Blood Diamonds
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
The West African country of Sierra Leone has long been known as a diamond-rich area. With civil war ripping the heart out of the country, all aspects of life there are unstable. Worst of all, guerrilla rebels, in their lust for the resource-rich land, have sunk to depravity and terrorism to evict people from the country.
It's into this maelstrom of political and emotional turmoil that Ben and Danielle must go. The leader of the rebels, a fanatical and charismatic woman known only as the Dragon, is not content with ravaging her own country. She plans a final coup that will perfect her power and topple Western governments-unless Ben and Danielle can stop her in time.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Land packs a load of information and action into his fifth thriller (after 2001's Keepers of the Gate), in which Palestinian-American detective Ben Kamal and his unlikely partner and lover, Israeli detective Danielle Barnea, battle a female Sierra Leone rebel leader with global designs. On the plus side are Kamal and Barnea, both touching and accessible characters with enough backstory to make them interesting, but not too much to overexplain them (although in Kamal's case it becomes a near thing, especially in flashback scenes from his father's life). There are also some sharp political insights into how prospects in the Middle East have deteriorated since the series began; as Kamal's friend and mentor Colonel al-Asi grimly recalls, "The cooperative ventures you and Barnea worked on were symbols of peace when it still seemed possible." The action scenes are as plentiful and professionally rendered as ever, ranging this time from Israel's West Bank and a doomed Russian town to a bloody Sierra Leone landscape where the rebel leader (known as the Dragon) trades her country's uncut diamonds for weapons of supreme terror. But Land interrupts the flow of his narrative by constantly cutting from one set of players to another each cut is soon predictable by its length and by the cliff-hanging clich s that end most chapters. There's also an impossible-to-kill villain, whose near-magic reappearances will irk readers. Established fans will probably overlook the flaws, but newcomers might wonder what the previous fuss was all about.
