A Long Night in Paris

April 13, 2020
Taking place over a frantic 28-hour period, Israeli author Alfon’s stellar debut opens with the kidnapping of an Israeli tech entrepreneur at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport by a mysterious lady in red. Two operatives for Israel’s supersecret Unit 8200, Col. Zeev Abad and his deputy, Lt. Oriana Talmor, quickly determine that Chinese agents kidnapped the wrong person. Their real target, a corrupt member of Unit 8200 who was attempting to sell state secrets, slipped through the airport into the night. Alfon, himself a former member of the real Unit 8200, skillfully unfolds an authentic game of chase and capture, depicting a variety of eye-opening, 21st-century spycraft techniques. Each chapter—121 in all—is a short burst of action, description, or characterization, and though the plot does sag in the middle, weighed down by an excessive cast and subplot overload, Alfon has created a mesmerizingly real world. Fans of espionage thrillers will hope to see a lot more from this talented author.

May 1, 2020
An Israeli man arrives in Paris and is promptly abducted from Charles de Gaulle airport. It quickly becomes apparent that a Chinese commando unit took the wrong man. Other matters take longer to resolve themselves in this complex thriller by a former Israeli journalist and intelligence officer. As the long night grinds forward and the bodies accumulate, spies in France and Israel plot against each other (and against the rival factions in their own intelligence organizations). The one man determined to sort it all out is Colonel Abadi, the controversial new head of Israel's Unit 8200, who is working with the reluctant Commissaire L�ger of the Paris Police. Meanwhile, Oriana Talmor, Abadi's lieutenant, tackles the internecine squabbling in Jersusalem. There's much to like in this oddly schizophrenic thriller: it moves at breakneck speed yet is rich in technical detail; its take on bureaucratic buck-passing is spot-on; and its leads possess star quality in abundance, even though Abadi is an uncomfortable mix of James Bond and Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon, and Talmor, the real genius of the team, struggles to avoid being cast as a Bond girl.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)