The Madmen of Benghazi

June 30, 2014
De Villiers (1929–2013), the author of about a hundred spy novels featuring Austrian nobleman and freelance CIA agent Malko Linge, makes his U.S. debut with this entertaining entry first published in France in 2011. Malko goes to Cairo to find out who is trying to kill Ibrahim al-Senussi, the grandson of Libya’s King Idris, whom Muammar Qaddafi overthrew in 1967. Now that Qaddafi has been deposed, al-Senussi is the prospective head of the new Libyan government. Malko accepts his mission with gusto, as it involves seducing Cynthia Mulligan, a London model and al-Senussi’s mistress, to gain information. Malko soon gets on the track of a ruthless Islamist, Abu Bukatella, who doesn’t want a modern monarch backed by the West to rule Libya. The book is short, blazingly fast, and full of explicit sex. Readers may wonder why American publishers waited so long to bring the series to this country.

July 15, 2014
Best-selling French novelist de Villiers, who died in 2013, wrote more than 200 books about suave Austrian spy Malko Linge; this is the first to be translated into English in decades.Linge, who comes from the Austrian nobility, is a freelance spy for the CIA; he's the go-to guy when the target is gorgeous and needs wooing. This time he's working for the Company's station chief in Cairo, trying to secure top-level intelligence on a man the Americans hope to deposit on the Libyan throne. A wealthy playboy, Ibrahim al-Senussi has been seduced by the idea of returning to his family's ancestral stomping grounds and running the country. He takes his gorgeous girlfriend, a model named Cynthia Mulligan, with him to Cairo for a series of meetings with men who may or may not be on his side. While terrorists plot to kill the would-be king, Linge romances his blonde bombshell of a girlfriend to help figure out what he's up to, while trying to stay alive in a rapidly evolving political climate that heats up with the fall of the notorious Libyan dictator. The author was a journalist, and his intimate knowledge of regional geopolitics gives this book a ripped-from-the-headlines feel; the plot, however, is pedestrian. Linge, brought in because he is supposedly an expert at romancing women, tends to twiddle his thumbs a lot. And the "master spy" doesn't seem very competent: At one point he and his fellow agents search for a known terrorist in the terrorist's homeland by stopping at gas stations and asking if anyone knows where he lives.A ton of coincidences and a dry, journalistic approach to fiction render this spy novel no threat to Ian Fleming's legacy.

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July 1, 2014

The first SAS (Son Altesse Serenissime) novel appeared in 1965. Hearing of the death of James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, in 1964, de Villiers's editor told him, "You should take over." De Villers did, writing 200 SAS novels before he died in 2013. This is the first published in English. The series titles all feature the same hero, Austrian nobleman Malko Linge, who subsidizes his sybaritic lifestyle by freelancing for the CIA. If this book is representative of the series, its strong reading for two reasons: de Villiers knows the world and the players he writes about, and he writes solid action and sex scenes. This installment takes place in Egypt and Libya prior to and following Muammar al Qaddafi's death. The CIA wants to install a puppet king in Libya. Jihadists, "the madmen of Benghazi," conspire to bring him down. Malko is caught in between with explosive results. The French literary establishment ignored de Villiers, but a former minister commented, "The French elite pretend not to read him, but they all do." VERDICT If you like James Bond, you'll like Malko Linge.--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2014
Between the mid-1960s and French author de Villiers' death in 2013, he wrote nearly 200 novels (sometimes as many as five a year) about the Austrian Malko Linge, whose freelance operations for the CIA took him around the world and sent him regularly into life-threatening danger (and into the arms of many beautiful women). The series was wildly successful butuntil nowhas been unavailable in English. This thrilling adventure, originally published in 2011, marks the first Linge novel to appear in the U.S. (more are on their way). It's set in Egypt and Libya around the time of the death of Muammar Quadaffi. Malko's assignment is to seduce the girlfriend of a man who fancies himself the next king of Libya and to extract vital information about the man's immediate plans; the case leads to some close calls with death and to several graphic (and, it must be said, almost completely unnecessary) scenes of carnal intimacy. Linge has been called the French James Bond, but no Bond novel was ever as sexually graphic, or as politically relevant, as this one. It's so good, though, in that guilty-pleasure, over-the-top Bondian way that it will make American readers impatient to get their hands on the entire series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)