The 43-year-old Morten Hesseldahl has an impressive CV. He was formerly the director of one of the major Danish publishing houses and is now director of the national newspaper Information and chairman of the board of directors of the Danish Film Institute. And on top of this he has even recently written a political thriller entitled Drager over Kabul ('Kites over Kabul'), which has just been awarded the Danish Crime Academy prize as the best Danish thriller 2007.
 
At the centre of the novel is a face-to-face meeting that is supposed to take place in Copenhagen between the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the Somali feminist Mona Tariq, who lives in Holland and has an obvious affinity with the Ayaan Hirsi Ali of the real world. Both Karzai with his Western leanings and the strong critic of Islam are obvious targets for radical Islamists, and it does in fact turn out that a group of terrorists are out to kill two flies with one stone during the Copenhagen meeting.
 
The novel crosscuts among several different perspectives. We follow the eternally pipe-smoking Conservative minister for foreign affairs, Lars-Ole Ravn, who is to chair the meeting between Karzai and Tariq; the alcohol-addicted left-wing intelligence officer Gerhard Müller, whose task it is to prevent the assassination attempt; the reliable soldier Nazir from the Afghan intelligence service, who has been sent to Copenhagen to protect his president; and the religious fanatic Mahmoud, who is one of the jihadists seeking to assassinate Karzai and Tariq. And from the sidelines suddenly comes also the young and likeable painter and globetrotter Mathias, who unwittingly becomes mixed up in the whole of this explosive affair when, on board a ferry to Oslo, he comes across the beautiful but mysterious blonde who is so common a feature of this genre.
 
The array of perspectives in this set-up provides Hesseldahl with the possibility of introducing generous helpings of suspense, as he effectively changes the perspective when the tension increases. However, this technique also means that the author can draw a balanced picture of the problem as he can throw light on the complex question from various different perspectives. For instance, on the one hand we see how the foreign minister pleads for an active foreign policy to counter the terror that in his view is purely ideologically motivated, while on the other hand we can see that Mahmoud’s intense hatred of the West is primarily due to the fact that he has been unjustly tortured by American soldiers in a base in Kabul.
 
In other words, there is no unambiguous answer in 'Kites over Kabul'. One thing that is clear, however, is the splendid quality of the novel. Intelligently devised and written with an elegant sense of style and with an impressive understanding of the classical effects of the thriller. We can only express our surprise that Hesseldahl is not a full-time writer.

EXTRACT

The boulder sits in a slot between two mountain-sides like a heavy silhouette against the grey sky.  They move forward through a narrow passage of hard-packed snow at the bottom. He helps her the last part of the way and they step out onto the plateau that ends in a drop to the fjord, a kilometer down.

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