Beirut Station

De: Paul Vidich

Narrado por: Amber Townsend

A stunning new espionage book by a master of the genre, Beirut Station follows a young female CIA officer whose mission to assassinate a high-level Hezbollah terrorist reveals a dark truth that puts her life at risk.

Lebanon, 2006. The Israel–Hezbollah war is tearing Beirut apart and the country is on the brink of chaos.

The CIA and Mossad are targeting a reclusive Hezbollah terrorist. They turn to young Lebanese-American CIA agent, Analise, who has the perfect plan. However, Analise begins to suspect that Mossad has a motive of its own.

She alerts the agency but their response is for her to drop it. Analise is now the target and there is no one she can trust.

A tightly wound international thriller, Beirut Station is Paul Vidich's best book to date.

©2024 Paul Vidich (P)2024 W. F. Howes Ltd

Good story, ok narration

Narrator a bit monotone but with a pleasant voice and accent. Much of the dialogue, however, was read as if it were bullet points. Overall story was compelling. If the narrator was a bit more expressive, I would’ve enjoyed it much more.

Interesting and dramatic

The core of the story occurs during the 2006 attack by Israel on Lebanon following Hezbollah’s killing and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. In the book the jaded CIA head of station in Beirut is critical of Israeli activities in Lebanon, by both the IDF and Mossad. The lead character, a stunning junior CIA officer gets caught up in intrigue between Mossad and the CIA. I’m unsure whether the author has firm political views on the topics the book addresses or whether his sole aim is to relate intrigue as a writer of a good spy-story. The book kept my rapt attention.

Disorganized

I think the character needed to be more organized to be believable. I also feel that the main character need to be a bit more of an intellect.

Disappointing narration

This is a Paul Vidich novel. That means it's well written, and I will leave others to comment further on that.

My disappointment is in the reader. I am NOT especially critical of readers and am fine with different accents, approaches, genders, etc. My complaint here is that the reader seems to take short breaks (all too often) when she may as well be reading an instruction manual. She'll be going along, reading as you'd expect, and then a few sentences just get read as if she just has to get through the words so a computer AI service will transcribe them and do some search... And then she'll return to reading with normal expressiveness. Maybe this is intended to achieve some effect, but whatever it is, it didn't hit it for me.

It was not enough to ruin the book for me, but it was definitely distracting. Really too bad.