Book Blurb : Colin Forbes' perennially popular and energetic team of characters, Tweed, Paula Grey and Bob Newman, are on the trail of five heads of state who are conspiring to cause massive civil unrest throughout the Western world. Dictatorship and martial law will be the only acceptable form of government. Tweed knows the identity of four of the ringleaders - but who is the fifth? The riots are being carefully and strategically orchestrated on the Internet. One man is singlehandedly creating a weapon to destroy the conspiracy, but whose side is he on? Tweed and his team are racing against time, through London, Germany and Denmark...
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Colin Forbes's " Rhinoceros " is quite an old book and frankly hasn't aged all that well. To be fair to the author, it is set in the early 2000s and therefore the internet back then was not quite as ubiquitous as it is today, and given that the concept of global communications does form the crux of the story, the whole novel seems quite unbelievable today.
The attention the author has paid to staging the 'action sequences' and set pieces would have paid rich dividends if he had spent at least a proportionate amount of time in character building and plot building. Almost all the characters are undercooked, and to add fuel to the fire, there are too many of them. As a reader, at the end of the book, none of the characters stood out for me and neither did the overall plot itself.
To conclude, I repeat my earlier words, this book has aged well and can easily be avoided.
