Eye of the Needle [is] a deft thriller….

The book is smartly put together along lines suggested by Frederick Forsyth and John Le Carré. As in The Day of the Jackal, a double narrative focuses on the pursuer and the pursued, with the suspense extremely well sustained…. The British in Eye of the Needle can be just as ruthless as anyone else—being thoroughly careless of lives that are of no practical value to them. There is a nicely rendered sense of England during the war …, a careful dosage of explicit sexual activity, and plenty of cold-blooded violence.

The book is so well done and so enjoyable that I was surprised to find myself not liking it more than I did. There is something unusually heartless about it that comes, I think, from playing the shrewd and disabused British sensibility across the heroic days of World War II...