โ Scribed by Hagberg, David
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Late one balmy summer evening in Pyongyang, an important Chinese intelligence general on his way to a secret meeting with Kim Jon-Il is assassinated in plain sight of a surveillance camera. The two shooters are wearing the uniforms of North Korean police officers.
Kim Jong-Il denies any knowledge of the shooting, but the Chinese do not believe him. As they prepare to attack, Jong-Il promises to unleash his nuclear weapons on downtown Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo, plunging the entire region into nuclear war.
Kirk McGarvey, just off a difficult assignment that took him to Mexico City, has returned to his visiting professorship at the University of South Florida. A colonel in North Korea's intelligence service shows up in person, asking McGarvey to prove that North Korea did not authorize the hit.
It's the most extraordinary request McGarvey has ever received. He enters a dangerous international shadow world where almost nothing is as it seems. The puzzles lead him to a mysterious Russian ex-KGB multimillionaire whose specialty is expediting assassins for hire, to Pyongyang where he finds the wedge to open up a far-reaching plot so monstrous the entire world could go up into flames, and finally back to the one nation that potentially has the most to gain by such a war.
And the most to lose . . .
When two people in North Korean police uniform gun down Gen. Ho Chang Li, an important Chinese intelligence official, in Pyongyang, the prospect of nuclear war between China and North Korea becomes all too real in this routine political thriller from Hagberg (Soldier of God). North Korean intelligence officer Pak Hae, who must prove that his country's leader, Kim Jong Il, didn't order the hit on Ho, turns for help to former CIA director Kirk McGarvey, whose previous successes include killing Osama bin Laden. Pak has captured one of the two assassins, who under interrogation has revealed that he worked for a Russian paymaster. As McGarvey gets on the trail of those behind Ho's murder, the search follows predictable lines, including a hunt for a high-ranking traitor within the CIA. Readers looking for the insight into North Korean society offered by James Church's Inspector O novels (Bamboo and Blood , etc.) will be disappointed. (Mar.)
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"An espionage tale of deep intrigue, puzzles wrapped in enigmas, triple crosses, and brutal murders . . . One can only hope America's real-life enemies haven't thought to study this series."
--Publisher's Weekly on Dance with the Dragon
"David Hagberg writes the most realistic, prophetic thrillers I have ever read. His books should be required reading in Washington."
-- Stephen Coonts, author of The Assassin
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"David Hagberg runs in the same fast, high-tech track as Clancy and his gung-ho colleagues, with lots of war games, fancy weapons, and much male bonding."
--The New York Daily News
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