The Last Days
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The Last Days is a stunning political thriller from New York Times bestselling author, Joel C. Rosenberg
Osama bin Laden is dead. Saddam Hussein is buried. Baghdad lies in ruins.
Now the eyes of the world are on Jerusalem as Jon Bennett--a Wall Street strategist turned senior White House advisor--his beautiful CIA partner Erin McCoy and the U.S. Secretary of State arrive in the Middle East to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
On the table: a dramatic and potentially historic Arab-Israeli peace plan, of which Bennett is the chief architect. At the heart of the proposed treaty is the discovery of black gold deep underneath the Mediterranean-a vast and spectacular tract of oil and natural gas that could offer unprecedented riches for every Muslim, Christian, and Jew in Israel and Palestine.
With the international media closely tracking the story, the American message is as daring as it is direct: Both sides must put behind them centuries of bitter, violent hostilities to sign a peace treaty. Both sides must truly cooperate on drilling, pumping, refining, and shipping the newly found petroleum. Both sides must work together to develop a dynamic, new, integrated economy to take advantage of the stunning opportunity. Then--and only then--the United States will help underwrite the billions of dollars of venture capital needed to turn the dream into reality.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rosenberg's sequel to the bestselling The Last Jihad (2002) is a near-clone of its predecessor: an action-packed Clancyesque political thriller with paper-thin characters. Presidential envoy Jon Bennett returns as the protagonist, along with his bodyguard and love interest, Erin McCoy, an "Uzi-toting, Arabic-speaking CIA supermodel." Their efforts to broker a Middle East peace, whose centerpiece is a fortuitously discovered deep oil reserve with the potential to make every Israeli and Palestinian wealthy, are literally blown to pieces when a suicide bomber claims the life of the U.S. secretary of state and Yasser Arafat himself. The surviving members of the American delegation, along with the Palestinian and Israeli entrepreneurs behind the oil-drilling venture, are scrambling frantically to escape from the Gaza Strip when civil war breaks out among the factions grappling to succeed Arafat as leader. Meanwhile, the sinister forces behind the attack seek to wreak further havoc by dispatching teams of terrorists to America while provoking the Israeli government to trigger a wider conflagration by invading the West Bank and Gaza. The author singularly fails to suspend readers' disbelief with his baffling decision to set the action in the year 2010 while simultaneously placing real-life events from 2003 such as the invasion of Iraq and the appointment of Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) as Palestinian prime minister seven years in the future. His efforts to make the book a relevant, "ripped-from-the-headlines" tale are already dated the real Abu Mazen has resigned his post and the fantasy solution to the intractable political conflict by a deus ex machina will strike many readers as silly. $350,000 ad/promo.
