Point of Entry » (Reprint)

Peter Schechter is the author of Point of Entry, and an international political and communications consultant. A founder of one of Washington's premier strategic communications consulting firms, he has spent twenty years advising presidents, writing advertising for political parties, ghost-writing columns for CEOs, and counseling international organizations out of crises. He also owns a winery, farms goats, and is a partner in a number of successful restaurants. Schechter has lived in Europe and Latin America and is fully fluent in six languages. He lives in Washington, D.C.

With calculated cunning, renegade Syrian intelligence operatives have discovered how to smuggle uranium-235—the key material required to manufacture an atomic weapon—into the United States undetected, exploiting a network of the most experienced and sophisticated smugglers the world has ever known.

As the CIA repeatedly misinterprets numerous intelligence warnings, only Marta Pradilla—Colombia's beautiful, hard-minded new president—can assist the United States' conservative, isolationist President Stockman in finding the terrorists and their deadly cargo before it's too late. Set in Washington, D.C., Bogotá, Rome, and Tbilisi, and featuring a cast of major international figures, Point of Entry brings readers into an intensely treacherous world that reads less like fiction every day.

The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson

In Schechter's hands, all this is good fun. For a political consultant, he has no obvious political agenda, although he certainly lets Marta Pradilla make a strong case for new U.S. policies toward Cuba and drugs -- and has Stockman counter with the political case for the status quo. The romance between the conservative president and the liberal beauty queen, which at first looks silly, becomes rather touching, as infatuation opens his mind to new ideas. The author presents a world of spies, greed, duplicity and danger, but holds out the evergreen possibility that love can conquer all. If Point of Entry is sometimes over the top, this is not uncommon in stories that imagine nuclear attacks on the United States -- and after all, reality itself is often over the top these days. In its execution, the novel is thoroughly entertaining.