Who is Oscar King? I predict that will be the main question on the lips of DIFC folk come autumn.
UAE bookshops are currently awaiting delivery of a book by an author of that name that promises to take the country – or at least the DIFC – by storm when it arrives on the shelves.
Persian Roulette is a "mile-a-minute thriller that provides a sharp-eyed satire of our globalised world, in which those who shout loudest, shoot fastest and spend most always try to come out on top", according to the blurb on the copy I have exclusively managed to obtain.
The novel is endorsed by no less than Frederick Forsyth, the master of the meticulously plotted thriller, who calls it “hilarious”, and by tough-man survivalist Bear Grylls, who calls it “funny, troubling and thought- provoking”. Praise indeed.
Having raced through the book on a recent flight, I can confirm it is a page-turner of the highest order, not least because the action is all set in Dubai.
From the coffee shops of the DIFC to villas on the Palm to the swanky hotels, you just cannot wait to see which familiar location is the setting for King’s next chapter.
But who is this new star in the UAE’s literary firmament? The book’s intro gives some brief biographical details: “After a successful and varied career in the British special forces and service with the American military and government, Oscar King now works in the financial sector in London and the Middle East”.
Tantalising, but my best efforts to track him down got nowhere, just one blind alley after another. I had to conclude that it is a nom de plume, which of course raises the question: who is the real author? There are some clues, surely, in the main character.
You meet Harry Linley initially in a luxury villa on the Palm in the company of an Iranian businessman called Shaheen. Harry works in DIFC, but shrewdly conceals his background in the British military.
He and Shaheen hit it off to such an extent that Harry is asked to babysit Shaheen’s pride and joy, a Persian cat called Bunny, while the Iranian is away on business.
In the course of Harry’s cat-minding comes the incident that sets off a trail of events winding through the Ajman property market, the Russian business community, pausing briefly at the World islands where a dastardly deed takes place, ultimately to high diplomatic and political circles in Washington, Moscow and Tehran.
Along the way, Harry gets entangled with the Dubai police, and reveals some of the expert techniques they employ to ensure we all sleep sound in our beds in the emirate. As Grylls said, thought-provoking.
In the end, without giving too much away, world peace rests on the fate of the feline and of those who fall in love with her, including the voluptuous Russian fixer Oleana.
Harry is a conundrum, a bundle of paradoxes. He is a ruthless, spontaneous killer, but he loves cats. And women. And his faraway grown-up children. He is a high financier trading between Wall Street and London, but is still waiting for the Big Deal that will earn him enough to secure financial freedom for the rest of his life – £22 million (Dh125.1m), he estimates.
So by a process of deduction, it follows that Oscar King must be Harry Linley, and that the book is probably a fictionalised biography. In which case the question becomes: just who is Harry Linley?
fkane@thenational.ae
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