An Accidental American

Synopsis

Forced out of a self-imposed exile, one woman faces a lifetime's worth of secrets and betrayal-all in the name of staying alive. Nicole Blake had planned to leave her criminal life in the past. She had done her time in a dank prison in Marseille and relinquished the world of forgery and counterfeiting for an unassuming career as a freelance consultant. Now her world is a small farm in the French Pyrenees, with daily fresh eggs and the companionship of her devoted dog. But when U. S. intelligence operative John Valsamis shows up at her door, Nicole is reminded that she'll always be an ex-con. Valsamis is after Nicole's former lover, Rahim Ali, and soon Nicole finds herself back in Lisbon, tracking down Rahim in all their old haunts. Except now Rahim isn't just a document forger-he's a suspected terrorist. Unwittingly drawn into an international web of fundamentalism, crime, and corruption, Nicole discovers that its threads stretch from the cobbled streets of Lisbon to the once-beautiful city of her birth, Beirut, and to the top levels of the government that sent Valsamis to find her. And as with any good web, the harder Nicole fights to free herself, the tighter it closes around her. "Thought-provoking . . . The gritty atmosphere is perfectly drawn, and complex layers of lies and betrayal keep the reader happily guessing up to the end. " -Publishers Weekly "Chilling and utterly believable,An Accidental Americanhurls the reader into the dark and forbidding world of espionage. Not to be missed. " -Gayle Lynds, author ofThe Last Spymaster ______________________________________________________________ THE MORTALIS DOSSIER- ALEX CARR'S NOTE ON THE BOMBING OF THE AMERICAN EMBASSY IN BEIRUT On April 18, 1983, at one o'clock in the afternoon, a van carrying two thousand pounds of explosives blew up outside the American embassy in Beirut, killing sixty-three people. Among the victims were seventeen Americans, eight of whom represented the Central Intelligence Agency's entire Middle East contingent. In the years preceding the bombing, an increasing number of attacks on Western and Israeli interests had been carried out by Palestinian and Muslim extremists, but the Beirut bombing was widely seen as a watershed event for American policies in the region. With the exception of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran four years earlier, an act that was carried out within the framework of Iran's Islamic revolution, the embassy bombing represented the first time America had been so directly and bloodily targeted by Islamic terrorists for its military involvement in the Middle East. It's impossible to see why the United States was such an unwelcome force without an understanding of the history of Lebanon and the surrounding region, and of American and Western involvement in the politics of the Middle East in general. Though Lebanon has existed in one form or another since the ninth century b. c. , the modern country of Lebanon was not established until 1920, when it was granted to the French as part of a system of mandates established for the administration of former Turkish and German territories following World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, almost all of what we think of as the modern Middle East was shaped by these mandates. America's first direct intervention in Lebanese politics came in 1946. During World War II, Lebanon had been declared a free state in order to liberate it from Vichy control. But when, after the war, Lebanon eventually moved toward full independence, the French balked, and the United States, Britain, and several Arab governments stepped

Copyright:

2007

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781588366139

Publisher:

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Date of Addition:

07/06/10

Copyrighted By:

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Literature and Fiction, Mystery and Thrillers

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.