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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #666937 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-30
• Released on: 2006-05-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Former CIA agent Baer, author of the memoir See No Evil (2002), which inspired the film Syriana, offers the same closely observed details of intelligence work and life in his first novel, a political thriller. Unfortunately, a surfeit of subplots and dozens of characters slow the action down. One day in June 2001, veteran CIA case officer Max Waller is crudely and coldly removed from his office and job in Langley, Va. On September 11, 2001, what Waller has discovered sifting through live secrets and dead agents from Washington to Tehran comes together into a plausible alternate theory of how and why the Twin Towers were targeted. Whether or not readers buy into that theory, they're sure to enjoy Baer's jaundiced view of his former employer. When Waller finds himself being trailed by some obvious outsiders, he thinks, "The FBI was capable of screwing up... but neither it nor the local police nor anyone else I could think of in this nation or abroad would be idiotic enough to field a white surveillance team in Harlem. For that, you needed incompetence on a colossal scale. Langley had to be behind it."
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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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