Drink with the Devil

by Jack Higgins

1997

Status

Available

Publication

Berkley (2003), 336 pages

Description

Fiction. Thriller. HTML: In 1985, off the northwest coast of England, an audacious hijacking by Irish Protestant paramilitaries culminate in the disappearance of one hundred million pounds of gold bullion. En route to Ireland, the seagoing barge Irish Rose capsizes and sinks under mysterious circumstances. Michael Ryan the mastermind behind the plot-his niece Kathleen, and the mysterious Martin Keogh survive the disaster. Everyone and everything else on board disappear beneath the waves with the ship. Ten years later, as the peace process falter in Ireland, the American president gets information about the Irish Rose and her cargo; it may be at the disposal of terrorist powers, who intend to use it to finance an Irish civil war. Inspired by the adage, "set a thief to catch a thief" the president and the English prime minister agree: only Sean Dillon, once the most feared IRA enforcer, now in the employ of British intelligence, can avert disaster..… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member HenriMoreaux

This wasn't too bad, but wasn't Jack Higgin's best work either.

The first half of the book is essentially an extended prologue for the real story which takes place in the latter half of the book. I didn't really get much out of the first half and think it could have been handled much better with a

few pages or a chapter then the meat of the book dedicated to the 'present day' story.

Asides from the lengthy 'past' section the books main fault is the second half of the book has an epic plot hole. We learn one of the main characters is in prison for bank robbery at the start of the second half, yet and the end of the second half it becomes apparent that it was totally and utterly unnecessary for said character to be robbing a bank.

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LibraryThing member DeaconBernie

The Higgins train is full speed ahead. Even though there are a couple glitches, this is still a carefully crafted story and very enjoyable.

LibraryThing member jimgysin

When it comes to thrillers--a category that most definitely includes this book and the entire Sean Dillon series--I accept a few plot holes and implausibilities and the like as necessities to keep the fun and excitement level going strong. After all, if everyone is rational and of human dimensions,

then things won't be as thrilling. But there are limits. And this Dillon outing has far, far too many plot holes--and two, in particular, that you could fly a 747 through. No spoiler here with regard to that latter point, but we learn late in the story that Dillon has been aware of a certain piece of information for quite some time and didn't act on it earlier and properly, even though acting on it earlier and properly would have made life a whole lot easier for a whole lot of people, including himself. And tied to that is the fact that what he learns involves enough funds to obviate the need for another character to have ever done something that he did that landed him in jail. And if that character hadn't been in that jail at that time, etc., etc. So why did the character do what he did when he knew that he had all of this money sitting around? Don't ask me. Another problem I'm having with pretty much every outing in this series is that Hannah Bernstein, the main female character in the series, is basically incapable of taking care of herself in spite of her past successes. It's as if she started to take stupid pills the minute Dillon walked into her professional life, or something. She makes at least one significant and boneheaded decision in each book, and also gets caught by the bad guys in pretty much every outing and then has to be saved by Dillon. Higgins is really missing the boat by not making her a kick-butt character here, opting instead to go for the sort of "weaker sex" stereotype that got old back when 1940s movies were being produced. In this one, Bernstein makes a phone call from an unsecured line in a building that is owned by someone with sympathies for the enemy. And then she talks to her boss without using code, and she uses the real names of people. Yeah, that's something an intelligent operative would do on a daily basis. And guess what? It ends badly. About the only thing she hasn't done yet is to fall down while trying to run away from someone. In any case, my first exposure to the series was two later on in the series relative to this one, and I liked it enough to want to go back and start from the beginning. But playing catch-up has been painful at times as bad patterns have become evident, and I'm in no particular hurry to read the next one in the series at the moment.

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