailed inside knowledge it reveals - of SAS actions and training, of a war in Oman I knew almost nothing about, of the mechanics of mounting assassinations so skilfully and stealthily as to make them appear to be accidents.

Like a number of other readers, I came to this book via the movie, which was such a success that it caused the author and the publisher to change the book's title from the original (The Feather Men). Fiennes himself remained vague on the story's veracity, asserting that it was up to the reader to decide whether it was fact or fiction, and suggested journalists subject events and people described in the book to "forensic examination", and to draw their own conclusions. Truth be told, I had to get through the first fifty or so pages, but after that I couldn’t put the book down. Best book I have read in a long time and it is a true story, with a lot of it set in Oman, a country I have never thought very much about. Once I’d grasped the plot, I surprised myself in realising that I had actually begun to rather enjoy it; that is if a reader, who in this situation is essentially a voyeur, can actually claim to be favorably interested in seedy sex, brutal violence and carefully calculated cold blooded killing.

I also found that by watching the movie first, I had a better understanding of the depth of this novel. From 1977 to 1990, three hired assassins known as the Clinic tracked down and murdered four former British soldiers, one at a time. This book discusses mostly a group of ex-Special Forces and SAS soldiers who are being targeted and killed by professional assassins. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I know I would have enjoyed it far more had I not been second-guessing all the way through whether it was supposed to be a thriller or a retelling of a true story.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.