The Key to Rebecca

Name: The Key to Rebecca
SKU: 165272
Availability: InStock

4.3 | 21,409 ratings

Price: 20.25

Last update: 01-29-2025

About this item

Ken Follett’s The Key to Rebecca took fans and critics by storm when first published 40 years ago. Today, it remains one of the best espionage novels ever written.

A brilliant and ruthless Nazi master agent is on the loose in Cairo. His mission is to send Rommel’s advancing army the secrets that will unlock the city’s doors. In all of Cairo, only two people can stop him. One is a down-on-his-luck English officer no one will listen to. The other is a vulnerable young Jewish girl....

Rob Swofford

Considered by some to be the best spy novel of the twentieth century

Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2024

I read this two (2) years after I graduated high school and read the novels from the NY Times nook review and found this to be a back breakingly good novel.

What a book Mr. Ken Follett, really interesting to read “THE KEY TO REBECCA” again after thirty (30) years or so .. .. ..

I hope this finds you well and in good spirits and if you are ever in Austin be sure to go for a swim at BARTON SPRINGS by the diving board near the lifeguard stand for a swim and a laugh.

Sincerely

Rob Swofford

Seemstress

Wonderful novel, poor edition

Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2023

I’ve been meaning to read The Key to Rebecca for years, and the story did not disappoint. It’s a special treat when an author is able to stitch history and fiction together so skillfully that the seam is almost impossible to detect.
However, the Kindle edition has some annoying flaws, such as periods inserted in the middle of sentences. Most distracting of all, the character Kemel is often referred to as Kernel…I assume because the OCR used in creating the Kindle edition had trouble distinguishing between “m” and “rn.” I hope someone from Amazon sees this review and takes the opportunity to have the Kindle version corrected; once upon a time, there was an icon on product pages that made reporting such errors simple, but alas, I had no luck reporting this problem.

Claudine Wolk

A Classic Folliet Cat and Mouse Thriller, Great Sex Scenes, Great Characters and Action

Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2023

Loved this cat and mouse thriller set in Egypt during the War. The Nazis have a spy working in Egypt and a British intelligence agent who bucks the system is trying to find him. This is the second spy-type novel that I have read from Folliet - the first being one of his first’s Eye of the Needle. Loved them both and want to read more. Ironically, the “Rebecca” in the title of this novel is one of my all-time favorite books, “Rebecca” by Daphne Du Maurier.

Bottom line - Folliet is a great writer so his books are already fun to read. The history and suspense is great but it’s the characters that keep you interested. They are multi-dimensional and unique. Plus, Mr Folliet always adds some, let’s say, well-written sex scenes.

I would love to hear any of your favorites of his books that are also in this genre.

Kindle Customer

A fun thriller, though very silly at times

Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2021

Ken Follett is generally a pretty good writer. If you like a thriller that doesn't embarrass you every other sentence with poor dialog, awkward word choices, and the like, Follett is usually your man. The first paragraph of this book is particularly excellent.

While there are some good elements throughout the book, there is a lot of simply unbelievable silliness in places that I sometimes found hard to get past. For example, there is a very long scene where three characters are on a small house boat. Two characters are engaged in, shall we say, relations, while a third character sneaks around, fumbles with a keys, a briefcase, sneaks in and out of a cabinet and so on, all without the male relations-engaging characters noticing somehow. No door separates then; they are basically all in the same small room. It's like something out of a Charlie Chaplin movie. We are also supposed to believe that the main villain's amazing sneaky plan is to randomly steal briefcases from English officers walking around Cairo. That's slightly exaggerated, but not by much.

There's another lengthy, silly scene where an English character who speaks little Arabic pretends to be an Egyptian cab driver. His passenger, a fluent Arabic speaker who must give multiple instructions on where to drive, somehow never notices this.

It's still mostly a fun book if you can look past this kind of nonsense.

Amazon Customer

Good thriller with a slightly disappointing ending

Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2021

I've always loved a well-written historical fiction, and Ken Follett is one of the best writer in this genre. The story is about this spy, part-egyptian part-german, who stole crucial military intelligence from the British High Command in Cairo to aid the German African Corp in their north African campaign. For the most part, the book was well-paced, the villain of the piece suitably cunning and ruthless, the manner in which he plotted to steal the military intelligence, and how the British counter-intelligence eventually managed to slowly tightened the noose around him, were entirely believable. It especially tickled my fancy to read that the book strongly implied that Erwin Rommel owed his renowned reputation in his victorious north African battles very much to the intelligence provided by the spy.
The book is by no means perfect. The writer added a romance between the hero (the MI5 officer tasked to apprehend the spy) and a beautiful Palestine-Jew whom he recruited to set a honey-trap for the spy, in the effort to spice-up the emotional tension in the story, which I felt was absolutely unnecessary. I guess being an English writer, he just couldn't pass up the opportunity to suggest that a pale-skinned, stiff-upper lipped English MI5 officer was equaled to the task of seducing a sexually-attractive Arab woman just as well as his French or Italian counterpart. The section in the book describing their bumbling first sexual encounter is also silly and incredulous. The writer's attempt to paint the hero as a tender and gentle lover only ended up making him read like a wimp in bed and no better than love-lost teenage school-boy. James Bond would definitely not have approved.
The biggest fault of the book is the ending. For a spy who had been so cunning, ruthless, and had successfully evaded the British authorities for the most part, near the book's end he suddenly seemed to have lost some of his mojo, and in my opinion, made some very questionable decisions, that ultimately led to his capture. I guess the writer needed to reel-in his spy somewhat, to humanize him, to suggest that he is not infallible and can make mistakes, so that we can all have a satisfying conclusion to the tale.
After all, how else can one explain Erwin Rommel's defeat at El Alamein?

CoinJock

Not stop page turner...

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2024

I truly could not put my Kindle down while reading this superb spy novel by one of the best storytellers of our time...This was the only Follett novel I had not read...and I guess I saved the most suspenseful for last...but don't make the same mistake...also read his historical novels. He truly is the master storyteller.

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