The Image

A stranger's careless guess at a Hollywood party turns Sami Najjar into a legend: three hundred million dollars, a fortune he never had and never claimed, repeated by the internet until it becomes a fact. The number opens every door, the celebrities, the private rooms, the believers, and Sami, a gifted Jerusalem-born director who learned as a boy what a name can be worth and what it can cost, makes the smallest and most fatal choice of his life. He lets it stand.

But belief is a current, and it carries him to a smuggling tunnel beneath the Mexican border, where men who deal in the real economy of power want to do business with the legend, and where, for the first time, being believed could get him killed. When the federal investigation comes, it doesn't need a crime. It needs the image. The jet that was always a charter, the tiger that was always a rental, the photographs with famous men, all of it turned into evidence of a fortune that never existed, and dragging his innocent father down with him.

Stripped of status, freedom, and reputation, Sami begins the only excavation that matters: digging down through everything the world believed, to find the man buried underneath.

Inspired by true events. For readers of American Kingpin*,* The Wolf of Wall Street*, and* Shoe Dog.