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Sean Dillon #20

The Death Trade

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The master of suspense returns with a cutting-edge tale that pits his heroes Sean Dillon and Sara Gideon against the nuclear ambitions of Iran.
An eminent Iranian scientist has made a startling breakthrough in nuclear weapons research, but he can’t stand the thought of his regime owning the bomb. He would run if he could, but if he does, his family dies. He is desperate; he doesn’t know what to do.

It is up to Sean Dillon and the rest of the small band known as the Prime Minister’s private army to think of a plan. Most particularly, it is up to their newest member, an intelligence captain and Afghan war hero named Sara Gideon, who thinks there just might be a way to pull it off.

But plans have a way of encountering  the unexpected. And as the operation spins out, from Paris and Syria to Iran and the Saudi Arabian desert, there is very much that is unexpected indeed. And much blood that will be spilled.

319 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 2013

231 people are currently reading
986 people want to read

About the author

Jack Higgins

481 books1,280 followers
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Jack Higgins was best known of the many pseudonyms of Henry Patterson. (See also Martin Fallon, Harry Patterson, Hugh Marlowe and James Graham.)

He was the New York Times bestselling author of more than seventy thrillers, including The Eagle Has Landed and The Wolf at the Door. His books have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide.

Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, Patterson grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland. As a child, Patterson was a voracious reader and later credited his passion for reading with fueling his creative drive to be an author. His upbringing in Belfast also exposed him to the political and religious violence that characterized the city at the time. At seven years old, Patterson was caught in gunfire while riding a tram, and later was in a Belfast movie theater when it was bombed. Though he escaped from both attacks unharmed, the turmoil in Northern Ireland would later become a significant influence in his books, many of which prominently feature the Irish Republican Army. After attending grammar school and college in Leeds, England, Patterson joined the British Army and served two years in the Household Cavalry, from 1947 to 1949, stationed along the East German border. He was considered an expert sharpshooter.

Following his military service, Patterson earned a degree in sociology from the London School of Economics, which led to teaching jobs at two English colleges. In 1959, while teaching at James Graham College, Patterson began writing novels, including some under the alias James Graham. As his popularity grew, Patterson left teaching to write full time. With the 1975 publication of the international blockbuster The Eagle Has Landed, which was later made into a movie of the same name starring Michael Caine, Patterson became a regular fixture on bestseller lists. His books draw heavily from history and include prominent figures—such as John Dillinger—and often center around significant events from such conflicts as World War II, the Korean War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Patterson lived in Jersey, in the Channel Islands.

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854 (35%)
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558 (23%)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 188 reviews
Profile Image for Will.
620 reviews
January 7, 2014
SUBJECTIVE REVIEW FOLLOWS:

I've read a dozen Jack Higgins books and some of them are incredibly entertaining and explore an original plot and storyline. Unfortunately, 'The Death Trade' isn't one of them. Higgins gives us untrained readers the outer appearance of either writing to a deadline or padding the old 401k account. He recycles characters from previous novels that we like a lot, but ties them into another middle east Al Qaeda plotline that seems very familiar. Even the locales of Majorca, Algeria, Beirut, Paris, Tehran and Saudi Arabia are seemingly retreads of past adventures--which I might add I've already paid for, read and reviewed. Hopefully he'll break out of this malaise with his next installment. Lest you think I am wholly disgruntled, I gave the book four stars, because Higgins is damn near hypnotic with his writing style.

SPOILER REVIEW PLOT SUMMARY FOLLOWS:

Ferguson Defeats the next Master. An Iranian scientist is about to perfect the next generation of nuclear bombs when he is announced to receive the Legion of Merit in Paris. Ferguson's two 'loose cannons' Sara and Sean Dillon head to Paris to engage the star, and Sara renews and old friendship with the Iranian Secret Police COL Declan Rashid during he trip while her lover Daniel Holley has taken on a suicide mission in Mali. After Husseini finds that his mother and daughter have been killed in a car wreck, the Iranians lose their extortive hold on him and he flees to his casa in Beirut. Sara and Dillon, as well as Declan and Al Quada pursue him as well, setting up his flight to the Saudi desert to reunite with his mentor at a desert hospice. AQ gets wind of this and gets there first, but Sara gets thru to the outpost and warns them of the inbound AQ hitmen. In a slight of hand, Husseini arranges to escape with the AQ team and explodes a secretly hidden portion of Semtex and takes them all out. Declan Rashid elects to abandon the Iranians and return to London, only to be pursued by his boss GEN Ali ben Levi who turns out to be AQ's European master coordinator. Ben Levi goes out in a London firefight, as Dillon and Rashid are wounded, but Ferguson gains a turncoat Ali Saif in the process.
Profile Image for AJourneyWithoutMap.
791 reviews80 followers
August 11, 2016
Jack Higgins, best known for the epic novel The Eagle Has Landed, returns with one of his most famous characters in The Death Trade, which is the 20th installment in the hugely successful Sean Dillon series.

