The kidnapping of a noted nuclear scientist sends Carter on a rescue mission to a military stronghold of a despot anxious to blackmail the Western powers. Views: 26
EDITORIAL REVIEW:
He has been called his generation's finest writer of international intrigue, one of America's most gifted spy novelists ever, and the successor to Graham Greene and John le CarrŽ. But with his follow-up to the 2006 electrifying number one bestseller *The Messenger*, Daniel Silva has written his most compelling and entertaining novel to date.
When last we encountered Gabriel Allon, the master art restorer and sometime officer of Israeli intelligence, he had just prevailed in his blood-soaked duel with Saudi terrorist financier Zizi al-Bakari. Now Gabriel is summoned once more by his masters to undertake what appears to be a routine assignment: travel to Amsterdam to purge the archives of a murdered Dutch terrorism analyst who also happened to be an asset of Israeli intelligence. But once in Amsterdam, Gabriel soon discovers a conspiracy of terror festering in the city's Islamic underground, a plot that is about to explode on the other side of the English Channel, in the middle of London.
The target of this plot is Elizabeth Halton, the daughter of the American ambassador to the Court of St. James's, who is to be brutally kidnapped. Gabriel arrives seconds too late to save her. And by revealing his face to the plot's masterminds, his fate is sealed as well. Drawn once more into the service of American intelligence, Gabriel hurls himself into a desperate search for the missing woman as the clock ticks steadily toward the hour of her execution. It will take him from Amsterdam to Germany to the very end of Denmark. It will thrust him into an unlikely alliance with a man who has lost everything because of his devotion to Islam. It will cause him to question the morality of the tactics of his trade. And it might very well cost him his life.
Filled with breathtaking double and triple turns of plot, and a final mind-bending sequence that will leave readers breathless, *The Secret Servant* is not only a work of supreme entertainment, but also an exploration of some of the most daunting issues of our times: the war on terrorism, the weapons the West uses to wage it, and the time bomb now ticking in the heart of Western Europe. Views: 26
1899, China. The Mandarins are becoming troublesome again and there are rumors that attacks will soon begin on British trade missions and legations. Captain David Blackwoodof the Royal Marines, received a VC in the bloody battle for Benin, Africa but is now being packed off to this apparent backwater.But there are plenty of troubles in store for Blackwood in the shape of an errant nephew and a beautiful German Countess who insists he personally escort her up river on a small steamer into the heart of the country.China is a sleeping tiger that will soon awake when the Boxer Rebellion erupts into bloody war in 1900. True to their motto, the Royal marines are the first to land - and the last to leave.This is the second novel in the Blackwood saga, spanning 150 years in the history of a great seafaring family and the tradition in which they served.Review" 'One of our foremost writers of naval fiction' Sunday Times" From the PublisherDouglas Edward Reeman, a contemporary British writer, joined the British Navy at 16, serving on destroyers and small craft during World War II and eventually rising to lieutenant. He also has taught navigation to yachtsmen, and has served as president of the British Sailors Society and as a script adviser for television and films. Under the pseudonym, Alexander Kent, Reeman is the author of the best-selling 25-volume series of Richard Bolitho Novels. His books have been translated into nearly two dozen languages. Views: 26
Like almost everyone, Eric Warberg went to Hollywood to make it big. For many years, he was successful, until directing a few box office bombs made him virtually unemployable. When an opportunity presents itself for a return to his hometown of Memphis, to direct a small, independent film, it is a return to his roots in more ways than one. Despite the fact that he's greeted like a star, his homecoming is bittersweet. The novel begins on the onset of filming of what is temporarily called Memphis Movie. From day one, Eric feels stuck and unable to find his creative spark. He is helped along by a large cast of characters, some from his past and some from the filmmaking industry, including his partner, Sandy, who wrote the script for the movie. Their open relationship will be challenged by Eric's return to his roots. Running parallel to the film's production is the story of ex-hippie poet Camel Jeremy Eros, who has been hired by Eric to add Memphis mojo" to the... Views: 26
