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John Corey and Asad Khalil have both lived hard-knock lives. As revealed in Nelson DeMille's monster bestseller
Plum Island, the gruff, wisecracking NYPD homicide cop Corey stopped a hail of bullets--but he couldn't stop his wife from walking out on him. Asad, raised under Muammar Qaddafi's eye after his dad's murder, lost his surviving family in the 1986 bombing of Libya. He's heard the nasty rumors about his mom and the colonel, but he aims his rage at the infidels. The boy's got such a gift for terrorism he's earned the nickname "the Lion," and Boris, his vodka-sozzled, sex-addicted émigré mentor, knows precisely how to conduct a murder tour of America one step ahead of the police, the FBI, the CIA, and the ATTF (Anti-Terrorist Task Force), which combines members of all three. A pity Boris must die, but hey, he's an infidel too.
Asad pretends to defect, handcuffed to agents aboard a 747 bound for JFK, and he proves to be a worse seatmate than a siding salesman. Corey and his ATTF colleagues (most conspicuously the FBI's sexy Kate Mayfield, Corey's match in badinage and bad-guy busting) strive to halt Asad's methodical yet unpredictable bloodbath. Skillfully, DeMille alternates chapters told from Asad's and Corey's points of view. DeMille did his authenticity homework: when we're not savoring his gift for wiseacre dialogue in the Corey-Kate chapters, we're sweating alongside Asad on his ghastly, ingenious jihad.
The New York Times put DeMille's social satire on a par with Edith Wharton's, and he's great on the colliding folkways of the feuding, mutually doublecrossing crimebuster institutions. Naturally, he's on the side of the regular-guy flatfoots. "Cops sit on their asses and flip through their folders," he writes. "Feds sit on their derrieres and peruse their dossiers." And the CIA gets it in the shorts, satirically speaking. One deplores the mass murderers, but the book's real bad guys wear the priciest suits.
DeMille reportedly has a $25 million book contract. With fast, funny, absorbing thrillers like The Lion's Game, he's earned it. --Tim Appelo
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From Publishers Weekly
John Corey, former NYPD Homicide detective and star of DeMille's Plum Island, is back in this breezily narrated high-octane thriller about the hunt for a Libyan terrorist who has set his sights on some very specific targets--the Americans who bombed Libya on April 15, 1986. The novel begins with a tense airport scene--a transcontinental flight from Paris is flying into New York, and no one has been able to contact the pilot via radio. On the flight is Asad Khalil, a Libyan defector who will be met by Special Contract Agent Corey, his FBI "mentor" Kate Mayfield, and the rest of the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force. But when the plane lands, everyone on board is dead--except Khalil, who disappears after attacking the ATTF's airport headquarters. Has he left the country? Not if John Corey's right--and we know he is, thanks to gripping third-person chapters detailing Khalil's mission alternating with Corey's easy-going first-person narration. And by making Khalil, who lost most of his family in the 1986 bombing, as much of a protagonist as Corey, DeMille adds several shades of gray to what in less skillful hands might have been cartoonishly black and white. If anything, the reader ends up rooting for the bad guy, Khalil, with his mission of vengeance, is a more complex character than John Corey, who never drops his ex-cop bravado (thus trivializing a romance that moves from first date to proposal of marriage within the few days the plot covers). But as usual, DeMille artfully constructs a compulsively readable thriller around a troubling story line, slowly developing his villain from a faceless entity into a nation's all-too-human nemesis. Agent, Nick Ellison. 500,000 first printing; major ad/promo; BOMC main selection; 12-city author tour; Time-Warner audio. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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