Above and below blood temperature

Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
by Bernard-Henri Levy, translated by James X. Mitchell
Duckworth, £20, pp. 454, ISBN 0715632612

The last time Mariane Pearl saw her husband Daniel, correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, she was preparing a celebratory dinner for their last night in Karachi, and he was setting off for a final interview he believed crucial for a story about the ‘shoe bomber’ and the fundamentalist Islamic underground groups in Pakistan. She was six months pregnant. Pearl, by all accounts, was an energetic, loving, humorous man, full of intelligence and curiosity. He never returned. Eight days later, his kidnappers murdered him. A Mighty Heart, written slowly in the months after his killing and the birth of their son, is her attempt to make sense of what happened, to describe, hour by hour, the search for her missing husband, and in so doing shed some light on the confused and terrifying world of terrorist intrigue. She needed to know how Daniel died, and why, and when, and when she knew she needed to write it down so that others should know. The result is a gripping and infinitely touching book, as evocative of the frenzied and paranoid world of international conspiracy as it is poignant about her feelings for her murdered husband.

There was no difficulty in tracing Pearl’s last hours, because the two of them had always worked so closely together and because, bit by bit, at least some of those involved in his kidnapping and death were caught or identified. Mariane Pearl writes well about the waiting, the swings between hope and despair, the false leads and broken promises, in a city, Karachi, which by early 2002 was full of rumours and corruption and different factions fighting each other for power, just as she does about the people who helped her and the intimacy of the relationship that built up between them in the eight days of waiting.