Deception
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A young woman finds herself in hot water in this international thrill ride from the acclaimed author of A Gathering of Spies and A Game of Spies
When Hannah Gray discovers that her lover and business partner has implicated her in a massive act of insurance fraud, she flees Chicago rather than going to the police. An Adriatic cruise will help to clear her head, she reasons, and give her time to plan her next move.
On the ship, Hannah meets Renee Epstein, an elderly woman whose husband is also a fugitive, on the run from a top-secret government agency that wants to use his scientific research for a purpose he never intended. Scribbled into the couple’s guidebook is the formula for a powerful new energy source with incredible destructive capabilities. Hannah borrows the book, and shortly thereafter, the Epsteins are murdered. Suddenly Hannah is the target of an assassin whose talents are as unique as they are deadly.
Pursued from the Greek islands to Istanbul to the South of France, Hannah hopes to stay alive long enough to turn her bad fortune around. Thousands of miles from everything and everyone she knows, she decides to reinvent herself—or die trying.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his first two well-received thrillers, A Gathering of Spies and A Game of Spies, Altman used familiar backgrounds from WWII fiction in imaginative ways. He does the same good service in his latest, an exciting and moving adventure set in the present but owing much to the moral quandaries explored by past masters such as Eric Ambler and John le Carr . Hannah Gray is a classic Ambler character a woman fleeing one set of troubles and getting caught up in another. Gray discovers that her lover and business partner in a Chicago medical research firm has been pulling off massive medicare fraud without her knowledge. Instead of immediately blowing the whistle, Gray takes a last-minute offer from a friend to go on a cruise from Venice to the Greek Isles, a chance to lie low and think about her options. On board, Gray befriends an elderly couple, Renee and Steven Epstein. Unbeknownst to Gray, Steven is a scientist working for a top-secret U.S. government agency, and is having second thoughts about his major breakthrough on a new energy source with devastating weapons possibilities. The head of the agency, Keyes (who goes by only one name), sends a pair of agents including one who suffers from a medical condition that lets him pass for a 13-year-old boy to kill Steven and Renee and recover any records of the breakthrough. Renee innocently gives Gray a guidebook in which Steven had written down the energy formula, and soon Gray is ankle-deep in death and deception in exotic locales. Altman humanizes all this contrivance with many beautifully drawn characters, especially the distraught but resourceful Gray and the terminally overwrought Keyes, already weakened by the death of a young son some years before.
