The Enemy Within
By Tim Ayliffe
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Shortlisted for the 2022 Danger Prize.
Shortlisted for the 2022 Ned Kelly Award.
'He heard a voice, someone calling out in the distance, followed by a loud fluttering of birds. Bailey looked up just in time to see a body falling from the sky ...'
Investigative journalist John Bailey is doing his best to turn his life around after losing the woman he loved. He has a new job. He’s given up the drink. He even has a dog.
But then Federal Police raid his home with a warrant granting them unprecedented powers to take anything they want, including all his electronic devices and passwords. When Bailey protests, they threaten to put him in a prison cell.
Someone wants to stop Bailey doing what he does best – exposing the truth. He has been investigating the rise of a global white supremacist group and suspects that a notorious neo-Nazi in the United States has been directing deadly racist attacks on Sydney’s streets.
When the body of one of his key sources washes up on a nearby beach, it’s clear Bailey and anyone helping him have become targets. Bailey reaches out to a ruthless old friend – CIA veteran, Ronnie Johnson – to lure the enemy from the shadows.
An enemy who thought they were untouchable. Until now …
The brilliant third book in Tim Ayliffe’s John Bailey series. Bailey’s adventures in The Enemy Within, State of Fear and The Greater Good are to be adapted for the screen by CJZ Productions, Australia's largest independently owned production company series.
Praise for The Enemy Within:
‘A breathlessly written book, ripped from today’s headlines, this is a cracking read that blurs the line between fact and fiction. More please.’ Michael Robotham
'A cracking yarn told at breakneck speed. I couldn't put it down.' Chris Hammer
‘Sharp, gritty, sophisticated. Ayliffe’s criminal world is terrifyingly real.’ Candice Fox
Praise for State of Fear
‘Another brilliantly crafted thriller from Ayliffe that fits perfectly in today’s worrying world … Verdict: Get this guy on TV.’ Herald Sun
‘Sharp, incisive and scarily prescient, I was hooked from the first chapter to the final page.’ Sara Foster, bestselling author of The Hidden Hours
‘Utterly compelling and terrifyingly timely. I could not put it down.’ Pip Drysdale, bestselling author of The Sunday Girl
‘As a correspondent, I lived this world. Tim Ayliffe has written it.’ Stan Grant, writer and broadcaster
Praise for The Greater Good
‘A brilliantly written character starring in cracking crime thriller.’ Herald Sun
'Ayliffe delivers a taut, nail-biting page-turner, stamping his mark on the modern day Australian thriller.’ Better Reading
‘An absolute cracker of a thriller.’ Chris Uhlmann
Tim Ayliffe
Tim Ayliffe’s thriller novels have been informed by his 25-year career as a journalist in Australia and around the world. He writes about espionage, extremism, politics and the global power games at play in the 21st Century. He has been the Managing Editor of Television and Video for ABC News and also Executive Producer of News Breakfast. He is the author of the ‘John Bailey’ series including The Greater Good, State of Fear, The Enemy Within and his most recent novel, Killer Traitor Spy. Tim's thrillers are also in development for TV. When he's not writing or chasing news stories, Tim watches rugby and surfs. He lives in Sydney.