Iran under its conservative regime is vigorously pushing forward its nuclear program and is on the brink of making a cheap nuclear bomb which will be four times as effective as anything else on the planet. Achieving such a major breakthrough would have made any nuclear scientist proud, but the mastermind behind the nuclear research is not. The French-Iranian scientist Simon Husseini was working on medical isotopes when he was forced to conduct the research on nuclear weapons. He does not want the Iranian government to have the bomb but there’s little he can do as it would endanger his family.

Simon Husseini escapes to Iraq with the help of a fake passport. But with his aged mother and invalid 40 years old daughter under house arrest in Tehran, and Lt. Col. Declan Rashid, the military attaché at Iran’s London embassy, making an all-out effort to capture him, he is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Sean Dillon, the former IRA enforcer turned British black ops agent, teams up with Sara Gideon in a risky operation that stretches from the burning deserts of the Middle East to Europe to save the scientist.

Jack Higgins spins a feverish tale as Sean and Sara races against time to save Simon Husseini and his family members, and prevent the rogue state from obtaining its own nuclear bomb. It is fast-paced, electrifying and solid. If you loved his earlier books, you should be pleased with this one too. It is pure entertainment, through and through.
Profile Image for Brenda.
5,089 reviews3,018 followers
March 11, 2014
The Prime Minister’s private army they were called; but the work they did was for the good of the country and its inhabitants. Newest member Sara Gideon, a decorated captain from the Afghan war and with a permanent limp to remind her of those days, along with seasoned ex IRA veteran Sean Dillon were off to Paris to a meeting of dignitaries. She would attempt to meet with an old friend, an Iranian scientist who had been a good friend of her father’s, but now was a virtual prisoner – the subterfuge was a risk but it must be done.

With the dangers in London, the constant risk and involvement of al Qaeda, the team was desperate to achieve their goal. But the violence and murders were all around them and the hunt for answers was on. In a race with the clock which spread from London to Paris, from Syria to Iran and into the Saudi Arabian desert it seemed they were one step behind the evil of the “Master”. Would they survive the horrors which surrounded them?

Another brilliant Jack Higgins thriller! I have read Jack Higgins for a lot of years and he never disappoints. I enjoyed catching up with Ferguson, Roper, Billy and Harry, as well as Sean! A great read with twists and turns throughout, and a shocking ending which I didn’t see coming. Highly recommended.
Profile Image for Nancy Geary.
159 reviews1 follower
August 25, 2016
Jack Higgins & Sean Dillon can't do much wrong by me. Jury is still out on Sara Gideon - she's no Hannah Bernstein and seems to me a watered down version. Glad to see the usual suspects, Ferguson, Roper, et al, are back on the job.

Liked the plot & pace of the story. No extra "fluff" or filler in a Higgins novel. Delves into the war on terror & current situation in the Middle East without being preachy. The pace of the story takes the reader along for the ride until you turn the last page and think, "When's the next one coming out?"

