Alors que sa fille vient de découvrir son existence et part à sa recherche, Jack Elliot, mercenaire écossais, est mandaté par un Cambodgien en exil pour exfiltrer sa famille d’un camp de prisonniers khmer. Un roman de guerre et d’apprentissage, un drame historique et intime, dur, parfois à la limite du soutenable, dans la touffeur de l’Asie du Sud-Est, où se côtoient violence et grandeur d’âme. ( )

The Noble Path is a thriller set in Cambodia and Thailand amid the bloody reign of the Khmer Rouge
.A rescue mission turned to an escape mission with suffering and betrayal. ( )

A brilliant book. Six stars! This powerful story follows two threads—that of the naive eighteen-year old Lisa, who’s trying to find the father she had always been told was dead; and Jack Elliot, her father, who’s setting out on a mission to Cambodia to rescue a family from the Khmer Rouge.

When Lisa is clearing out the family home after her mother’s death, Lisa breaks open the locked chest that has been kept in the loft and which she had always been forbidden from touching. Inside, she discovers photos of her father and newspaper articles describing a Northern Ireland massacre of innocent women and children for which her father was court-martialled. No wonder her mother had tried to wipe his existence from their lives.

But Lisa recognises the man’s face—she saw it briefly at her mother’s funeral. Now she knows he’s alive after all, the desire to find him grows. She’s training as a reported, so why not attempt to track him down?

Meanwhile, Jack Elliot is hired to attempt to rescue a woman and her two children from a Cambodian slave camp ruled by the vicious Khmer Rouge.

Starting with the newspaper articles, Lisa tracks down another of the soldiers court-martialled. This man has helped Elliot put together his team and the equipment for his mission. When he tells her that Elliot is currently in Bangkok (the staging-post for his incursion into Cambodia), she sets out to find him.

She arrives too late, and her father has already left the Bangkok hotel. The naive girl is quickly taken advantage of by various unscrupulous and manipulative villains. She succeeds in tracking down one of her father’s contacts in the city, but even he is not as trustworthy as he seems.

The two stories are cleverly intertwined. We feel the emotion of them both as we despair at Lisa’s naivety and sigh at Elliot’s apparent lack of empathy for everyone he comes into contact with.

Elliot eventually finds the family he has been seeking. His escape home with them is perilous, but the time spent with them and the events they survive together slowly has an effect on Elliot.

I can’t recommend this thriller highly enough: it’s a story you really feel involved in and which drags you through its pages at break-neck speed. ( )

I really enjoyed reading this novel and don't understand some of the harsh reviews which have been published. The author explains at the beginning that the novel was originally written in the 1980s and he has recently updated it for re-release. He goes on to say that when he wrote the original, he was unable to access Cambodia to research the area in detail.

There are two main storylines in this book. Jack, ex-military, is a 'soldier of fortune' who is paid by Ang to rescue his family from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Meanwhile, Lisa loses her mother and discovers a father who she always believed to be dead. The two stories are very much intertwined and keep you guessing about what will happen in the end. Despite not travelling to east Asia whilst writing the book, the author has described the area in sufficient detail that you get a great sense of place and history. The events in Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1970s would have been recent when the book was originally written and are now historical references. I thought the whole novel was very well written, with great tension throughout, which keeps you turning the pages.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review. ( )