Bloodmoney

April 4, 2011
Foreign intrigue specialist Ignatius (The Increment) continues his fictional trek through terrorist hot spots with this timely thriller about the CIA's bungling attempts to influence Pakistan's shaky, insecure leadership. Sophie Marx, an agent hungry to return to the field after a high-level but boring desk job, works for a new intelligence unit disguised as a Los Angeles record company, Hit Parade, whose undercover focus is to control Pakistani organized terrorist cells through bribery. It's not working. Not only are the terrorist attacks continuing but CIA agents delivering the bribes are being murdered. To make matters worse, Hit Parade's secret funding sourceâa highly illegal strategy to skim money from the world's financial marketsâis rapidly becoming public knowledge. Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist, is especially good at capturing the work environment at the CIA, where petty bickering, one-upmanship, and moral lapses often get in the way of sound policy.

Starred review from February 15, 2011

Ignatius (The Increment, 2009, etc.) continues his series of top-notch CIA thrillers with this fast-paced new entry.

CIA field agent Sophie Marx recently returned from an overseas assignment where she narrowly escaped being killed. Now Sophie's working in a special off-the-books project run by the dangerous but capable Jeff Gertz. Gertz alone knows the full story behind the Hit Parade, a separate, untraceable operation of the CIA that is hidden in Los Angeles behind the façade of an entertainment company. From this seemingly innocuous office, Gertz runs operatives all over the world whose jobs, it appears, are to bring assets into the fold. But then something goes wrong, and those operatives start dying. One by one, the Hit Parade is losing some of its best agents to an unknown threat and Gertz, who never lets anyone see him sweat, decides that Sophie, his newly named chief of counterintelligence, is exactly the right person to keep his boss at the CIA and the White House off his back. When Sophie heads out to investigate, she finds much more than she anticipated. A longtime contributor to the Washington Post, where he has covered both the CIA and the Middle East, Ignatius writes with authority and skill about a shadow world in which nothing is as it seems and money is power. This may be fiction, but in the end the reader will be struck by how feasible the story really is.

A terrific, believable novel about the intersection of politics, ethics and finance.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 1, 2011

A new CIA unit in Pakistan is being systematically decimated, and ambitious young CIA agent Sophie Marx is charged with figuring out why. As she gets closer to the truth, her confidence in both her CIA bosses and her Pakistani contact goes up in smoke. A prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post, Ignatius has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for 25 years, so he knows his news. With his recent Increment being developed for film by Jerry Bruckheimer, he would seem to know his thrills as well.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2011
An aggressive new unit of the CIA, reporting only to the White House, is created to do what its discredited parent agency cantbuy peace in Pakistans tribal areas. Even better, it is self-funding. It feeds economically sensitive intelligence to a London hedge fund and rakes off the lions share of the profits, thereby rendering itself completely invisible to Congress and the public. But then the units field operatives begin to die, and Sophie Marx, head of counterintelligence, is assigned to plug the leak. Sophie quickly finds herself in peril and in an uneasy alliance with the head of Pakistani intelligence, who also wonders how one group of Pakistani fighters has breached seemingly unbreachable U.S. security. After a quarter-century of journalistic writing about the CIA and the Middle East, Washington Post columnist Ignatius is now better known as a novelist (The Increment, 2009; Body of Lies, 2007), and Bloodmoney will only enhance this recognition. In addition to being a solid page-turner, it offers intriguing characters, a complicated but skillfully explicated plot and a nuanced view of Pashtun tribal culture often at odds with the larger Punjabi population. And as with all of Ignatius fiction, readers attuned to current events may wonder if he knows things most Americans dont. Ignatius denies this in the acknowledgments, but the tease is part of the appeal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)