Three times the OAS has attempted to assassinate the French president, Charles De Gaulle.  Three times they failed, and infiltrations and arrests have weakened the OAS to a level where they can't reliably plan anything anymore.  The three top men from the organisation decide to plan something on their own, without consulting the organisation to avoid leaks, and they decide to use a hired killer rather than someone from their own ranks, because possibly every OAS member is known to the police.

A handful of potential candidates is selected, and an Englishman is contacted.  He accepts, but his price is high.  The OAS is forced to rob banks and jewellers all over the country to pay the bill, since they are out of money.  In the mean time the man, who uses The Jackal as his codename, prepares his task.  False and not so false papers, disguises that fit the documents, and a suitable weapon.  The gun itself is not that special, but the way it needs to be transported is.  And most importantly: when and where will he strike?

Then one day the advance payment is on his Swiss account, and the Jackal can officially start with his task.  Via Brussels and Milan he travels to France.  But the police had been wondering what the three OAS-kingpins were doing on their own, and thanks to a few not too legal actions they know two things: "assassin" and "Jackal".  A giant manhunt can begin, starting with finding the real identity of one man of whom nobody even nows the nationality...

This is not a glamourous James Bond story, it's quite the opposite.  Dirty tactics to get information, dirty acts to cover tracks.  Elegant men let their own politics prime over the general interest, peole sacrificing each other to reach their goals.  The story makes one even wonder if our lovely Western Democracy is, below the surface, behaving that much better than other regimes.

And at the same time it's a wonderful police fiction story.  One can follow the careful preparation of the assassin, but also the not so glamorous part of police work: the boring plowing through piles of information to find that one anomaly that might be a clue.  Forsyth goes through a lot of detail, making you feel like you were there, like he was there at the time.  There are some small mistakes though, like the name of the Belgian national airport, or the one Belgian name that is mentioned.  True, it is a very common name - but not in Liege.  In France the river Drôme flows the wrong way, and probably there were other details that I missed.  But other descriptions are correct, and they are the ones that matter.

Everyone knows that Charles De Gaulle didn't die from an assassination, so in theory there shouldn't be much suspense in this book.  But you can safely forget about that theory, this book has all the ingredients of a very decent thriller.  The story has a slow start due to a lot of background information that is needed, but as soon as it starts it's constantly picking up speed like a train waggon rolling downhill, unstoppable.  The main characters are credible living people, and the tension buils up towards that one time in that one place where police, assassin and victim all come together.  Even if we know in advance he failed, the entier build-up makes you want to read, just to be really sure, since it could just as wel be that...