Honor Among Thieves » (Reprint)

A political aspirant turned author, Jeffrey Archer seems to delight in conspiracy and simple twists of fate in his fiction, even as these forces have shaped a rocky course in his own life. Misfortune led Archer to write the book that began his career, but fate seems to have smiled on his bestselling books.

Spring 1994, Washington, D.C. - While the Clinton Administration grapples with its domestic policies, a sinister plot is being masterminded six thousand miles away in Baghdad. By using $100 million as bait and spinning a deadly web of corruption, forgery, and terror, Saddam Hussein seeks to embarrass the U.S. with the ultimate revenge: to steal a treasured historical document and then destroy it before the world's media-on July 4, 1994.

As the countdown to Independence Day begins, two agents stand in the way of his nearly flawless plan: Scott Bradley, a rising star in the CIA who is desperate to prove his patriotism, and Hannah Kopec, the stunning Mossad operative who has already lost o much that she fears nothing and trusts no one. Their unrelenting quest to prevent what would undoubtedly be the most humiliating day in U.S. history takes them across four continents and climaxes in a dramatic, triple-twist ending.

Ingeniously plotted and as up-to-the-minute as today's headlines, Honor Among Thieves resonates with the brilliant pace that is the trademark of master storyteller Jeffrey Archer.

BookList

Just in time for the beach, the Archer mix-and-match best-seller machine has churned out an international thriller that will no doubt be described as "fresh from this morning's headlines." This time out the key characters are a Yale constitutional law professor who moonlights as a CIA consultant but yearns for field experience, a Russian-born Israeli model who signs on as a Mossad trainee when her family is decimated by a Gulf War Scud missile, an Iraqi diplomat assigned to the United Nations, a Mafia don and his lawyer son who run a unique temporary agency. The minor characters include the quintessential stage Irishman: an aging alcoholic who, when sober, is a master forger. With cameos by Saddam, Bill, and Warren Christopher, and with a multinational cast of spooks and sadists, bankers and bureaucrats, Archer concocts an unlikely but not absolutely inconceivable high-stakes shell game motivated by vengeance, greed, conspiracy, and betrayal. It is the shallowness rather than the depth of Archer's characterization that makes the men and women who populate his novels seem familiar: we've met these folks before, not in "real life," but in other best-sellers and TV movies. Still, predictable as it is, "Honor among Thieves" pushes all the right buttons; expect heavy demand from readers who like paint-by-number fiction.