Book Review: The Day of the Jackal
The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsythe concerns a fictional attempt on the life President de Gaulle in 1963, instigated by the dissident group the OAS, who were unhappy that De Gaulle has ceded power in the French colony of Algeria to the Algerians.
After several failed attempts, they decide to employ a professional assassin to do the job. The book follows the assassin as he prepares for his task and the security services’ attempts to catch him. It provides a detailed account of the rather basic and slow methods in use at that time to detect criminals, and how to avoid detection. The book starts slowly but eventually becomes more exciting leading to a dramatic conclusion.
The group mostly enjoyed the book, despite its slow start, using words such as dense and exciting to describe it, and scoring it an average of 8 out of 10.