(Harper Collins, 1996)
“Here’s a techno-thriller that gets up and runs. Charged with a wry sense of humor and an attitude that gives the prose a special punch.”
-Elmore Leonard
-Tony Hillerman
-Larry Bond, author of Red Phoenix and Cauldron
-Dr. Tony Cordesman, ABC News military expert and professor at Georgetown University
A psychic assassin is sent to kill the president in this futuristic technothriller. n the near future, mental warfare has become the weapon of choice and the gifted have learned how to probe minds by channeling their psychic powers.
Enter Texas multibillionaire Coleman O. Mosley, a corporate tyrant intent on assassinating the president. He finds his assassin in a powerful government organization known as “The Shop” — a kind of psychic CIA — pulling the reluctant Wes Hardin, their best operative, out of retirement. In a war of twisted minds and tangled motives, the ultimate outcome will surprise even the ablest player.
From Publishers Weekly
Carey Hawkins is an unusual assassin. Highly skilled with a sniper rifle, he is also armed with extraordinary psychic powers, which he employs to devastating effect in this spooky, if murkily plotted, techno-thriller from Bay (The Coyote Cried Twice; A Quick and Dirty Guide to War). Hawkins, who narrates, acts as a disturbingly amoral agent of The Shop, a psychic special-ops division of the CIA. Reluctantly brought out of retirement, he is assigned to infiltrate the security network of a paranoid Texas billionaire, Coleman O. Mosley. The Shop knows Mosley plans to assassinate the U.S. president, but Hawkins is unsure of the purpose of his mission. Is he to foil Mosley’s plot or assist it? Once on the billionaire’s payroll as a hired gun, Hawkins is tested in bloody shoot-outs in Bosnia and Somalia as Mosley prepares him for the ultimate rub-out. The climax to all this mayhem is surprising and shocking, if not quite satisfying. Bay lays down his story in cool, lean prose that’s as tough as his protagonist, who’s plenty tough. If, in battle, brain is superior to brawn, then the Rogue Warrior has met his match here, and then some.
(Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.)
