Stalking-Horse

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Two completely different stories unfold side by side in this intelligent, skillfully composed political thriller. When the author finally synthesizes the two plots, he delivers nothing less than a clever lesson in the perception of time and an unsettling revelation about the treachery of governments. Adrian Medcalfe is an Englishman stationed at NATO headquarters in Brussels. A desk man, he is unexpectedly given a sensitive intelligence assignment: to hook up with a Western agent in Sofia and find out why Bulgarian officials have apparently permitted their own foreign minister to be assassinated. In Washington, Matthew Di Coiano, a specialist with the National Transportation and Safety Board, has been pulled from an outing with his kids to work an entirely different job. He must help an accident investigation team determine why a passenger airplane has crashed in the sea near Cape Cod. Medcalfe and Di Coiano both end up discovering startling information, and both find themselves in unaccustomed danger. Remarkably, Delahaye (On the Third Day) has researched two different organizationsNATO and NTSBin order to write this novel, yet written about both as if he were an insider. He shows a great gift for the most difficult tasks, gently yielding secrets as the plot unfolds and sustaining suspense throughout a tautly paced narrative. (May)

Library Journal

This is the tale of two bureaucratsone British, one Americaneach with a conscience and a degree of initiative. Briton Adrian Medcalf is suddenly sent from his post at NATO headquarters in Brussels to Sofia, Bulgaria, where he is quickly caught, questioned, and bundled aboard a Russian airliner bound for Washington. His real problems, however, begin when he contacts British In telligence. American Matthew Di Coiano, a crash investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, learns that uncovering the cause of an accident over the North Atlantic turns out to be unpopular with his superiors and dangerous for him. The two stories eventually overlap in an explanation that exposes a new dimension of superpower deceit. John North, L.R.C., Ryerson Polytechnical Inst., Toronto