Assegai

Wilbur Smith, Jg. 1933, widmet sich seit 1964 ganz dem Schriftstellerberuf und hat bisher knapp 30 Romane veröffentlicht, von denen jeder einzelne auf Expeditionen recheriert und zu einem überwältigenden Erfolg wurde. Wilbur Smith lebt mit seiner Frau abwechselnd in Kapstadt, auf einer Farm im Landesinneren von Südafrika, auf den Seychellen und im Herzen von London. Seine Bücher, die eine Weltauflage von über 70 Millionen Exemplaren erreicht haben, sind in 26 Sprachen übersetzt und zum Teil verfilmt worden.

The highly popular historical novelist returns with another guaranteed best-seller. In the early 1900s, Second Lieutenant Leon Courtney decides to hang up his military career after a near-fatal mission in British East Africa (and a subsequent court-martial proceeding instigated by a vindictive superior office). He takes up big-game hunting, but that's only his cover: in reality, he is working as a spy, gathering intelligence for his uncle Penrod Ballantyne. Leon's target is Count Otto Von Meerbach, a German weapons manufacturer (the novel is set only a handful of years before World War I), but Leon doesn't count on falling in love with the target's seductive mistress, Eva. Can Leon foil Von Meerbach's plot to foment an African rebellion and, at the same time, protect the beautiful Eva? There is a reason Smith is a hugely popular writer of historical novels: his remarkable talent for re-creating historical periods and crafting characters we care about is virtually unmatched in the genre. Smith's novels of the Courtney and Ballantyne families (in 2005, he brought the two sagas together in The Triumph of the Sun) have been entertaining readers for nearly five decades, and if this novel is any indication, he is showing no signs of slowing down. -- David Pitt "Booklist" (03/15/2009)