The Program
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- €4.99
Publisher Description
The Program safeguards the truth, but when The Program has a hidden agenda, the protected become the hunted
With his nuanced psychological insight, inscrutable plotting, and a captivating lead character that parallels Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware, Stephen White's Alan Gregory novels have become perennial national bestsellers. But, with The Program, White has challenged himself and honed his craft with remarkable assurance to create a rare breed of thriller. A dazzling mix of first-person and omniscient voices rewards readers with an irresistible narrative momentum. But the heart and soul of the novel is an indomitable woman reevaluating the seemingly innocuous choices she's made in the past while confronting the horrifying circumstances that threaten her family's future survival.
"Every precious thing I lose, you will lose two." The Program begins with a condemned man's last words to New Orleans District Attorney Kirsten Lord. After her husband is gunned down in front of her, Lord has no choice but to flee the wrath of the murderer's vengeance. Lord pulls up stakes, changes her name, and accepts the Witness Protection Program's offer to hide her and her young daughter in Boulder, Colorado. Soon thereafter, they are befriended by Program veteran Carl Luppo, a solitary mob assassin tormented by his former life who has nothing but time for regret.
Sensing that someone inside the program has compromised Lord and her daughter's safety, Luppo takes on the role of sentinel, fully realizing that this may be his last shot at redemption. Even though Lord suspects that Luppo's warnings about the Program's dark side are justified and that she should believe the former hit man's instincts, the only people she can really trust are her nine-year-old daughter and perhaps her Program-appointed psychologist Alan Gregory.
Fans of White's previous work will applaud the brilliant use of series favorite Alan Gregory in a seemingly secondary role in the novel, and new readers will find themselves compelled to find out what Gregory has encountered before. But all readers will agree that The Program is a superior thriller; a novel firmly grounded in the realities of three-dimensional characters in crisis and driven with the narrative pace of a guilty pleasure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Once it recovers from a wobbly beginning, this ninth thriller in the bestselling series featuring Boulder, Colo., clinical psychologist Alan Gregory sprints competently along. Peyton Francis, aka Kirsten Lord, was once a New Orleans district attorney. Now she and her nine-year-old daughter are enrolled in the witness protection program, in hiding from Peyton's husband's assassin, who was most likely hired by a Colombian drug lord Peyton put away for life. Given a new ID and moved to Boulder, Peyton is befriended by another witness protection participant, a former mob hitman who, like herself, is referred by the Feds to Dr. Gregory for counseling. Plagued by doubts about the federal marshal entrusted with her safety and tortured by second thoughts about the impending execution of a black man she may have mistakenly sent to death row in Florida, Peyton races against time to stay the Florida execution, and is forced to go into hiding from the very witness protection forces assigned to protect her. The usually sure-handed White is guilty of some artless writing at the novel's start, creating a veritable obstacle course of meandering points of view, including an obscure long-running metaphoric thread linking repressed memories to images of a pod of whales. However, once the narrative drive settles mainly into Peyton's first-person voice, the story comes handily together. Featuring an interesting cast, including a young Texas schoolmarm turned professional hit person, a sinister cabal of federal marshals with hidden agendas and an entrepreneurial assassination broker in Atlanta, the narrative drives to an edge-of-your-seat denouement. Author tour.