Almost everything people know about Dick Turpin and highwaymen is myth. The historical truth is much nastier, more brutal and bloody. As Dick Turpin went to the scaffold in York in 1739 he was determined to look his best. The previous day he had had a new frock coat and pumps delivered to him in the condemned man's cell in York Castle Prison. And he paid £3 and 10 shillings for five men to act as mourners. Who was this notorious highwayman and why did he become so famous? What did he do to become the subject of such extraordinary myths? Most of all, why are highwaymen romantic figures? We have highwayman now: we call them muggers and car-jackers and we don't sing ballads about them or eulogise them for their brave exploits. This is a masterly biography of one of Britain's best-known criminals - but it is also an examination of the cult of the highwayman, of crime in the 18th century and the treatment of criminals. In the absence of any police force how were crimes solved? Who... Views: 26
Where were you when the world changed?One minute everything was fine and the next...they arrived. Those that saw them died instantly. The unlucky ones survived. Now unimaginable things straight out of nightmares roam the streets of our towns and cities. Nothing is impossible. Nowhere is safe. And no one can escape The Change... Views: 26
SUMMARY:When Ellie Avery, an Air Force wife, mother, and occasional sleuth, investigates the apparent suicide of a fellow military wife, she becomes immersed in a mystery involving Middle Eastern artifacts, a priceless manuscript, black marketeers, and a shady art dealer. Reprint. Views: 26
About the AuthorAlgernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was born into a well-to-do Kentish family. His parents, converts to a Calvinistic sect, led an austere life, ill-suited to their dreamy and sensitive son. During adolescence, he became fascinated by hypnotism and the supernatural and, on leaving university, studied Hindu philosophy and occultism. Later, he was to draw on these beliefs and experiences in his writing. Sent away to Canada at the age of twenty, his attempts at making a living were wholly unsuccessful and shortly after his return to England, he began to write. The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, published in 1906, was followed by a series of psychic detective stories, featuring John Silence, 'physician extraordinary'. His reputation as one of the greatest exponents of supernatural fiction began to grow. Chiefly known for his ghost stories, Blackwood wrote in many different forms within the genre. His most personal works, however, are his 'mystical' novels, for example The Centaur, where he explores man's empathy with the forces of the universe. Blackwood also wrote children's fiction. A Prisoner in Fairyland was adapted into the play (later the musical), Starlight Express. Later in life, Blackwood turned to writing radio plays, and in 1947 he began a new career on BBC TV telling ghost stories. He received a knighthood in 1949. Views: 26
He doesn’t need a wife. She doesn’t want a husband. Destiny’s not listening. Book 2 in the Gypsy Legacy Series As children, Brand Waring, heir to the Duke of Warringham, and his brother were kidnapped and sold to a plantation in the West Indies. Now Brand is back to wreak vengeance on those responsible for his brother’s subsequent death. The last thing he wants, or needs, is to be distracted by an instant attraction to a flighty Society belle. Felicia Collings has found it easy to refuse every marriage proposal, thanks to a ring left to her by her gypsy great-grandmother. Reportedly it will lead her to the man whom she is destined to marry. To her relief, the ring has been blessedly silent on this issue. Until Brand recognizes it, and sparks fly. In spite of himself, Brand finds himself drawn to the beauty, and to the wounded soul reflected in her eyes. At his gentle hands, Felicia begins to learn what it means to be cherished and loved. Then the past rears its head to threaten their fragile happiness. As Brand begins to doubt whether vengeance is as sweet as a lifetime with Felicia, he finds himself racing to save them both from not one cold-blooded killer—but two. Views: 26
In Cole Calmenson's Teacher's Pets, Kate and Lucie are best friends who love, love, love DOGS. But just because they can't have dogs of their own doesn't mean they can't MAGICALLY turn into them!The FURRY ADVENTURES continue in this CHARMING series when Kate and Lucie find a substitute teacher in their class. Mr. Z makes goofy jokes and has the class going hog wild as he teaches about animal communication. At the same time, mean Darleen makes fun of Kate and Lucie's friendship. Luckily, once Kate and Lucie slap HIGH FIVES and say the special words, they turn into dogs and find a way to save the day. They even make a new friend in the process! Views: 26
