Alex Carr – författare

A powerful new thriller, the first in a series from this acclaimed writer. It features Nicole, part French, part Lebanese, part American - and a master forgerNicole has experienced enough danger and excitement to last her several lifetimes. But a six-year spell in Marseilles'' toughest prison has cured her adrenaline habit. Now peace and quiet are what she craves. A farmhouse buried deep in the French Pyrenees, a garden to tend, and the occasional job whipping up a passport or a visa to pay for her simple lifestyle will do her fine. John Valsamis could have been any tourist, a solitary American needing directions in Nicole''s empty corner of the world. But she knows he isn''t. From his briefcase Valsamis pulls a Red Notice, a document reserved for people regarded by interpol as serious terrorist threats. On the document is a face familiar to Nicole - Rahim Ali. They had worked together and been lovers a decade earlier in Lisbon. Nicole does not believe Rahim has turned to terrorism, yet Valsamis confronts her with what looks like proof, along with intelligence of a planned major terrorist strike. Rahim was last spotted in Lisbon and Valsamis wants Nicole to track him down. Nicole cannot resist the pull, the need to prove Valsamis wrong about her former lover. Just a few days, she tells herself, a week at most. She''ll find him and clear things up and be back to her old routine. But as the train slides south towards Lisbon''s Santa Apolonia Station, she begins to realise how foolish her expectations had been ...

An edge-of-the-seat political thriller set in the murky world of post-9/11 espionageArmy Intelligence reservist Kat Caldwell is teaching Arabic at a military college in Virginia when the order comes: retired spy chief Dick Morrow needs to find a CIA informant who has slipped away from his handler in Spain and may be heading to Morocco. Jamal was a prisoner whom Kat interrogated when she worked at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. Having gained his trust, she is now expected to discover his whereabouts on a treacherous trail that leads from Madrid¿s red-light district to the slums of Casablanca. But when a British soldier is murdered just as he is about to give testimony on the death of a Bagram detainee, Kat begins to suspect that the real story here is of the cover-up of US-sanctioned torture. And when in desperation Jamal contacts his former CIA handler, he unwittingly rekindles a bitter struggle between the one man who can save him and the one who wants him dead.

Forced out of a self-imposed exile, one woman faces a lifetime’s worth of secrets and betrayal–all in the name of staying alive. Nicole Blake had planned to leave her criminal life in the past. She had done her time in a dank prison in Marseille and relinquished the world of forgery and counterfeiting for an unassuming career as a freelance consultant. Now her world is a small farm in the French Pyrenees, with daily fresh eggs and the companionship of her devoted dog.But when U.S. intelligence operative John Valsamis shows up at her door, Nicole is reminded that she’ll always be an ex-con. Valsamis is after Nicole’s former lover, Rahim Ali, and soon Nicole finds herself back in Lisbon, tracking down Rahim in all their old haunts. Except now Rahim isn’t just a document forger–he’s a suspected terrorist. Unwittingly drawn into an international web of fundamentalism, crime, and corruption, Nicole discovers that its threads stretch from the cobbled streets of Lisbon to the once-beautiful city of her birth, Beirut, and to the top levels of the government that sent Valsamis to find her. And as with any good web, the harder Nicole fights to free herself, the tighter it closes around her.