cover image Martyr

Martyr

Jurgen Petschull. Mercury House, $18.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-916515-28-7

A seasoned author and reporter/journalist (for West German newspapers and the magazine Stern) Petschull has designed a thriller in the Ken Follett genre packed with enough savvy to give readers the fresh sense of ""you are there.'' Hussein, a sensitive young Shiite living in Germany, is rejected by his father in Beirut for lying about his student scrapes and failures. When his wife and daughter are slain in Beirut during the U.S. battleship New Jersey's attack on Muslim positions, Hussein is ripe for indoctrination as a martyr. The author's skill in probing the mentality of suicide mission terrorists calling themselves Allah's Holy Warriors is such that he engages sympathy for Hussein. He also compellingly recreates, from the heart-stopping viewpoints of passengers and crew, the lurid 1985 highjacking of a TWA plane and the murder of a young navy diver. Other striking scenes include the planting and smuggling of explosives on the plane, a terrorist training camp in the Bekaa valley, a safe house in bombed-out Beirut, a soldier of fortune get-together in Las Vegas and President Reagan's Oval Office, where a kidnap plot is hatched. An absorbing page-turner. (February 23)