The second in the excellent Palin travel series, where Michael's off on another globe trotting adventure. The result is Pole to Pole, Palin's account of his extraordinary journey of 1991, passing through 17 countries from Greenland and the former Soviet Union in the north to Kenya, South Africa and Chile in the south. Palin revels in the surrealism of it all as he travels through a range of vastly different European and African communities undergoing massive social and political upheavals in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, widow Joanna Brady becomes caught up in a deadly family tragedy initiated by a pair of star-crossed lovers, while trying to prove herself in the male-dominated world of law enforcement and struggling to cope with echoes of Tombstone's infamous Clanton gang.
A left-leaning appeal court judge liberates four of the most dangerous al-Qaeda terrorists from Guantanamo Bay and the CIA field officers track them back to Pakistan's northwest frontier mountain range. But disaster overtakes them and the four men vanish, to rejoin the dark and mysterious forces trained by Osama bin Laden high in the Hindu Kush. These are men with hatred in their hearts, with hatred for the United States and Great Britain, and they are sworn to hit back at the USA, which imprisoned so many of their high command.
When Navy SEAL Mack Bedford's fellow officers are brutally killed by Iraqi insurgents using a devastating, new anti-tank Diamondhead missile, Mack avenges their murders by gunning down the then unarmed attackers, ultimately getting himself court-martialed and kicked out of the Navy in the process. To make matters worse, Mack then learns that the Diamondhead missiles were sold illegally by French industrialist and infamous politician Henri Foche. Mack suspects that Foche will succeed in his campaign to become the next French President, and fears that his election will result in the spread of international terrorism.
When a terrorist bomb explodes in Boston's Logan Airport, Admiral Arnold Morgan, the President's most trusted advisor, moves quickly to break the cell in the United States and ship the Islamic fanatics to Guantanamo Bay. In response, the Hamas high command, meeting in a terrorist cell in Gaza, hatches a vicious plan to assassinate the Admiral the minute he leaves the United States. Morgan's old nemesis, Ravi Rashood, leads this international attack and attempt to eliminate him. The exhilarating chase swirls through southern Ireland, London, and Scotland.