cover image The Feather Men

The Feather Men

Ranulph Fiennes. William Morrow & Company, $23 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-688-12134-1

Founded in England in the late 1960s, the so-called Committee, otherwise known as the Feather Men, was a vigilante group dedicated to solving crimes that the police could not. This absorbing book details their 14-year struggle to capture the Clinic, a band of contract killers who murdered four former British soldiers. The background was this: Amr bin Issa, sheikh of a tribe in Oman, had lost four sons in his country's civil wars. Although tradition demanded that he avenge their deaths, he did nothing and was deposed as sheikh. Then he arranged with the Clinic to kill the servicemen believed responsible for the deaths of his sons. How the hired killers went about their task (making each murder look like an accident), how they were finally apprehended and how this case in 1990 also put an end to the Committee--or so Fiennes ( Hell on Ice ) contends its members have assured him--makes for a highly suspenseful tale. Readers will be given pause, however, by Fiennes's wont to romanticize vigilante justice and his assertion that for 20 years the British ``have had good reason to be grateful for the Feather Men's protective presence.'' Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)