The Enemy Within

Publishers Weekly

In this exhaustive and sometimes exhausting political action thriller, it's 2009, and Secret Service agent Laura Chapman is pulled off her White House detail to identify and thwart an assassin who has been paid $10 million by a foreign government to kill the president. The only clues: the assassin is male and he's a Secret Service agent himself. Laura, who has spent more than a decade on duty at the White House, is not your standard, black suit and earplug-wearing poker-faced agent: she drinks too much, smokes pot, sees apparitions and gets depressed. The son of true crime writer Alan Hynd, with more than 15 novels to his credit (A Room for the Dead, etc.), Noel Hynd knows the ins and outs of Washington's agencies both public and secret. He meticulously describes Laura's investigation step by frustrating step. There are subplots dealing with an American attack on Libya, sleazy American spies, Laura's love life and the question of whether those ghosts she keeps seeing are real or not. When the ending finally lopes onstage, it's not as spectacular as most readers would wish, but Hynd ties up all his loose ends, freeing the likable Laura for duty in subsequent volumes. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Someone homicidal is stalking the president. But how can a would-be assassin hope to evade the peerless U.S. Secret Service? Goodness, he is Secret Service!The viper in the bosom of the agency is clever, ruthless and ideologically motivated. Throw in the $10 million promised by a "hostile foreign government," and clearly the good guys have a situation on their hands. Enter Laura Chapman, veteran member of the Presidential Protection Detail: mid-30s, attractive, tough and no more paranoid than the job requires. Summoned by her boss, Laura's told that gender places her above suspicion, it having been gleaned from a credible source that the traitor is male. For that reason, among others, she becomes point person in a frantic investigation. Enter "Charley Boy," the aforementioned source, who turns out to be a half-Thai, half-American, $1,500-a-night hooker named Anna Muang, and who, in the course of performing her ancient calling, overheard bits and pieces of the POTUS plot. Anna likes the U.S. and the idea of the American Dream, and she is passing on information to earn the thanks of a grateful nation, plus a U.S. passport. Laura meets with her and leaves convinced that Anna knows even more than she thinks she does about a certain "blond man" of evil intent. Which, it turns out, is a precarious position for poor Anna to be in. As show-down time approaches, even Laura wonders if she can out-duel so accomplished a villain. In the West Wing, only feet from the Oval Office, a climactic, blood-drenched gun battle ensues, and when the smoke clears . . . Hynd (The Prodigy, 1998, etc.) has given us an intriguing heroine, some first-rate action scenes and about 100 pages more than a good suspensenovel can sustain.