An Expensive Education » (Reprint)

NICK MCDONELL was born in 1984 in New York City. A graduate of Harvard University, he is the author of two previous novels, Twelve and The Third Brother.

Mike Teak has a classic Harvard profile. He’s a twenty-five-year-old scholar/athlete from an upper-class family who was recruited by his godfather to work for a U.S. intelligence agency. On a covert mission in a Somali village, he delivers cash and cell phones to Hatashil, a legendary orphan warrior turned rebel leader. It’s a routine assignment until, minutes after they meet, the village is decimated by a missile assault, and although Mike escapes, his life is changed forever.
Echoing across continents, the assault disrupts professor Susan Lowell, who has just won a Pulitzer Prize for her book celebrating Hatashil. Also shaken is Lowell’s student,
David Ayan, who was born in the targeted village a world away from Harvard’s most exclusive final club, the Porcellian, which is courting him and Jane, the smart, risk-taking daughter of East Coast money who’s sleeping with him. David Ayan struggles with his identity and Susan Lowell struggles against rumors about her relationship with Hatashil, who has been accused of ordering the village massacre. But it is Mike Teak who faces a deadly struggle—because when he discovers a horrific conspiracy he immediately realizes that he has become expendable, with nowhere to run and no one to trust.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Nick McDonell has a personal, reportorial relationship with the settings in his novels: Twelve, his 2002 debut, is a scathing, unsentimental examination of privileged kids on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where McDonell was raised; The Third Brother (2005) focuses on a Harvard student sent on a magazine assignment to Bangkok, a milieu McDonell (as a Harvard student who'd once spent a summer in Bangkok) is more than qualified to describe; and An Expensive Education is a thriller set in the contrasting (yet overlapping) worlds of his alma mater, Harvard, and northeast Africa, where the 25-year-old McDonell has spent considerable time as a freelance journalist for Harper's and Time magazine, respectively. This intimate knowledge creates an air of realistic authority, even if the fictional characters dotting these landscapes sometimes seem too fantastical.