Wednesday, July 29, 2009

09.22 The Bitter Tea by Gavin Black




The Bitter Tea (1972) by Gavin Black
Pbk, Fontana, 189 p.


This was something of a classic 70's Fontana adventure novel a la Desmond Bagley or Alistair MacLean. All of Blacks book feature the hero Paul Harris. I'm not sure what role he plays in the other books but in The Bitter Tea he is a suave businessman who runs his own shipping company out of Kuala Lumpur.

One evening on a trip to a mountaintop luxury casino he witness an assassination attempt on a high ranking Chinese official and recognizes the assassin. That evening he also meets a beautiful and deadly woman from Bangkok.

The adventure is moderately interesting but not up to the standards of the authors I mentioned previously. I would probably give another one of his thrillers a try but unless it was substantially better I'd pass on this writer.

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