Rachel Kushner has written an astonishingly wise, ambitious, and riveting novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro's revolution -- a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. The first novel to tell the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958, this is a masterful debut.Young Everly Lederer and K. C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom -- three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child's dreamworld, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around them -- the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence.In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Mazière, whose seductive demeanor can't mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raúl Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of "yanqui" revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. Though their parents remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.At the time, urgent news was conveyed by telex. Kushner's first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.Amazon.com ReviewRachel Kushner's first novel, Telex from Cuba, doesn't read like your usual debut. Using family stories, extensive archival research, and all the tools of the novelist's imagination, she creates a portrait in many voices of a small society at a crucial moment in time: the American sugar cane and nickel-mining colony in the last years before Castro and the first moments of his revolution. As seen through the lives of the children and wives of American executives, and the parallel intrigues of a nightclub dancer with powerful friends and a former French collaborator--along with striking cameos by historical figures like the Castro brothers, Hemingway, and, yes, Colonel Sanders--Kushner's Cuba makes the raw materials of revolution, and its aftermath, come alive. Questions for Rachel KushnerAmazon.com: You're writing about the end of one era for Cuba at what may be the end of another. Was that in your mind as you wrote? Kushner: It wasn't so much, actually, but that might be because I wrote the bulk of the book before Fidel fell ill with diverticulitis, and before the American media's obsession with his (like all of ours) eventual death hit a pitch point. Even now, I find this sense of waiting and the media's focus on it to be an odd tautology: the "breaking" story is often that there's a breaking story, but then the story never comes. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Fidel Castro's policies, his segue out of public view has been pretty brilliant. He trumped the media's deathwatch by stepping down, which took away the promise in his death: nothing substantial has changed to date, except the perception that his move away from the role of lider would precipitate change. I do hear he has more time to read now. Someone apparently gave him a copy of Telex from Cuba. I'd like to think he's reading it now, in that tracksuit that replaced the military fatigues. Amazon.com: The kernel of your story was your mother's childhood, similar to some of those you describe in the book, growing up in Cuba as the daughter of an American mining executive. Did you hear her stories about that time during your own childhood? What did you add to them when you started doing your own research? Kushner: I indeed heard lots of stories when I was a kid--Cuba has a real mythological importance to my mother and her sisters and how they think of themselves (my mother, for instance, was under the sway of their Jamaican houseboy, Cleveland, who is the inspiration for Willy in my book). My grandparents, dead for many years now, saved an incredible trove of stuff from their life in Cuba: every last receipt from the United Fruit commissary where my grandmother bought groceries, a mimeograph of every letter she sent, etc. I spent about three years going through this stuff, and interviewing my mother and her sisters and others they’d grown up with. But then I had to disconnect completely from all that, and build a fictional structure and then adhere precisely to its logic and requirements, which meant only using what served my story. Just because something is true does not mean it has a place. Often it turned out quite the opposite, that the people and characters and details I imagined were much more fluid and true seeming, and it was the "true life" detail that stuck out and seemed awkward. That said, by so thoroughly metabolizing the "real" American colony, I was able to depict mine freehand, if you will, in a way that is (hopefully) convincing, that works as fiction but is a realm you can enter and see an erased world. I know that those who grew up in Nicaro have read the book and loved it, so that's nice. And there are many keys and arrows that point to or hint at real people and events, if amalgamations. Some of the American employees, for instance, were kidnapped and later invited to Raul's wedding. There was a Cuban investor who was a kind of interloper and got Batista's air force to strafe Nicaro, in order to drive the Americans out. I spoke on the phone to the former mine manager's wife, who told me that this Cuban investor threatened to kill her husband if he stayed. So that’s a real-life detail. I guess there are many, but they are a bare-bones architecture; how fiction becomes fiction is less linear, more mysterious, and might I say difficult! Amazon.com: This isn't your usual fiction debut, channeled through the perspective of a single navel. You take on a whole society's worth of voices, often in one scene (I'm thinking in particular of the wonderful party scene