The Day of the Jackal

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It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad. At that hour on March 11, 1963, in the main courtyard of the Fort d Ivry a French Air Force colonel stood before a stake driven into the chilly gravel as his hands were bound behind the post, and stared with slowly diminishing disbelief at the squad of soldiers facing him twenty metres away.      A foot scuffed the grit, a tiny release from tension, as the blindfold was wrapped around the eyes of Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, age thirty-five, blotting out the light for the last time. The mumbling of the priest was a helpless counterpoint to the crackling of twenty rifle bolts as the soldiers charged and cocked their carbines.      Beyond the walls a Berliet truck blared for passage as some smaller vehicle crossed its path towards the centre of the city; the sound died away, masking the Take your aim order from the officer in charge of the squad. The crash of rifle fire, when it came, caused no ripple on the surface of the waking city, other than to send a flutter of pigeons skyward for a few moments. The single whack seconds later of the coup de grâce was lost in the rising din of traffic from beyond the walls.      The death of the officer, leader of a gang of Secret Army Organisation killers who had sought to shoot the President of France, was to have been an end an end to further attempts on the President s life. By a quirk of fate it marked a beginning, and to explain why, it is first necessary to explain why a riddled body came to hang from its ropes in the courtyard of the military prison outside Paris on that March morning. . . .      The sun had dropped at last behind the palace wall, and long shadows rippled across the courtyard bringing a welcome relief. Even at 7 in the evening of the hottest day of the year the temperature was still

Frederick Forsyth is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of seventeen novels, including The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, as well as short story collections and a memoir. A former Air Force pilot, and one-time print and television reporter for the BBC, he has had four movies and two television miniseries made from his works. He is the winner of three Edgar Awards, and in 2012 he won the Diamond Dagger Award from the Crime Writers' Association, a lifetime achievement award for sustained excellence. He lives in Hertfordshire, England.

Forsyth is truly the world s reigning master of suspense Los Angeles Times

When it comes to espionage, international intrigue, and suspense, Frederick Forsyth is a master. The Washington Post Book World

Inventive, organized, believable, and absolutely spellbinding Suspense fiction at its very best and a cliffhanger par excellence. The Philadelphia Inquirer

A masterpiece tour de force of crisp, sharp, suspenseful writing It s an awful cliché to say that you won t be able to put this book down, but cliché or not, it s the truth. The Wall Street Journal