Ah, another Ken Follett book. Let’s see how this one adds up:
Historical background? Check = the last days of WWII, just before D-Day
Great bad guy? Check = Dieter Franck, Nazi tortuer extraordinaire (and his beautiful Jewish sidekick, Stephanie)
Feisty chick? Check, check, check = our heroine, Felicity “Flick” Clairet, the beautiful British leader of a French resistance group and all around bad ass; plus a bonus feisty chick: a Gypsy murderess named Ruby, plus a collection of crazy women willing to go along on the mission (all of whom are beautiful and flawed, of course)
Spies? Check = everyone’s a spy…seriously
Violence? Check = Nazis, ’nuff said
Romance? Check = quite a few dirty romps among the main characters
Jackdaws was really a lot of fun. It centers around Flick, who has been leading a group of resistance fighters in France on behalf of the Special Operations Executive in Britain. When a mission to destroy a communication post goes wrong, she heads home to regroup and figure out what to do next: round up French-speaking women to enter the post disguised as a cleaning crew and finish what she started.
Follet’s writing is fast paced and entertaining. Felicity has to find a group of women in two days who are willing to jump out of a plane and sabotage a Nazi post (and speak French!), which necessitates some rather loony characters, and Follett plays that to good effect. However, he doesn’t gloss over the evil of the Nazis, and a couple of the torture scenes had me skimming a bit when they got to be a bit much. Still, it was a great read and made my plane trip fly by (ha!)