Related to The Enemy Within
Titles in the series (2)
State of Fear Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Enemy Within Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for The Enemy Within
112 ratings10 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Enemy Within is Tim Ayliffe’s third exciting thriller to feature investigative journalist John Bailey.After a young Sudanese man is beaten into a coma only streets away from where a white supremacists rally was held just hours earlier, Bailey, writing a piece on the rise of right wing extremism for the launch issue of a new independent magazine, finds himself in the middle of a deadly conspiracy determined to start a race war.Fast paced and offering plenty of action, elements of the plot are recognisable from headline events including the emboldening of various hate groups (supported by political, media and law enforcement leaders), the cull of experienced investigative media, and the AFP raid on a journalist. I really like the way that Ayliffe (a former journalist himself) grounds his stories so that events seem plausible, and are relevant to Australian society. I found it easy to guess who was behind the direct actions of the extremists, but the identity of other players came as a surprise.Up against a well resourced and connected enemy, Bailey gets some help in The Enemy Within from his former newspaper colleagues, Gerald Summers, and Marjorie, plus ex-CIA agent (among other things) Ronnie Johnson. Unable to trust the police, when they learn of the supremacists end game Bailey and Ronnie physically take on the threat in a tense showdown.Bailey is in a fairly good place in this third novel,. He remains sober, he has grown closer to his daughter, he has adopted a dog, and his PTSD from his time as a captive in Iraq is rarely close to the surface. Though he is still mourning the death of his girlfriend (in State of Fear), there is a hint of possibility of a new romance in forthcoming books when Bailey reunites with a former lover, TV journalist Annie Brooks. The bushfires raging along the coast of NSW, which creates a pall of smoke over Sydney, and a throwaway line that refers to the incipient pandemic dates the timeline at January 2020. Set in Sydney, readers familiar with the city will recognise locations such as the Lindt Cafe and Bondi Beach.The Enemy Within is a gripping, tense and entertaining read. It’s not strictly necessary to have read the previous novels, The Greater Good and State of Fear, to enjoy this novel but I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I started out loving this book and the writing style, but perhaps I am in a reading slump because I found it disjointed and hard to finish.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I finished this over a week ago but hadn't had a chance to write about it.I probably should have read Hemon's Question of Bruno first but I found this one at City Books and not the other. Well, basically, his book could have been five/five stars if he had just ended it earlier. It seems strange but (without giving away too much) the second to last chapter is intense, challenging, and honest. It is s confrontation which is successful in getting the characters and the reader to be really engaged in what is happening and would have made for an uneasy but still more satisfying conclusion. Instead, Hemon wraps up some of the characters in a completely different setting and time period in a way that feels disjointed and completely disconnected from anything else earlier in the book. In a way, it's probably best to just consider the last chapter to be some add on short story not in connection with the rest imo...though perhaps that is just me.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Here's one of my everything-is-connected, one book leads to another kinda intro. I was told of Aleksandar Hemon's work by another writer, Valerie Laken, who praised his short stories, which made me sit up and take notice because her own story collection, SEPARATE KINGDOMS, was simply outstanding. I think she's also from Chicago, which is where Hemon lives now. Anyway, while looking at Hemon's story collections (there are two) I also found this novel, NOWHERE MAN, which immediately intrigued me because the title comes, of course, from the Beatles song and I have been a Beatles fan and follower since 1964. And just in the past year or two I read a couple of other novels that were both inspired by the music of the Beatles. One, originally published in Norwegian over 25 years ago is called simply BEATLES (by Lars Saabye Christensen), and tells of the lives of four young Oslo boys whose lives were influenced by the Liverpool lads - a wonderful picaresque, coming of age kind of novel only translated into English a year or so ago. The other is from Finland, called POPULAR MUSIC FROM VITTULA, and again it's all about some kids who were first enthralled by a 45 rpm Beatles record, "Rock and Roll Music," which they didn't understand but immediately made it their own as they labored to learn how to play musical instruments. Once again, a funny and marvelous book. And the Beatles' music was what started it all. So now here's Aleksandar Hemon with his fictional tale of Bosnian emigrant (not quite a refugee), Jozef Pronek, who does indeed appear to "a real Nowhere Man," caught between cultures as he struggles to make a life for himself in 1990s Chicago. Hemon gives a pretty complete look at Pronek's life, from his childhood in Sarajevo and a comical and sometimes heartbreaking look at Jozef's experiences with girls and women, from his first realization at the