The Key to Rebecca Kindle Edition

Product as advertised, prompt delivery.

The book was good, giving insight into the actions of spies and intelligence officers duringWW II. It got a little draggy with the side plots involving secondary characters.

Like most of his works, Ken Follett creates an interesting story that combines history and fiction. This is a page turner.

Ken Follett is generally a pretty good writer. If you like a thriller that doesn't embarrass you every other sentence with poor dialog, awkward word choices, and the like, Follett is usually your man. The first paragraph of this book is particularly excellent.While there are some good elements throughout the book, there is a lot of simply unbelievable silliness in places that I sometimes found hard to get past. For example, there is a very long scene where three characters are on a small house boat. Two characters are engaged in, shall we say, relations, while a third character sneaks around, fumbles with a keys, a briefcase, sneaks in and out of a cabinet and so on, all without the male relations-engaging characters noticing somehow. No door separates then; they are basically all in the same small room. It's like something out of a Charlie Chaplin movie. We are also supposed to believe that the main villain's amazing sneaky plan is to randomly steal briefcases from English officers walking around Cairo. That's slightly exaggerated, but not by much.There's another lengthy, silly scene where an English character who speaks little Arabic pretends to be an Egyptian cab driver. His passenger, a fluent Arabic speaker who must give multiple instructions on where to drive, somehow never notices this.It's still mostly a fun book if you can look past this kind of nonsense.

I've always loved a well-written historical fiction, and Ken Follett is one of the best writer in this genre. The story is about this spy, part-egyptian part-german, who stole crucial military intelligence from the British High Command in Cairo to aid the German African Corp in their north African campaign. For the most part, the book was well-paced, the villain of the piece suitably cunning and ruthless, the manner in which he plotted to steal the military intelligence, and how the British counter-intelligence eventually managed to slowly tightened the noose around him, were entirely believable. It especially tickled my fancy to read that the book strongly implied that Erwin Rommel owed his renowned reputation in his victorious north African battles very much to the intelligence provided by the spy.The book is by no means perfect. The writer added a romance between the hero (the MI5 officer tasked to apprehend the spy) and a beautiful Palestine-Jew whom he recruited to set a honey-trap for the spy, in the effort to spice-up the emotional tension in the story, which I felt was absolutely unnecessary. I guess being an English writer, he just couldn't pass up the opportunity to suggest that a pale-skinned, stiff-upper lipped English MI5 officer was equaled to the task of seducing a sexually-attractive Arab woman just as well as his French or Italian counterpart. The section in the book describing their bumbling first sexual encounter is also silly and incredulous. The writer's attempt to paint the hero as a tender and gentle lover only ended up making him read like a wimp in bed and no better than love-lost teenage school-boy. James Bond would definitely not have approved.The biggest fault of the book is the ending. For a spy who had been so cunning, ruthless, and had successfully evaded the British authorities for the most part, near the book's end he suddenly seemed to have lost some of his mojo, and in my opinion, made some very questionable decisions, that ultimately led to his capture. I guess the writer needed to reel-in his spy somewhat, to humanize him, to suggest that he is not infallible and can make mistakes, so that we can all have a satisfying conclusion to the tale.After all, how else can one explain Erwin Rommel's defeat at El Alamein?

Loved this cat and mouse thriller set in Egypt during the War. The Nazis have a spy working in Egypt and a British intelligence agent who bucks the system is trying to find him. This is the second spy-type novel that I have read from Folliet - the first being one of his first’s Eye of the Needle. Loved them both and want to read more. Ironically, the “Rebecca” in the title of this novel is one of my all-time favorite books, “Rebecca” by Daphne Du Maurier.Bottom line - Folliet is a great writer so his books are already fun to read. The history and suspense is great but it’s the characters that keep you interested. They are multi-dimensional and unique. Plus, Mr Folliet always adds some, let’s say, well-written sex scenes.I would love to hear any of your favorites of his books that are also in this genre.

Fantastic WW2 thriller. One of Follet’s earlier books but still great. You care about his characters and don’t want the book to end. Recommend.

I’ve been meaning to read The Key to Rebecca for years, and the story did not disappoint. It’s a special treat when an author is able to stitch history and fiction together so skillfully that the seam is almost impossible to detect.However, the Kindle edition has some annoying flaws, such as periods inserted in the middle of sentences. Most distracting of all, the character Kemel is often referred to as Kernel…I assume because the OCR used in creating the Kindle edition had trouble distinguishing between “m” and “rn.” I hope someone from Amazon sees this review and takes the opportunity to have the Kindle version corrected; once upon a time, there was an icon on product pages that made reporting such errors simple, but alas, I had no luck reporting this problem.

Fast delivery. Great book. Love Ken Follett books!

Another great story from Ken Follett combining history, danger and romance. An easy read it carries the reader along at speed.

Ken Follett est vraiment un écrivain hors pair. Ce nouvel ouvrage qui décrit avec force des moments historiques n’omet pas pour autant la richesse et la fine psychologie des différents personnages qui volent la vedette aux évènements hyper importants qu’ils sont en train de vivre.Le suspens est de plus en plus haletant et l’on souffre autant que les protagonistes en se demandant s’ils vont réussir à s’en sortir.J’ai beaucoup aimé aussi les changements de style quand l’auteur se met dans la peau de chacun des personnages et transcrit ce qu’ils sont en train de penser.C’est encore un livre qui ne s’oublie pas facilement.

One of the best novel I have read. At the end of some chapters we get so much engrossed in the book. Only when some feeling that we are reading a book brings us out of engrossment. Author has succeeded in holding reader's breath.

Excelente