Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION STO | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"The perfect post-Bond spy...Move over, Jason Bourne." -- BookPage
Salim Dhar is the world's most wanted terrorist. After he narrowly failed to kill the U.S. president, the CIA is under pressure to hunt him down. Echelon, the West's intelligence analysis network, is in meltdown, monitoring all channels for the faintest trace of Dhar. But no one can find him. Only Daniel Marchant, renegade MI6 officer, knows where he is.
Marchant pursues Dhar up into the Atlas Mountains outside Marrakech, where he sees an unmarked military helicopter take off and head east. Is someone shielding Dhar to perpetrate an act of proxy terrorism on the West? Or is the CIA right when it claims to have killed him?
To discover the truth, Marchant must be recruited by Moscow. It's a role that will require him to believe his late father was a traitor, an allegation that he fought long and hard to dispel. Now he must rekindle those rumors and confront dark truths about his own loyalties.
As Britain braces itself for an airborne terrorist attack, Marchant is about to discover that treachery is the greatest game of all.
Author Notes
JON STOCK, a former Delhi correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, writes a column for The Week magazine in India, and has contributed to BBC Radio 4. He is the author of Dead Spy Running as well as two previous novels. He lives in Wiltshire, UK.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Daniel Merchant pursues the world's most dangerous terrorist, Salim Dhar, who tried to kill the U.S. president, in Stock's smart second thriller featuring the MI6 agent (after 2010's Dead Spy Running). Along the way, Merchant battles Russians and terrorists as well as American intelligence as personified by blowhard CIA official James Spiro. In a particularly wince-inducing scene, Merchant is tortured by a Moroccan intelligence officer, who employs the classic techniques used in William Goldman's The Boys from Brazil. Merchant later escapes to England, where his mentor, MI6 chief Marcus Fielding, commiserates briefly, then sends him back into the jaws of death in search of Dhar. The crosses-double, triple, and beyond-will set readers' heads spinning as they attempt to keep track of character loyalties. While Merchant appears to succeed a little too easily in the end, the last installment of the projected trilogy will no doubt hold more than one nasty surprise for our hero. Agent: Claire Paterson, Janklow & Nesbit. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Ploys and counter-ploys, motives sincere and suspicious, agents trustworthy and treacherous--plus a daunting lexicon of spy-agency jargon, terms and acronyms--highlight a complex thriller about the search for a "most wanted" terrorist. Like just about everyone else who appears in this intricate tale from British journalist Stock (Dead Spy Running, 2010, etc.), the storyteller in the Marrakech marketplace is more than he appears to be. Besides regaling visitors, he passes on, in code, orders to Daniel Marchant, late of Britain's MI6, to head into the nearby mountains where Salim Dhar, who recently attempted to assassinate the president of the United States, may be hiding out. In the well-crafted set piece that follows, Marchant watches as six U.S. Marines are captured, but not before Dhar appears before them and is taken out. Or is he? Washington's National Security Agency, eager to annihilate Dhar--and score a coup over MI6--insists he was. But Marchant thinks Dhar lives on. A labyrinthine plot with an overriding theme of trust ensues. Sipping scotch back in Marrakech, Marchant meets CIA op Lakshmi Meena, who happens to mention the "'half-brother thing'" between Marchant and Dhar, something to which M16 operatives in Britain are keenly attuned. Fearing Dhar may be at the center of plans to launch a massive terrorist attack on London, the intelligence agency thinks Marchant's fraternal tie to Dhar may afford an approach to the terrorist. But some at M16 distrust Marchant's allegiances since his late father, who had been at MI6, was thought by some to be a covert Russian agent. Russia likewise questions Dhar's sympathies and wants him to prove his loyalty. It is left to the younger Marchant to reach Dhar and force his hand--or to reveal his own loyalties. Scattered clichs and a threadbare Mata Hari subplot aside, this one will please fans.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
British agent Daniel Marchant is MI6's loose cannon. He drinks too much, talks too much, is ambiguous in his loyalties. But he's the only one who has a bead on the most hunted terrorist in the world. That's Salim Dar, who almost succeeded in assassinating the U.S. president and may have blood links to Marchant. Thus is the stage set for the main theme of this genre-bending espionage novel, that lives in the spook world are so interwoven that treachery becomes a betrayal of friendship, even of love. This is le Carre territory. The spy's handlers so double-cross and humiliate him that he defects to the other side, or pretends to. Le Carre wrote it, with fewer words and to greater effect, in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Unfortunately, Stock's gray style turns what should be a thundering read into a trudge. Good words are often well used, but mostly they lack zip. We read about the gun battles, tortures, chases, and seductions, then turn another page surprised that we don't much care.--Crinklaw, Don Copyright 2010 Booklist