age of 10 or 11 that there was a real and mysterious difference between the girls who wore no tops at the beach and those who did not to a final tenuous adult relationship with a young woman he meets while working as a door-to-door canvaser for Greenpeace. Oh yeah, and early on, he and his friend Mirzah become Beatles fans and, like the kids in the Finnish and Norwegian books, take up instruments and learn to play the Fab Four tunes, mostly to get chicks, of course. There is one particularly poignant scene toward the book's end when the adult Jozef reluctantly acknowledges that "Yesterday" was never really anything but an especially sappy song, certainly marking the end of his long-held innocence. This is a richly textured and episodic book which speaks to and of so many important issues both sociological and historical. There are many references to the civil war in Bosnia, of course, and a ground-level and graphic view of how things really were there and in Ukraine in the early 90s as the USSR suddenly flamed out and crumbled, allowing centuries old ethnic hatreds and rivalries to ignite again. Jozef, a peaceful and essentially good-hearted observer, doesn't really understand the hatred between the Christian and Muslim populations that suddenly erupts in those violent and turbulent times. He is perhaps more of a victim and casualty than a participant. Geeze, there is just so much going on in this book, which covers the first nearly thirty years of Pronek's life as well as his family history and ancestry, which, as the final chapter suggests must all be taken with several grains of salt. There are several narrators in NOWHERE MAN. I kinda lost count as I at times wrestled with the constantly shifting point-of-view, trying to establish exactly who was speaking in each chapter or section of the book. Finally I just gave up and went with the flow. I loved the one narrator, Viktor Plavchuk, a grad student in English Lit, who unwillingly falls in love with Jozef, and whose dissertation topic is "Queer Lear." Humor is a constant in the narrative and I found myself smiling, chuckling and laughing throughout the book, at least when I wasn't being horrified by descriptions of the wars. The description of the obligatory year of national military service is especially funny and will ring true to any veteran.The last couple of chapters are perhaps the hardest, due to the quick shifts in times and narrators. Jozef and his Amazing Technicolor Dreams are surreal and disturbing, and in this final 'ancestral history' Hemon revisits many of the names from earlier in the book and recasts them in a broader historical view, even using his own name - "Alex Hemmon, a former member of the Purple Gang in Detroit, a hit man who has to kill someone every time he gets drunk (which he does habitually), and who moonlights as a professional trombonist in an orchestra regularly performing at the Far Eastern Grand Opera."Because I had trouble with the shifting POV's and the last chapter, which seemed almost tacked on, I was tempted to give this book just 4 stars. But then I thought, Nah. Just because I didn't quite get it doesn't negate the sheer genius of the book. This is most definitely a 5-star read, maybe more. I recommend it highly.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I love the way this guy constructs sentences. The comparisons to Nabakov are apt. Hemon is really funny, too.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Darling of the "New Yorker," and now, finally, master of that very familiar kind of virtuoso late twentieth-century easily eloquent but somewhat watery post-Nabokovian prose. But why master something so thoroughly known? Bourgeois, in the old-fashioned sense, in its ambitions and in its ideas. Forgettable.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book started off with great promise, but the last chapter let it down somewhat. The writing is brilliant, and every sentence is very evocative and pops out of the page at you, insisting you have a mental picture of it. Wonderful writing and wonderful story.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The book is heavily bifurcated, and choppy. The story(s) are told by multiple narrators, over multiple time periods. Each chapter weaves a different thread. I would have rated this book higher had it not been for the author's repertoire of sordid, repugnant, abhorrent, queer dross he had to inject in the novel.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This strange but interesting novel is in part a "Chicago" novel. In "Nowhere Man," Hemon takes his protagonist from Sarajevo to the Soviet Union, from Chicago to Shanghai. From the grand causes of Jozef's adolescence -- for instance trying to change the face of rock and roll and, hilariously, struggling to lose his virginity -- to a fleeting encounter with George Bush (the first) in Kiev, to enrollment in a Chicago ESL class and the sometimes glorious adventures of minimum-wage living, which includes stints as a P.I. and as a fund-raiser for Greenpeace, Hemon crafts an unusual but endearing character. Written with all the literary verve of his earlier stories, but funnier, warmer, and more accessible, "Nowhere Man" traces a life at once touchingly familiar, eccentric, strange and bracingly out-of-the-ordinary, all the while reminding the reader why Hemon earned such extraordinary recognition after just one book. In spite of that I was uncomfortable with Hemon's prose style, which could use some polishing or perhaps better editing.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5weird but very cool book--beautiful language, style.