The Three-Nine Line
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
More than forty years after their release from the notorious "Hanoi Hilton," three American prisoners of war return to Vietnam to make peace with their most brutal former captor, a guard whom they've dubbed, "Mr. Wonderful." The U.S. State Department hopes reconciliation will help cement a major trade agreement between Washington and the Vietnamese. But when Mr. Wonderful is found murdered, the three ex-POWs are accused of the crime and the multi-billion dollar deal threatens to unravel. Enter pilot, still-aspiring Buddhist, and former military assassin Cordell Logan. Working with a newly formed covert intelligence unit that answers directly to the White House, Logan is dispatched to Hanoi to identify the real killer as the trade agreement threatens to implode. What he soon uncovers proves to be a vexing and increasingly dangerous mystery. Who really killed the guard and why? Unlocking the answers will test every ounce of Logan's ingenuity and resolve, while risking his life as never before.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Freed's outstanding fourth Cordell Logan mystery (after 2014's Voodoo Ridge) takes the wise-cracking U.S. government agent to Hanoi, where three ex-POWs, once guests of the notorious Hanoi Hilton, are participating in a reconciliation ceremony with their former guards. When one of the guards, the brutal Pham Huu Chi (aka Mr. Wonderful, because he wasn't), is found stabbed to death in a lake in downtown Hanoi, the Vietnamese police suspect one or more of the Americans were involved. Clarence Hallyday manages to catch a flight to safety, but Virgil Stoneburner and Steven Cohen, the latter of whom happens to be Logan's former philosophy professor, are placed under house arrest at their hotel. Logan, posing as a psychologist, has to get Stoneburner and Cohen out of the country before the local authorities stage a show trial that will scuttle a multibillion dollar trade pact between Vietnam and the U.S. To the Vietnamese, the Americans who bombed their country four decades ago were imperialist murderers. To the Americans, their jailers were sadistic torturers. Freed pulls off the remarkable feat of writing an entertaining first-class suspense yarn while addressing serious political and personal issues in an even-handed, informed manner.
