I really enjoyed this espionage novel, mostly because the major player ends up being an Egyptian secret service agent, perhaps the only one with a conscience in the novel. Usually, the protagonist is the heroic American. This time it's Omar Halawi who saves the life of Sophie Kohl, wife of Emmett Kohl, State Department liason. The book jumps back and forth in time, from the Kohl's honeymoon in Europe, where they get a taste of 'real life' in Novi Said, a part of the then disintegrating Yugoslavia, an experience that colors and influences the rest of their lives, thanks to their guide, the pragmatic Zora Balasevic, a Serbian nationalist.
The novel begins with Jabril Aziz, an American of Libyan descent who was the architect of a CIA scenario nicknamed 'Stumbler, a plan to take over Libya from Ghadaffi.
Later, we find that Sophie has been recruited by her old Serbian friend, Zora, to pass on US State Department secrets, which she then sells, to the Egyptians and another bidder. Sophie breaks into her husbands computer to get the information and even ends up having an affair with CIA agent Stan Bertoli, to ensure that she may have a safe haven if discovered. Plans go awry when her husband is accused to sharing secrets. He is sent to Budapest, rather than lose his job, where he's been for a couple of years with Sophie. They go out to lunch, seemingly an innocent lunch; he tells her he knows of the affair with Stan just before he's assasinated by an unknown terrorist. Actually, this is how the novel begins, which starts the flashbacks to this point, and leads us forward to finding out who has arranged the assasination.
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