Eye of the Needle [is] a deft thriller…. The book is smartly put together along lines suggested by Frederick Forsyth and John Le Carré. As in The Day of the Jackal, a double narrative focuses on the pursuer and the pursued, with the suspense extremely well sustained…. The British in Eye of the Needle can be just as ruthless as anyone else—being thoroughly careless of lives that are of no practical value to them. There is a nicely rendered sense of England during the war …,...

"The Key to Rebecca" is an assured best seller even before publication, with a first printing of 100,000 copies, a major subsidiary success with sales to the leading book clubs, a serialization smash with rights sold to just about every publication this side of Presbyterian Life, and a perfectly dreadful novel. I suppose it says something about American tastes in popular fiction but I don't like to think what. Mr. Follett's first novel, "The Eye of the Needle," got ...

If Frederick Forsyth could write as well as he can plot and if John Le Carré could plot as well as he can write, one of them might have produced Eye Of The Needle. This is, quite simply, the best spy novel to come out of England in years. If it ranks below Ambler and Greene at their best, it is because Ken Follett is writing in retrospect about a world and time he could not have known. The 1939–45 war was, to its philosophic witnesses, a moral crisis. A sense of hesitant and then enraged ethic...

There are no secrets and few surprises in Triple, but Ken Follett knows other ways to keep tension high in his thrillers. Follett has taken one convention of the spy-novel—spy accomplishes dangerous mission, barely avoiding treacherous counter-agents—and turned it inside-out once again. In The Eye of the Needle, the protagonist is a World War II German spy who we hope will be caught. In Triple, Israeli agent Nat Dickstein is the hero, but one whose identity is uncovered, whose plans are guesse...

Ken Follett's forte is the variation upon history. His previous best seller, Eye of the Needle, concerned a demon German spy in England who nearly won the war for Hitler. It really wasn't half bad. Triple plays variations on the usual assumption that the Israelis gained the ability to make atomic weapons by hijacking the essential uranium. The book is an account of how they pulled off their coup, told very much from the Israeli point of view…. Triple is a readable adventure story, a suc...

["Triple"] is eminently qualified for … popularity, for its behind-the-scenes interpretation of contemporary events includes everything in the political and emotional spectrum, as well as what someone calls the hijacking of a holocaust…. "Triple" offers a literally earthshaking—i.e., atomic—confrontation among Israel, the Egyptians and the Fedayeen, with the Russians, Americans and French muttering in the background. And it has an Israeli hero no bigge...