Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #191233 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

From Amazon.com
Where are the new Casablancas coming from? Here's one possible source. Bartle Bull, a lawyer, publisher, explorer, and writer, centers his latest thriller at the Cataract Cafe, a floating version of Rick's in 1935 Cairo. The owner, Olivio, is a dwarf from Goa, and his regular customers include a stalwart British professional hunter, his unfaithful wife and her lover, an Italian aviator, American twin sisters in search of all kinds of adventure, and various rogue Germans, including a doctor who regrets not being able to use Olivio for medical research. Bull's writing is wry and deceptively simple:

The waiter set before the doctor a glass of warm boiled water and the flesh of a Nile perch, cleaned from the bone and rearranged on the plate in the shape of a smaller fish. The water was pink from the three spoonfuls of vinegar that had been stirred into it, the day's first weapon in his battle with arthritis. The German leaned forward. His high hooked nose hung over the table like a chimney over a fireplace as he widened his nostrils and smelled the fish.

From Publishers Weekly
Bull, an explorer who turned his extensive knowledge of Africa to excellent use in The White Rhino Hotel, has produced another rattling good blockbuster yarn. The description seems inevitable, because this is very much a period pieceAthe period being 1935 (a few years before The English Patient takes place), when Mussolini was flexing his military muscle in Africa and pouring men and munitions through the Suez Canal for the conquest of Abyssinia, in one of the harsh prologues to WWII. The large and spirited cast includes Olivio Alavedo, the wily Goan dwarf who runs the Cataract Cafe on a barge in Cairo; his friend Anton Rider (a British great white hunter raised in England by gypsies), whose long absences on safari have spoiled his marriage to plucky Gwenn. She, alas, takes up with a suave but untrustworthy Italian flying ace, Count Grimaldi, and soon finds herself, when the attack on Abyssinia begins, trying to patch up the natives his planes are massacring. Other characters include a pair of sexy, sharp-shooting American female twins on Anton's war-beleaguered safari, a grizzled German adventurer attempting to make off with Italian silver booty and a delightfully languid British aristocrat, Adam Penfold, who seems to know everyone. The action is nonstop, the details are rawly authentic and the whole thing makes for a fast-paced and absorbing, if somewhat old-fashioned, read. The only problem is that Bull seems to take rather excessive relish in the many imaginatively brutish ways in which men kill each other.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Egypt on the brink of World War II is rife with political and economic intrigue, and Cairo is the meeting place for adventurers and scoundrels of all types. No place is more alive with these than the Cataract Cafe, whose owner, the enterprising dwarf Olivio, welcomes old friends from Kenya (see Bull's The White Rhino Hotel, LJ 3/15/92): safari leader Anton Rider; his estranged wife, Gwen, now a medical student; old Africa hand Lord Penfold; Colonel Grimaldi, an officer in the Italian air force now massing for its assault on Ethiopia; and the dazzling American twins who have hired Anton to lead them on an Ethiopian safari. Bull sets his colorful cast in Ethiopia on the eve of invasion and in Egypt as various factions compete for water from the improved dam at Aswan, but countless repetitious scenes of graphic violence and brutality at the expense of psychological development drain the narrative of the tension and suspense that would make it truly riveting.?Cynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, MA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.