White House

New York, NY: Forge, 2001. First Mass Market Edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Mass-market paperback. Very good. Cover has slight wear and soiling. Minor ding to several page corners at back.. Glued binding. [10], 422 p. Kirk McGarvey Novels A terrorist bomb explodes at a Georgetown restaurant, killing CIA operative Kirk McGarvey's French girlfriend and wounding his daughter. The bomb was meant for him, but the terrorists have made a fatal mistake-attacking McGarvey's family-and he goes after them with a vengeance. At the same time, McGarvey must struggle with an escalating crisis in the Far East, where a mysterious underground nuclear explosion has destroyed a power station off the coast of North Korea. U. S intelligence fears the worst. Because if Kim Jong Il, its controversial stringman, has nuclear weapons, he may just be crazy enough to use them. From the corridors of power in Washington to the Japanese space launch centre at Tanegashima, Kirk McGarvey must track a terrorist operation with its sights on both his family and the White House itself. From Wikipedia: "David Hagberg (born 9 October 1942 in Duluth, Minnesota) is an American novelist best known for his techno-thrillers featuring super-spy Kirk McGarvey. Hagberg has also written under the pseudonym Sean Flannery, Nick Carter, David Bannerman, David James, Robert Pell, and Eric Ramsey. Hagberg's style has been described as a cross between Tom Clancy and Ian Fleming. His thrillers generally feature a combination of technical detail, timely plots and super-spy heroics that are sometimes almost prophetic in their accuracy. In the novel Joshua's Hammer, for example, written in 2000, Hagberg gives a chilling account of a mega-terrorist plot by Osama bin Laden to kill thousands of Americans on their home soil, published a full year before the World Trade Center Attacks. His scenario of McGarvey tracking bin Laden to his urban lair in Pakistan and shooting him in the head far from Tora Bora s caves was described and executed in Allah s Scorpion (2007) four years before the eerily similar event echoed Hagberg s novel. Like many "cloak-and-dagger" novelists, Hagberg has a professional background in espionage, having spent his stint of military duty as a cryptographer for U.S. Air Force Intelligence. Hagberg apprenticed as a spy writer by contributing more than 20 "work-for-hire" entries in the Nick Carter-Killmaster series of espionage novels between 1976 and 1987. He also wrote "work-for-hire" novels based on the Flash Gordon comic strip. His work has been well received by his colleagues in the crime writing community. Three of his novels, The Kremlin Conspiracy, False Prophets, and Broken Idols, were nominated for Edgars by the MWA in the "Best Paperback Original Novel" category. Three of his McGarvey novels, Countdown, Crossfire, and Critical Mass, won American Mystery Awards, given by Mystery Scene Magazine, for "Best Spy Novel." Hagberg wrote a short story titled "Genesis" in Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50th Anniversary."