Promise of Christmas

by Gerald Seymour

Book Overview

Behind the lines lie unspeakable danger and the test of a lifetime for former intelligence officer Bill Penn. When a secret mass grave in the Balkans reveals the body of Dorrie Mowat, he is drawn into... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0006490336
• ISBN13: 9780006490333
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Good Life Publications
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 7.0" x 10.3"

Customer Reviews

absolute thriller

First of all to start with, its the first time I am reading Gerald Seymour's. THe title of the book caught my attention when I was searching for a book and after i read it it was obviously up to my expectation. the book starts off with a exhumtion of a young british lady in the civil war of Rosenovici. It shocked many ppl because her presence was unexpected. THen comes the hero, Penn who kept his own life at stake to find out the murderer just for a report to the victim's mom.. gerald has mixed emotion and courage and everything in his words and it's very touching. the book is really good and its a must read but the ending is a bit disspaointing for me.. i didnt expect it to him.. it was very ironic.. but i have learned a lot of things from this book.. this book is an absolute thriller.. i just rated 4 because of the ending.. hehehe..

For Dorrie

Dorrie Mowat was an English teenager of exceptional incorrigibility, who caused her mother and stepfather innumerable instances of hurt, anger, and social embarrassment before she left home to travel the Third World. Even her mother, Mary, detested her as "Horrid Dorrie". At the beginning of THE HEART OF DANGER, an international graves registration team in disintegrated Yugoslavia unearths a mass grave of Croation villagers, inhabitants of Rosenovici, apparently murdered by their Serbian neighbors from the village of Salika. Dorrie is among the bodies, her face bludgeoned, throat cut, and head bullet pierced. After Mary brings her daughter home in a coffin - outraged at the official indifference of Her Majesty's government, grief-stricken and guilt-ridden - she hires Bill Penn to go to the Balkans, find out why Dorrie was murdered, discover who was responsible, and write a report. Once in Zagreb, Penn discovers that there may be one surviving eyewitness to the crime, an old woman living in the ruins of Rosenovici now behind the cease fire line in Serbian controlled territory. Penn crosses into THE HEART OF DANGER to find the answers. Gerald Seymour is the best writer of believable covert action fiction that I've found on today's bookshelves. Even better than the master, John Le Carré, because Seymour's plots move at a somewhat faster pace without sacrificing character development. And this author's heroes aren't indestructible and flawlessly noble like so many protagonists of the genre (especially, it seems, if they're Americans). For example, Penn is a plodding, regular bloke still smarting from being sacked by MI5 after years of faithful service in the trenches because he lacks the higher education necessary for further advancement. So, now he does grotty surveillance jobs for a second rate detective agency, and returns home at night to a sinking marriage. His is a mid-life crisis well underway. As he gradually pieces together Dorrie's last hours, he discovers another side of the girl that compels him to seek justice in her memory. For the first time in a long time, Penn has the opportunity to regain his dignity and a sense of self-worth. Powerful incentive, that. The villain of the piece on the other side of the line is Milan Stankovic, a loving father and husband, once a simple clerk, now popularly acclaimed to be chief of the local militia in Salika. This newly acquired power, plus the memory of Croatian atrocities against his grandparents, burned alive in a church with many other Serbs during WWII, combine into a continuum of tribal violence and hatred. The banality of this evil is unremarkable for the Balkans, but relatively unknown in contemporary America the Melting Pot. In all of Seymour's books that I've read, any victory of good over evil that may occur is of a Pyrrhic sort. It's hard to tell, at the conclusion, which side has sustained the greater loss. It's the novelty of this approach for this genre of fiction, and its commen

A masterpiece, but it helps if you know about there.

I have read four books of Seymour and this one is the best. It is complex and true, it reveals the horrors of the Balkan ethnic wars by focusing on events in just one, average village. As usual, the reader can get the flavor of the places described and there is no happy end. It is more psychological than a thriller, and that is, I presume, the reason why the book is unpopular with some. Last but not least at all: the book rightly describes the amount of blame and responsibility resting on the Western powers for doing nothing and the sleeping ability inside any individual to make a difference. The heroism of the main character is tragic and moving, but real and not cheap. An excellent, underrated book.

Vividly depicts the horror of a war zone.

Seymour has once again written an interesting book. This time he has gone to the heart of a modern conflict and shown the harsh realities of a futile war which he depicts with his expert use of lagnuage. His graphic descriptions of some of the more grotesque aspects of life in the war zone only heighten interest in his story. One feels compelled to read on while at the same time feeling revulsion at the cruelty depicted in the pages of this novel. "Man's inhumanity to man." Once again, as in many of his books, the leading character does not survive the final pages of the novel. This so often happens with some of Seymour's more interesting characters. One might almost say it is one of his trademarks and what one expects to happen to the central character. Seymour has the ability to make one identify with his characters and think about them even after the book has been closed. While not his best book, it comes close