The story is a work of fiction, but it is easy to see that the author writes about something he himself has experienced. The author has chosen to keep the story in a simple language that fits Paul, sounds authentic and makes the book easy to read. We follow him from young age until he ends up as a counter-terrorist operative. We experience the story through the eyes of Paul, a Maronite Christian growing up in the Bekaa Valley. Sawan brings us into as his story picks up at the outset of the Lebanese civil war in the middle of the 1970’s. With many different religious denominations, who in a varying degree dislike each other, and as the battleground for her neighboring states, Lebanon spell trouble like no other nation. All words related to one small strip of land on the coast of the Mediterranean -Lebanon. I received this book from the author, free of charge, with no expectation of a positive reviewĪnyone who have watched news the last 40 years will be familiar with the words Druze, Maronite, Beirut or Shatila. He infuses his thriller with chilling realism. Sawan understands his topic well, having been born in the Bekaa Valley and tortured as a youngster, then recruited and trained to fight terrorists. Sawan taps into this horrific reality with his hero Paul, who commits to eradicating evil by becoming the terrorists’ worst nightmare. It was the dawning of the age of suicide bombers, now agonizingly common. Marines and 58 French soldiers protecting the U.S. when in 1983 a suicide truck bomb killed 241 U.S. As Sawan writes, the line was far from green - it was a waste land of humanity. Life was dangerous as forces clashed over the Green Line that divided Beirut.

Lebanon was a precursor to the war now in Syria, when it was fought over by the Syrian army, militant Islamic jihadists, Christian militias, the Druze, and the Israeli army.

The book’s opening line is a grabber: “I’ve become the kind of man I hate.” With that, the book is impossible to put down until the final satisfying line.īeyond the story, the book opens a window into the complexities of life in the Middle East, not only during the civil war years, but now. The book’s narrator is Paul, a Christian who grows up in Lebanon’s notorious Bekaa Valley, home to battling factions during the brutal, complex, and devastating Lebanese civil war from 1975 to 1990.ĭefending his sister from an assault by neighborhood thugs with a well-aimed B-B gun, Paul’s young life soon morphs into escalating assaults against Islamic jihadists who find joy in the taking of innocent life. Sawan’s compelling thriller, Al Shabah, or The Ghost, fact and fiction are skillfully blended into a fast-paced and highly charged story of an assassin whose specialty is wiping out terrorists

Al Shabah by A.E. Sawan