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Summary
Summary
Someone in Pakistan is killing the members of a new CIA intelligence unit that is trying to buy peace with America's enemies. It falls to Sophie Marx, a young CIA officer with a big chip on her shoulder, to figure out who's doing the killing and why. Her starting point is Alphabet Capital, the London hedge fund that has been providing cover for this secret operation, but the investigation soon widens to include the capitals of the Middle East and the cruel hills of South Waziristan.
Sophie thinks she has the backing of her hard-nosed boss, Jeffrey Gertz, and his genial mentor at headquarters, Cyril Hoffman. In addition, she gets help from the well-mannered lieutenant general heading Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. But the closer Sophie gets to her quarry, the more she realizes that nothing in this gallery of mirrors is quite what it seems. This is a theater of violence and retribution, in which the last act is one that Sophie could not have imagined.
David Ignatius has written a disturbing and compelling novel where the price of unchecked government is paid in blood, and peace can be bought only through betrayal.
Author Notes
David Ignatius was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on May 26, 1950. He received a B.A. from Harvard University in 1963 and a diploma in economics from Kings College, Cambridge, England, in 1975. He has worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post, where he is an associate editor. In 1985, he received the Edward Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting from the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. He is the author of several novels including Agents of Innocence, Siro, The Bank of Fear, A Firing Offense, Body of Lies, The Increment, and The Director.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Foreign intrigue specialist Ignatius (The Increment) continues his fictional trek through terrorist hot spots with this timely thriller about the CIA's bungling attempts to influence Pakistan's shaky, insecure leadership. Sophie Marx, an agent hungry to return to the field after a high-level but boring desk job, works for a new intelligence unit disguised as a Los Angeles record company, Hit Parade, whose undercover focus is to control Pakistani organized terrorist cells through bribery. It's not working. Not only are the terrorist attacks continuing but CIA agents delivering the bribes are being murdered. To make matters worse, Hit Parade's secret funding source-a highly illegal strategy to skim money from the world's financial markets-is rapidly becoming public knowledge. Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist, is especially good at capturing the work environment at the CIA, where petty bickering, one-upmanship, and moral lapses often get in the way of sound policy. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Ignatius (The Increment, 2009, etc.) continues his series of top-notch CIA thrillers with this fast-paced new entry.CIA field agent Sophie Marx recently returned from an overseas assignment where she narrowly escaped being killed. Now Sophie's working in a special off-the-books project run by the dangerous but capable Jeff Gertz. Gertz alone knows the full story behind the Hit Parade, a separate, untraceable operation of the CIA that is hidden in Los Angeles behind the faade of an entertainment company. From this seemingly innocuous office, Gertz runs operatives all over the world whose jobs, it appears, are to bring assets into the fold. But then something goes wrong, and those operatives start dying. One by one, the Hit Parade is losing some of its best agents to an unknown threat and Gertz, who never lets anyone see him sweat, decides that Sophie, his newly named chief of counterintelligence, is exactly the right person to keep his boss at the CIA and the White House off his back. When Sophie heads out to investigate, she finds much more than she anticipated. A longtime contributor to theWashington Post, where he has covered both the CIA and the Middle East, Ignatius writes with authority and skill about a shadow world in which nothing is as it seems and money is power.This may be fiction, but in the end the reader will be struck by how feasible the story really is.A terrific, believable novel about the intersection of politics, ethics and finance.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* An aggressive new unit of the CIA, reporting only to the White House, is created to do what its discredited parent agency can't buy peace in Pakistan's tribal areas. Even better, it is self-funding. It feeds economically sensitive intelligence to a London hedge fund and rakes off the lion's share of the profits, thereby rendering itself completely invisible to Congress and the public. But then the unit's field operatives begin to die, and Sophie Marx, head of counterintelligence, is assigned to plug the leak. Sophie quickly finds herself in peril and in an uneasy alliance with the head of Pakistani intelligence, who also wonders how one group of Pakistani fighters has breached seemingly unbreachable U.S. security. After a quarter-century of journalistic writing about the CIA and the Middle East, Washington Post columnist Ignatius is now better known as a novelist (The Increment, 2009; Body of Lies, 2007), and Bloodmoney will only enhance this recognition. In addition to being a solid page-turner, it offers intriguing characters, a complicated but skillfully explicated plot and a nuanced view of Pashtun tribal culture often at odds with the larger Punjabi population. And as with all of Ignatius' fiction, readers attuned to current events may wonder if he knows things most Americans don't. Ignatius denies this in the acknowledgments, but the tease is part of the appeal.--Gaughan, Thoma. Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Action junkie Sophie Marx works for a secret CIA unit formed after 9/11 to avoid the sclerotic Langley headquarters. Suddenly, four agents are assassinated, and her job is to find and plug the leaks. She goes deep into suspicious territory to discern the facts from the careful camouflage. To her horror, she learns that her own side is rotten with deceit as her boss is using the powerful instruments of modern finance in London to fund the alternative unit. Unbeknownst to anyone, a Pakistani professor bent on revenge for the drone-caused deaths of his family had penetrated the electronic defenses and killed the vulnerable agents. VERDICT Ignatius leverages a colorful cast of fresh characters and the mystique of the Internet to weave a compulsively readable story about the profound hostilities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The author's eighth novel (The Increment; Body of Lies) is essential for all active readers of spy thrillers and suspense and will leave them happily hungry for the ninth one. [See Prepub Alert, 12/6/10.]-Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
