Keller is a normal guy, likes to do the crossword puzzle, watch television and lead a pretty normal lifestyle. Until his phone rings, and a woman known as Dot sends him off to various locations to kill certain people. The speed and method depend on how fast the client wants the job done. Keller isn't a sadist, he doesn't get any particular enjoyment out of ending these people's lives, but he doesn't have many other skills that can earn him such a lucrative living. He also faces several conundrums.
Byrne and Susan Hollander stroll home from a concert on a fine summer's evening in New York. Some hours later, their daughter Kristin arrives home to discover her parents brutally killed and the house ransacked. She also finds she is now a very young millionaire. A few days later the police trace the two killers to an apartment in Coney Island and both are dead.
For a start, it is very deliberately a post-9/11 thriller, in which a man bereaved by the loss of his wife and children in the Twin Towers sets out to wreak what he thinks of as a sacrificial vengeance on the city by becoming a serial terrorist himself. For another, Block, who wrote some pornography early in his career, has created a female character whose kinky sex antics will definitely ruffle some of his mainstream readers. Block's intimate knowledge of New York and its folkways--and of urban character and conversation--has always been one of his great strengths and is on plentiful show again here.
In Silicon Valley, the eccentric inventor of a new encryption application is murdered in an apparent carjacking. In Istanbul, a cynical undercover operative receives a frantic call from his estranged younger brother. When Alex Treven, a patent lawyer who has been working for the inventor, is attacked in his apartment, he is convinced he is the target of a conspiracy, and his brother, Ben, is his only hope. Setting aside their differences, Alex and Ben come together to find out who is behind the attacks. They soon learn that forces in America and abroad are involved in a high-stakes struggle to take hold of the technology, and now both of their lives are in danger.
Evan Tanner, the thief who never sleeps, returns in a classic adventure appearing in hardcover for the first time! Tanner is well-traveled, a master of disguise and subterfuge, accustomed to navigating the hidden geography of the world's most dangerous countries and territories. Borders and bureaucracies mean nothing to him. Passports and visas are but a trifle to a man who speaks countless languages, with contacts in subversive organizations that span the globe. Tanner's been smuggled out of Turkey, fled the Soviet Union in an experimental aircraft, and escaped from a bamboo prison in Thailand.