at the center of the book). Was that your intention from the beginning, or did you start with one perspective and then find yourself needing more? Kushner: It's true, not one navel, and not my own, either. Probably that's partly why it took me so long to write it. I somehow always knew it would be a structure of multiple voices, rather than a single protagonist. I had become attached, from early on, to the idea--whether I have achieved it or not--of getting at the complex and varied forces of revolution and what led to it, i.e, how did the Americans participate, how did it constitute them, and the reverse, how did they affect it? There would have been no way to do this without rendering the story from multiple perspectives. Alejo Carpentier does it for the Haitian Revolution in The Kingdom of This World, for instance, with one narrator named Ti Noël, but he has this guy live about 200 years, so he can witness every significant juncture in the epic. My problem was not a protracted timeframe, but a subtle network of dynamics: the American executives at United Fruit and the Nicaro Nickel Company were dealing with Batista and in denial of the revolution. But the revolution was obviously real, and so I needed to send some people up into the mountains to behold what was happening there. A disaffected narrator like La Mazière--like Rachel K, based on a real life figure of that same name--serves this role. Also, he cuts through a bit of the romance associated with revolutionary change. He's totally jaded and there for all the "wrong" reasons, an adventurer who sees violence as mystical, as a "pure" agent of change, if you will. And Rachel K was useful in that she could reveal some of what was happening in Havana and be close to the big political players in the government as well as the underground. Lastly, a child who can see it all up close, like Everly, can reveal certain less mediated truths, without the more narrow judgments and strictures of adult thinking. Everly can hold contradiction in her mind and not be forced to resolve it, which is what maturity so often does to the process of thinking. On the other hand, in K.C. I wanted a child narrator who was looking back in hindsight, who has some degree of awareness, but not complete awareness, of how and whether his memories hold up over time: is the world he loves as benevolent as it had seemed to him as a child? Was it benevolent even then? Regardless, it's his childhood as well as a place, and he has a right to have his own feelings about his own childhood, even if the implications of it are so much larger than one boy's life. Amazon.com: You leave yourself almost entirely out of the story, but there is one provocatively named character who apparently shares very little of your own biography: Rachel K. How did she come into the story, and how did she come to share your name? Kushner: Actually, Rachel K is a real-life historic figure of pre-Castro Cuba, though specifically of the dictator Machado's era, and not Batista's. While I was researching the book, I came across a reference to her while reading Michael Chanan's comprehensive book about post-revolutionary films, The Cuban Image. Rachel K (no period after K—in every Cuban history reference, she is, as if sprung from a Kafkan universe, referred to this way) was a "French variety dancer" who became an icon after she was found mysteriously murdered in a hotel room. No one ever figured out what happened, and the mystery of her death came to signify the mortal decadence of Havana in the 1930s. The Cubans made a film about her in 1973 called The Strange Case of Rachel K. Because of her role in history, and in historical imagery, and due to the striking coincidence that her name is like mine, I felt it would be an act of exclusion not to put her in the book. I took the "cue" and ran with it, basically. And as you say, yeah, she is unlike me, which makes her perhaps a perverse or fun surrogate: she's discreet and dispassionate, qualities I wish I possessed, but in fact do not. Though perhaps she is my repressed double, "more me than me." On the surface I am much more like Everly: a goofy fabulist. Amazon.com: You've visited Cuba a lot in recent years. What memories are there of the pre-Castro times and of the American presence? Kushner: The residue is everywhere. There's the layer of it that many people know--the American cars, the rusted and burned-out neon signs for Woolworth's and Zenith Televisions et cetera in bigger cities like Havana and Santiago. In the Nipe Bay region, the northeastern part of what used to be called Oriente Province (now divided up) where my book takes place, suddenly, the residue is both less visible, and yet much, much stronger: the real story is there, lurking, and going there and excavating that residue was crucial to writing the book. In Nicaro, for instance, it's a small mining town and there is no skeleton of midcentury American retail, and without an architectural heritage like you have in the cities, there was little to stop the Soviet-financed construction of huge Brutalist apartment