The Bombmaker

By Stephen Leather

Book Overview

Andrea Hayes was one of the IRA's most deadly killers. But when a misplaced bomb ripped apart a group of passing kids, she left all that behind her.

Now, years later, she lives a quiet, suburban life with her husband and young daughter, and her days of violence seem a distant memory. But then her daughter is kidnapped by persons unknown, and the past comes knocking at her door . . .

*********

PRAISE FOR STEPHEN LEATHER

'A master of the thriller genre'
Irish Times

'As tough as British thrillers get . . . gripping'
Irish Independent

'The sheer impetus of his story-telling is damned hard to resist'
Sunday Express

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0340689560
• ISBN13: 9780340689561
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Length: 406 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 4.5" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

A little girl's promise kept

What would happen if two tons of fertilizer hit the fan? During the first hundred pages of THE BOMBMAKER, one learns that four otherwise respectable Beijing Chinese - a general, two bankers, and a relative of former Communist Party First Secretary Deng Xiaoping - want to blow a bloody big hole in the center of London's financial district. Why isn't immediately apparent. Maybe they'd encountered a snippy foreign exchange teller on their last visit to The City. To work out the details, they employ a mysterious killer-for-hire named Egan, who coerces a former IRA bombmaker, Andrea Hayes, to construct the explosive device by kidnapping her young daughter, Katie. In the bad old days, Andrea specialized in fertilizer bombs, but gave up that line of work after accidently killing four young boys and maiming a fifth. For years, she's lived with her husband, Martin, who knows nothing of her past. THE BOMBMAKER is such a first rate knuckle-biter that the unspecified reason for the plot, though eventually revealed, recedes into the background and the reader is left to fear for Katie in her basement prison, to empathize with Andrea confronting the repercussions of past notoriety and four-thousand pounds of smelly Bandini, and sympathize with Martin left alone, frantic, and without a clue. And it only gets better when MI5 finally gets dropped into the plot's mix. The high-tension ending should leave even the most jaded of thriller readers satisfied. Oddly, however, it's spunky Katie's last act that prompted me to award 5 stars, even though she's given relatively little exposure in the overall story. Because of her, I ended up liking this book enormously. Cross my heart and swear to die.

A good, tense thriller

Odd that this author is basically non-existent in the US. The Bombmaker is a tense thriller that starts off just a tad slow but that steadily cranks up the tension until you find yourself unwilling to put it down until you finish it. Perhaps the best thing about it is its convincing portrayal of the workings of a Secret Service and the way it goes about preventing a terrorist act. I found the book quite interesting in this respect. While the characters are a bit two-dimensional, the plotting is excellent, and the book is a good, easy, tension-filled read.

An Explosive read!

I found this book to be an excellent read although at times it gave me mixed feelings.You keep asking yourself if this story could be based on truth although you know its fiction. I can't describe all the different feelings I went through while reading this book - I don't think I can do it justice by descibing my thoughts, I think you have to read it for yourself to understand how difficult it is to put into words how good this book is.