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Reviews of Cut Out

“An honourable attempt to get into the mind of a terrorist. What really motivates this bright, educated, lethal young man... And the ending is purposely inconclusive. What has it all meant, those killings, those mistaken interpretations of what actually had happened, this waste of intelligence and dedication? Mr Smith offers no answers. He merely observes in this very well written, gripping book.”
New York Times Book Review
“A stunning debut... An English schoolteachers stalks a German terrorist who killed the teacher’s wife ... Irony suffuses the plot for the wife was faithless and intending to leave her husband... An English detective in turn pursues the teacher. Koller realising that he has been set up by his “cut-out” is also tracing his own path back along a well-hidden route of communications, becoming ever more human as he does. This finely observed book by a journalist who knows the Middle East well is bitter, compelling, and, one suspects, too true.”
Library Journal
“...a suspenseful, carefully written and memorable novel.”
Playboy
“For the unremitting chill of its violence, few novels match ‘The Cut-Out’ ...a top-rank thriller ...reflecting I suppose the insane chaos of a sick, sick world.”
Los Angeles Times
“A convincing novel... one that is both informative and frightening. Highly recommended.”
The Muncie Evening Press, Indiana
“Smith knows the twisted ropes,”
Christopher Wordsworth, The Observer.
“Excellent and authentic... intricate background material and well-observed characterisation.”
The Birmingham Post
“Novels about the murky world of terrorism are two a penny these days but this one contrives to be a cut above average”
The Sheffield Telegraph
“A chilling, thrilling tale... a superb fictional corollary of his biography of the terrorist Carlos.”
Auckland Star
 

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  Cut-Out
Andre Deutsch,
London, 1979.

Published in the United States in 1980 by Viking, New York, as “The Cut-Out” and as a paperback by Ace Charter in New York in 1982. ISBN 0 233 97279 X
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