Blow the House Down, Robert Baer
Blow the House Down, Robert Baer
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Blow the House Down

Author: Robert Baer

Narrator: John Rubinstein

Abridged: 5 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/30/2006

Categories: Fiction, Political

Synopsis

Former CIA operative Robert Baer pushes fiction to the absolute limit in this riveting and unnervingly plausible alternative history of 9/11.

Veteran CIA officer Max Waller has long been obsessed with the abduction and murder of his Agency mentor. Though years of digging yield the name of a suspect—an Iranian math genius turned terrorist—the trail seems too cold to justify further effort. Then Max turns up a photograph of the man standing alongside Osama bin Laden and a mysterious westerner whose face has been cut out, feeding Max’s suspicion. When the first official to whom Max shows the photo winds up dead, the out-of-favor agent suddenly finds himself the target of dark forces within the intelligence community who are desperate to muzzle him.

Eluding a global surveillance net, Max—in the summer of 2001—begins tracking the spore of a complex conspiracy, meeting clandestinely with suicide bombers and Arab royalty and ultimately realizing the Iranian he’d sought for a decades-old crime is actually at the nexus of a terrifying plot.

Showing off dazzling tradecraft and an array of richly textured backdrops, and filled with real names and events, Blow the House Down deftly balances fact and possibility to become the first great thriller to spring from the war on terrorism.

Also available as a Random House AudioBook and an eBook

About The Author

Robert Baer spent twenty years running agents from inside the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, operating against Hizballah, Al-Qaeda, and other terrorist organizations, and “was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East” (Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker). His memoir See No Evil was a New York Times bestseller and inspired the movie Syriana starring George Clooney. He lives in Colorado.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Will on October 20, 2008

Baer may have a story to tell that is non-fiction, but the CIA will not clear the things he has to say. So he decided to sidestep the secrecy requirement and present his tale as fiction. It is all done with a nod and a wink. So take what he proffers as fiction as gospel. This is a very slickly writt......more

Goodreads review by Isis on September 21, 2009

I'm sticking this under 'memoir' even though it's ostensibly fiction, because having heard Baer speak (he lives about 40 miles from here) and read two of his nonfiction books, it's clear this book is only a slight fictional branching from his own experience. I don't know that he believes 9/11 was re......more

Goodreads review by Jim on January 13, 2018

This read was fascinating. The author, of course, is the real deal. Baer has been out there, gone behind the curtain and peaked beneath the circus tent. He's seen the rabbits, Lennie. Now this book is a rather complex read. It's espionage, after all. What, you expect it to be simple? There's lots of......more

Goodreads review by Mandi on December 01, 2020

Down Right Chilling Written by Mandi Scott Chestler on March 25th, 2010 Book Rating: 3/5 After reading so many of his non-fiction books, I was pleasantly surprised that former CIA operative Robert Baer could also write a gripping thriller. Thanks to Blow The House Down, now I begin to understand that a......more

Quotes

Stunning Advance Praise for Blow the House Down

“One of the finest espionage novels I’ve read since the end of the Cold War. Sharp, witty, and chilling; do yourself a big favor and read this.” —Nelson DeMille, author of Night Fall and The Lion’s Game

“Moves at jet speed . . . a crackling spy thriller that will leave readers wondering how much may be true.” —David Wise, author of Spy

“Harrowing . . . pulses with the gritty details only a former intelligence officer could know. Watch out, Tom Clancy, there’s a new storyteller in town—and he’s actually lived the life he writes about!” —David Ignatius, author of Agents of Innocence

“Unputdownable . . . Bob Baer has developed great characters and put them in situations that are devastatingly authentic.” —Joseph J. Trento, author of The Secret History of the CIA

“Lively . . . an insider’s tale about the one unforgivable sin of the intelligence world—not wanting to know.” —Thomas Powers, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Intelligence Wars

“Engrossing and challenging—how do you act when you know what really happened on September 11? Baer is so persuasive, one wonders whether he in fact did know. He certainly writes as if he did.” —William F. Buckley, Jr., author of Miles Gone By and Last Call for Blackford Oakes

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