A fun, pleasing read from a master of the craft.
Profile Image for Mike French.
430 reviews110 followers
March 1, 2014
Not real excited about this one. If you want to read all Sean Dillon books,go ahead. I found the earlier ones more exciting.
Profile Image for Steve.
925 reviews10 followers
August 20, 2018
August 2018. Read much of this story while on vacation in Morro Bay with lots of summer fog. I was torn between a 4 and a 5 rating. I looked at a few other Goodreaders remarks and it surprises me to see one person constantly give these Higgins stories one star and say they are boring. My question would be - if they are boring to you, why keep reading Higgins? I happen to like the familiarity of the same characters in the series. We are fortunate that fiction lets us decide "truth" and "falsehood", good guy and bad guy, and right from wrong. Just this weekend we heard that "truth isn't truth". We also have been recently taught that there are alternative truths. Thank you Mr. Higgins for letting us see black and white and grey. In the end, what seems to be a major tipping point is when "bad guys" kill civilians, women and children. Quite simplistic but quite satisfying. ......and now I yield the soap box to other readers.
Profile Image for Neil Fulwood.
978 reviews23 followers
November 29, 2023
Let’s accentuate the positive: volume twenty of the Sean Dillon saga has more Dillon for your buck than most of the last half dozen entries. It’s also eventful as all hell. There’s a beating, a shooting, an assassination, a double cross or a triple cross on at least every other page. On the downside, however, it’s a complete mess in terms of narrative, and I can’t for the life of me figure whether Higgins was going for a more experimental approach to the thriller modelled on the spiralling chain-of-consequences structure of, say, Tolstoy’s ‘The Forged Coupon’ or if he was simply making it up as he went along whilst on a several week bender. Either way, the what-the-fuck-o-meter exploded round about the 200 page mark.
Profile Image for Susan in Perthshire.
2,208 reviews116 followers
June 8, 2018
When I think how beautifully original, well written and riveting “The Eagle has Landed” was, I could weep at how Jack Higgins now seems to write by numbers. Predictable, tired, boring - I cannot believe I am using these adjectives to describe a work by the man who has written some stunningly authentic and brilliant thrillers. The characters never came alive despite the fact that several have appeared in more books than I care to remember. Utterly one-dimensional. The plot was familiar, predictable and just never engaged me. Jack Higgins used to be one of my reliable authors; someone I could pick up knowing I would have a few hours enjoyable escapism. This is not in that category.
Profile Image for Vishesh Aneja.
206 reviews3 followers
August 4, 2019
That was by the book thriller if there ever was one. Pretty generic for the genre, more of a plot of an action tv series than anything else. You could guess the plot halfway through but it didn't take anything away from enjoying the story.

I liked the characters of Sara and Dillon and was happy to note there are other books starring them so looking forward to that. This could be a pretty decent TV series.
Profile Image for L.M. Mountford.
Author 34 books1,276 followers
September 13, 2017
I would not recommend this as a standalone. Instead, you'd be much better off reading the other books in the series to get to know the characters and places.

The book is very entertaining, this is not something to read if you want depth but the characters and plot are very entertaining with great pace and twists at every turn. Forget Cussler, Ludlum, Lee and Clacey - Higgins is the master of Action.
762 reviews2 followers
December 27, 2020
This is Jack Higgins still at the top of his game. The book is a real page turner.
Sean Dillon, ex IRA enforcer and now a secret service operative, along with his colleagues, is called on to fly to Iran and bring a doctor/nuclear scientist to Britain, where his knowledge will be used to build a bomb for us, rather than the Middle East or al Qaeda,
Simon Husseini has his doubts and wants to know what would happen if he destroyed all his research. He runs away to the Lebanon, but is soon found and taken to a desert retreat run by Greek Orthodox monks.
The terrorists chasing Dillon and crew arrive ahead of the Brits, but Husseini comes up with his own plan.
The upshot of all the subterfuge, terror and deaths is that nobody benefits from the research, as it is destroyed. It will, at some point in the future, be rediscovered. However, short term, no big bad bomb.
Profile Image for Penny.
622 reviews14 followers
January 25, 2015
I think we are all getting a bit tired of Sean Dillon but the story was good and kept my interest.
I find it quite fascinating that Higgins continues to have nearly all of his characters drink like fish and smoke like chimneys. The characters still seem to be able to kill people with one shot right after chugging down a magnum of champagne or several glasses of hard liquor and run like gazelles in spite of their tar filled lungs.
None the less I keep on reading and he keeps on writing. I own every one of his books that I am aware of and still prefer his early works. Everyone needs to read "Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo".
Profile Image for Wallie Burke.
46 reviews
January 21, 2014
Can't go wrong with Dillon & Company. One observation; the books do seem to to bet getting shorter.
Profile Image for KEVIN.
58 reviews1 follower
March 10, 2019
I love Jack Higgins I've been reading him since I was a teenager. A natural storyteller he rarely disappoints. I particularly enjoy the pulp/thriller stories he wrote early in his career under various pseudonyms before he had his big break with The Eagle Has Landed.
However it is late in his career now ( he is 89) and his writing style in all those years has hardly changed. In one sense this is a good thing as his fans get what they pay for; a fast paced Jack Higgins action/thriller. But the characters are now anachronisms. They drink like fish, smoke like chimneys and talk like Biggles. They inhabit a strange twilight world that is stuck in a late 1950's early 1960's bubble; jarring when you are reading a book set in the present day.
I believe Mr Higgins stories would be more effective if he actually set them in the 1950's. They would certainly be easier to digest. Still, I am glad that he is still around and still writing and I applaud the resistance he must be putting up whenever his publisher suggests taking on a younger co-writer. Keep 'em coming Jack!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Michael crage.
1,128 reviews5 followers
March 14, 2019
I have no idea what genre this book belongs in besides good and exciting. The writing was a little uneven, that is the only reason for a 4 star rather than a 5 star. The story revolves around an Iranian scientist who was working with medical isotopes which saved many lives. But it turned out that his work also led to the possibility of building a much more powerful bomb than existed. Because of his, everyone wanted him with the British. the Iranians, and al-Qaeda's people. I did not really care for the ending, but it did work.

