The Eye of the Tiger - Wilbur Smith

I’ve read many good things about Wilbur Smith’s work over the years and have seen a couple of the movies based on his novels, so I decided it was finally time to read something by him. He’s written several connected series, but I happened to have one of his stand-alone novels, THE EYE OF THE TIGER (his ninth novel, originally published in 1975), on my shelves, so I dived into it.

And that’s an apt choice of words, because there are quite a few underwater scenes in this book. The narrator and protagonist, Harry Fletcher (not his real name, as we find out fairly soon), is a charter boat skipper based on an island off the east coast of Africa, where he takes wealthy tourists on deep sea fishing expeditions. He’s hired by a couple of men for a different sort of job. They have a young scuba diver working for them as well, and Harry’s job is to ferry the group around the islands while they search for some mysterious something that’s sunk somewhere in the area. This is a pretty common sort of plot, going all the way back to the Gold Medal era, so it’s not surprising when things turn sinister and dangerous.

It’s hard to talk too much about what goes on in this book without giving away too much. The story has plenty of twists and turns, and quite a few of the characters turn out not to be what they seem at first. At fairly regular intervals, a harrowing action scene erupts, and they’re superbly written. During some of them, I completely lost track of time because I was so intent on turning the pages to find out what was going to happen. Let’s just say that despite its length (and it’s considerably longer than most of the books I read), THE EYE OF THE TIGER kept me engaged from start to finish and wound up being thoroughly satisfying. It’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year, in fact.

That said, as long as it is, it’s still considerably shorter than some of Smith’s other novels. With my attention span the way it is these days, I’m not sure how many of them I want to tackle. But I do want to read something else by him and I hope I get around to it relatively soon. In the meantime, I really enjoyed THE EYE OF THE TIGER, and if you’re an action/adventure fan, I give it a high recommendation. It’s available in an e-book edition and has been reprinted in paperback many times.