May 30, 2005
Israeli-born international lawyer Carmon, in his impressively authentic debut thriller, has created a hero, Dan Gordon, with a background in complex asset recovery cases quite similar to his own, though making Gordon a former member of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, seems to be a fictional addition to the author's résumé. Hot on the trail of $90 million stolen from a failed California bank, Gordon stumbles onto a plan whereby Iran will use the missing money to buy nuclear weapons. A credible premise and a cast of twisted characters, from CIA and Mossad agents to the really bad guys, more than compensate for occasionally stiff or silly writing ("I had a sense of cat and mouse here. But which one of us was the cat and which one was the mouse?" says Gordon about a financial adversary). With any luck, Carmon's prose will get smoother in the sequel, but his ear for high-level intelligence deception won't lose a beat. A bestseller in Israel, the novel includes an appreciative foreword by an anonymous former member of Mossad's directorate.