THE DOUBLE EAGLE.

THE DOUBLE EAGLE by JAMES TWINING.
In Paris a priest is murdered, the killers dumping his mutilated body into the Seine. Only he has taken a secret with him to his death. A secret that reveals itself during an autopsy and resurrects the spectre of a seventy-year-old heist.

Jennifer Browne, a young and ambitious FBI agent is assigned the case. This is her last chance to kick start a career that has stalled after one fatal error of judgement three years before.

Her investigation uncovers a daring robbery from Fort Knox and Tom Kirk, a brilliant young art thief, is her prime suspect.

Tom caught between his desire to get out of the game and his partner's insistence that he complete one last job for the criminal mastermind Cassius, finds himself on the run in a race against time to clear his name. A race that takes him from London to Paris, Amsterdam to Istanbul in a search for the real thieves and the legendary Double Eagle.

...... From the outer back cover.

FIRST SENTENCE (from the profile): They were late.

MEMORABLE MOMENT: Only one eyelash remained where it had fluttered down from his briefly unmasked face to the floor. It glinted black in the moonlight.

A wanabee DA VINCI CODE - sadly this in no way compares with the Dan Brown novel.

Nowhere near as thrilling a thriller as it thinks it is, The Double Eagle is what I can only describe as a fairly average read with some equally average characters and though it was good to see that one of the main characters was a woman who was both strong and resourceful, sadly this didn't make up for the fact that, on the whole, they were weakly written.

Not particularly good at working out clues as to 'who done it' and why, even I managed to work out the plot without too much trouble. That said there were one or two surprises in the last 60 or so pages when the pace picked up slightly though this went nowhere near to making up for what was an otherwise disappointing read.

Purchased from a PDSA charity shop, The Double Eagle was the first book read for the TYPICALLY BRITISH READING CHALLENGE.