buildings. So you don't think, shiny 1950s America when you get there. But everyone you speak to who is old enough knows they live in a former American colony, and when we went, all the Jamaicans and Haitians who had worked as butlers in the houses of my grandparents and their friends are still there, and they told me stories about the town in its colonial, er, heyday. The managers row, which features in my book, is still there, and the biggest house, which the mine administrator lived in, is now a school. Fidel had a real axe to grind with Nicaro--not unfounded, by any means--and I'm sure the children are aware that the facility's benefactor is a banished "yanqui" landlord. Preston, the United Fruit Company town, has been renamed, but it was an American town in every way. United Fruit built the entire infrastructure, the roads, the electricity, ran their own mail service, the trains, shipping, everything. The town they built is still there, and the houses, once uniformly "company property" even in paint scheme (all over Central and South America United Fruit painted their towns a particular shade of mustard yellow) have never been repainted. And so what paint is still there is a palimpsest of the Old Order: faded patches of mustard yellow linger on the weathered exterior of every house. The old company hotel where my mother used to sit on the porch and sip her cane juice, waiting for my grandmother to shop, is still there, but it has no windows and the tile floors are cracked. United Fruit departed very quickly when Fidel nationalized the mills, and they left a huge cache of company records, which I discovered behind a chainlink fence in the back of the public library in Banes. The Cubans know it's part of their history, which is why it's in the library, but like every other detail of American life, its state of decay, moldering under a leaky roof, is part of the allure: a history erased, but not completely… Amazon.com: My strongest sense of that moment (until I read your book) was from one of my favorite movies, the glorious documentary, I Am Cuba. Did that play a role in helping you imagine the times? Kushner: Funny you should ask, because one of the images on my website, www.telexfromcuba.com, is a still I made from I Am Cuba, of women in a poolside beauty contest, to depict what La Mazière means when he speaks of a place "where dreams are marbled with nothingness"--i.e., a place simultaneously at a height and in decline, upon which he's projecting his own knowledge of decline, having lived through the German occupation of Paris and their subsequent departure eastward, as they were crushed by the Allies and the party was over. I thought a lot about whether or not to use this image, because the film was not made in the fifties, but in 1964, and moreover with a real political agenda. That said, it is indeed an amazing film, and the tracking shot into the swimming pool at the beginning is right up there with the tracking shot at the beginning of Touch of Evil as a stunning technical feat (and was even replicated by Paul Thomas Anderson in the opening of Boogie Nights). But I Am Cuba is more than just beautiful and strange. It is, as I said, extremely dogmatic, it's a piece of propaganda, really, and yet it is one of only a handful of films that you show you what prerevolutionary Havana might have looked like. There are no films made in the fifties that actually portray life in Havana at that time, at least that I am aware of. It's the closest thing, despite its dogma. And even its dogma can take on a kind of surreal charm: the "evil" Americans are all played by Russians, who have these heavy and angular Slavic jaws. Also, they speak with Russian accents. From Publishers WeeklyKushner's colorful, character-driven debut succinctly captures the essence of life for a gilded circle of American expats in pre-Castro Cuba, chronicling a mélange of philandering spouses, privileged carousers and their rebellious children. K.C. Stites and Everly Lederer are raised among the American industrial strongholds of the United Fruit Company sugar plantation and the Nicaro nickel mines. As adolescents, they are confronted by the complexities of local warfare and backstabbing politics, while their parents remain ignorant of the impending revolution. Meanwhile, in Havana, burlesque dancer Rachel K and her former SS officer companion become entangled in Castro's revolution. Toward the end of 1957, K.C.'s brother, Del, joins the rebels, and within a month the United Fruit Company's cane fields are ablaze. Throughout the following year, the attacks on U.S.-operated businesses intensify; political and personal loyalties are shuffled and betrayed; and the violence between the rebels and Batista's forces escalate. The action, while slowed at times by Kushner's tendency to revisit plot points from multiple points of view, culminates in a riveting drama. Given the recent Cuba headlines, Kushner's tale, passionately told and intensively researched, couldn't have come at a more opportune time. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Views: 26