Profile Image for Norman Smith.
371 reviews6 followers
February 15, 2024
The book has a much higher rating than I expected. It is the 20th in a series, and so it is possible that most people who have worked their way through the previous 19 are interested in the characters and find this to be an enjoyable continuation of the series. In my case, it is my second book from the series and it confirms to me that it is not to my taste. Bad dialogue, no character development, completely improbable plot, stereotyping galore.

On the plus side, it doesn't take long to read.
246 reviews3 followers
January 12, 2019
Informative. Enjoyable. Reasonably concise. A similar scope to Clancy, without all the boring repetition. Very up-to-date for experiences, equipment, communications etc.,
And have just realised how similar is a new author, Harry Buckle. So if u have read all the Higgins, try HBuckle new books, Just in Time, and Regime Change.
Profile Image for Brad.
221 reviews
January 17, 2019
Like someone watching a train wreck (or so I'm told), I'm evidently inexorably drawn to finish the Sean Dillon series. But it's running very low on gas. Almost no action until the last 10 pages of this one, confusing plot, and little empathy remaining for the characters. Other than that it was great. :)
21 reviews
Read
June 20, 2022
Excellent as usual

Once again this book has lived up to expectations. An extremely interesting and exciting read. Whilst the basic plot remains its been adapted so that the final confrontation is no longer in Ireland which adds to the excitement of not knowing the final outcome. An excellent read highly recommended.
214 reviews1 follower
January 26, 2023
Having read and enjoyed many of Jack Higgins books in the past, I picked this this up (obviously years after it was published) excited to go on another adventure with Sean Dillon and the Prime Minister’s private army. While it held my interest, I admit I was disappointed. I don’t think it measures up to most of Higgins’ earlier books.
Profile Image for P V Sanders.
35 reviews1 follower
February 20, 2017
Another superb thriller from the master that is Jack Higgins

Wonderful tension, superb story and brilliant characters. Another book to be read by all fans of great thrillers. A must read.
14 reviews
June 14, 2020
Action packed as usual.

Every page is griping. The characters have become lifelike and constant through out the series. Higgins is amazing and creates wonderful plot lines that are throughly believable.
30 reviews2 followers
March 10, 2021
Another multinational battle between Britain and Al-Quida

A potential new "romance" for Ms. Gideon with far reaching international connections. And, will Dillon, Roper , or especially, Ferguson ever retire?
Profile Image for Kevin Reeder.
303 reviews1 follower
June 29, 2021
Murder on the run

Ferguson is gone and the crew take things into their own hands to try to spirit away a doctor and stroke a blow to AQ. Action abound and the suspense and intrigue of multiple kill teams deployed at the same time will keep you turning pages
Profile Image for Vicki Jaeger.
991 reviews3 followers
October 8, 2021
A glamorous little crew that operates outside of the law, saving the world from terrorists, and having champagne and a steam bath to relax. And I just didn't care--about the characters, the story, or how it ended. I stopped around p. 130.
63 reviews
January 11, 2022
I spent a couple days reading this (audio book) and it was not enjoyable. The characters, the odd, sometimes stilted conversations...just not clicking for me. I also disliked the voice actor's portrayal of a few characters...not all. Life's too short. Move on.
Profile Image for Cathie Murphy.
830 reviews
March 5, 2023
Truly enjoyed the book. Lots of various characters. It takes awhile to figure who they are, but the book flows well. It's right to the point and the suspense is maintained well throughout the book. It's easy to read and follow. It's got an interesting plot that is well developed.
Profile Image for Marylu Sanok.
434 reviews4 followers
August 13, 2018
Read all of Jack Higgins with Sean Dillon as the main character. While sometimes Sean does things normal people cannot do, he always is exciting and a thrilling story.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 188 reviews

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