Book review: The Devil's Alternative

The storytelling of Frederick Forsyth needs no introductions to those who have already had a taste of his writings through the legendary thriller "The Day of the Jackal" which have been turned into a movie (like most of his works). The movie had different versions of it including the latest of "The Jackal" enacted by Bruce Wills (although the storyline has been altered to make up for the technological advancements that were shown). Nevertheless, this book indeed is the Devil's Alternative and the intricate details of the events will blow your mind away.
Frederick Forsyth, born in Ashford in the year 1938, has been an RAF fighter pilot, a newspaperman, a foreign correspondent and BBC radio and televsion reporter, has the uncanny ability to weave the facts and fiction into a fabulous fabric of storytelling. Having travelled to over forty countries all over the world and speaking French, German and Russian, he has the ability to plot a complex and strategic thriller involving the most unusual array of characters (both fictional and real) into a nailbiting story. One thing about the stories he writes: they are so real-like, almost tangiable and always well researched.
I have had the fortune of reading most of his well known thrillers and I have to tell you, this is one of his most enjoyable books. Involving a crisis that wil rock over ten European nations, the USA and the USSR this book will keep the reader guessing till the end. The chain of events described in the book, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, will miraculously fall in place ... but for that you will have to read it ...

A small snip from the book to get the interest going:
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...Back in the seventies, photographic survellience, though good, had been slow, mainly because each cartridge of exposed film had to be ejected from the satellite at specific positions, free-fall to earth in protective coverings, be retrieved with the aid of bleepers and tracing devices, be air-freigted to NRO's central laboratories, be developed and screened. Only when the satellite was within the arc of flight which permitted a direct line between it and the United States or one of American-controlled tracking stations could simultaneous TV transmissions take place. But when the satellite passed close over the Soviet Union, the curve of the earth's surface baffled reception, so the watchers had to wait until it came around again.
Then, in 1978, the scientists cracked the problem with the Parabola Game. Their computers devised a cat's cradle of infinite complexity for the high tracks of half a dozen space cameras round the globe's surface, to this end; whichever spy-in-the-sky the White House wanted to tap into could be ordered by signal to begin transmitting what it was seeing and throw the images in a low-parabola arc to another satellite that was not out of vision. The second bird would throw the image on again, to a third satellite, and so on, like basketball players tossing the ball from fingertip to fingertip while they run. When needed images were caught by the satellite over the United States, they could be beamed back down to NRO headquarters, and from there be patched through to the Oval Office.
The satellites were traveling at over forty thousand miles per hour; the globe was spinning with the hours, tilting with the seasons. The number of computations and permutations was astronomical, but the computers solved them. By 1980, at the touch of a button, the President had twenty-four-hour access by simultaneous transmission to every square inch of the world's surface...

PS: Sorry Bibliophiles, I had not gone through the comment of Karu and forgot to mention the price and the number of pages/approximate reading time for this one... for the price may be around Rs.100 (the one I read from Indranil), and the book is set in small print and about 400 pages, give or take a few... 8 hours approx. at my speed.