Product Description

Former CIA operative Robert Baer pushes fiction to the absolute limit in this riveting and unnervingly plausible alternative history of 9/11.

Veteran CIA officer Max Waller has long been obsessed with the abduction and murder of his Agency mentor. Though years of digging yield the name of a suspect—an Iranian math genius turned terrorist—the trail seems too cold to justify further effort. Then Max turns up a photograph of the man standing alongside Osama bin Laden and a mysterious westerner whose face has been cut out, feeding Max’s suspicion. When the first official to whom Max shows the photo winds up dead, the out-of-favor agent suddenly finds himself the target of dark forces within the intelligence community who are desperate to muzzle him.

Eluding a global surveillance net, Max—in the summer of 2001—begins tracking the spore of a complex conspiracy, meeting clandestinely with suicide bombers and Arab royalty and ultimately realizing the Iranian he’d sought for a decades-old crime is actually at the nexus of a terrifying plot.

Showing off dazzling tradecraft and an array of richly textured backdrops, and filled with real names and events, Blow the House Down deftly balances fact and possibility to become the first great thriller to spring from the war on terrorism.


Also available as a Random House AudioBook and an eBook


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1918474 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-30
• Released on: 2006-05-30
• Formats: Abridged, Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 6.27" h x 1.00" w x 5.51" l, .37 pounds
• Binding: Audio CD

From Publishers Weekly
Rubinstein reads Baer's first novel, aglimmer with purple prose and intelligence world double-dealing, with a tough-guy grunt and a taste for broad comic voices. Baer intends his novel as a fictionalized version of his own experiences as a career CIA officer (his memoir See No Evil was the inspiration for the movie Syriana), incorporating real-life figures like FBI man John O'Neill (who died in the World Trade Center) into his story of a Baer-like intelligence agent who finds himself trapped in a web of global terrorist maneuvering. Rubinstein's reading is solid, but listeners will undoubtedly find that the most fascinating aspect of this audiobook is Baer's chat with author Seymour Hersh. Two experts of the shadowy intelligence underworld, they discuss the relationship between Baer's characters and real figures, and Baer's stated intention to prod the uninformed reader into learning more about the secret workings of the intelligence world. Baer and Hersh deliberately leave things vague, but their hints about the relationship between Baer's book and reality are tantalizing.
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From AudioFile
John Rubinstein is in his element performing Robert Baer's spy novel. The story of evil inside the very spy agencies charged with protecting our safety is compelling, and Rubinstein's no-nonsense delivery adds to the tension. Rubinstein captures the mood and accents of a dozen characters without making any sound like caricature. He makes it simple to follow the complex story of spies, counterspies, and plots within plots, which begin in the Middle East and may lead to 9/11. It's interesting to note that Baer is a former CIA operative who spent 20 years fighting Middle East terrorist groups. He knows what he's talking about. M.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Baer, the American intelligence officer on whom the central character in the film Syriana was modeled, makes his fiction debut with this shrewd and rather alarming exploration of events surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks. To call the book an "alternate history" conjures up notions of science fiction, which this novel definitely is not, but, on the other hand, to assume that Baer is postulating that what happens here actually happened in real life is equally inappropriate. The book is a novel and a very believable one: leave it at that. The plot, which revolves around a CIA officer whose personal investigation into Osama bin Laden takes him into dark and dangerous territory, is extremely well crafted, and it certainly doesn't hurt that the author, an expert on terrorism (and on Al-Qaeda, in particular), fills the book with the kind of detail that will make readers feel as though they have completed a crash course in international intelligence. This is the kind of stuff that could make a terrific flick, but it's doubtful that a Hollywood blockbuster could capture the subtlety that Baer brings to his story. David Pitt
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