The Lion's Game

Starred review from January 3, 2000
John Corey, former NYPD Homicide detective and star of DeMille's Plum Island, is back in this breezily narrated high-octane thriller about the hunt for a Libyan terrorist who has set his sights on some very specific targets--the Americans who bombed Libya on April 15, 1986. The novel begins with a tense airport scene--a transcontinental flight from Paris is flying into New York, and no one has been able to contact the pilot via radio. On the flight is Asad Khalil, a Libyan defector who will be met by Special Contract Agent Corey, his FBI "mentor" Kate Mayfield, and the rest of the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force. But when the plane lands, everyone on board is dead--except Khalil, who disappears after attacking the ATTF's airport headquarters. Has he left the country? Not if John Corey's right--and we know he is, thanks to gripping third-person chapters detailing Khalil's mission alternating with Corey's easy-going first-person narration. And by making Khalil, who lost most of his family in the 1986 bombing, as much of a protagonist as Corey, DeMille adds several shades of gray to what in less skillful hands might have been cartoonishly black and white. If anything, the reader ends up rooting for the bad guy, Khalil, with his mission of vengeance, is a more complex character than John Corey, who never drops his ex-cop bravado (thus trivializing a romance that moves from first date to proposal of marriage within the few days the plot covers). But as usual, DeMille artfully constructs a compulsively readable thriller around a troubling story line, slowly developing his villain from a faceless entity into a nation's all-too-human nemesis. Agent, Nick Ellison. 500,000 first printing; major ad/promo; BOMC main selection; 12-city author tour; Time-Warner audio.

February 1, 1999
Plum Island's Detective John Corey battles a terrorist called the Lion, a young Arab whose family died in the Libya bombing.

December 15, 1999
Lifting a creepy detail from the Flying Dutchman legend--a ship manned by corpses--DeMille raises the curtain on a new John Corey mystery with a 747 landing itself at New York. Onboard, everyone is dead. The macabre scene alarms the NYPD's Corey even more because the deceased do not include a particular prisoner-passenger listed on the manifest, Asad Khalil, "defecting" Libyan terrorist. Since Corey's best-selling exploits in "Plum Island" (1997), he has joined an interagency team slated to take Khalil into custody. The perils of Khalil being at large are immediately impressed upon Corey and his new FBI love interest when they discover half their colleagues murdered. Switching to omniscient narration, DeMille flashes back to clarify Khalil's motivation: he seeks vengeance for the death of his family in the 1986 U.S. air strike against Libya, and he proceeds to wreak it with psychopathic efficiency. Suspense arises from Corey and company's pursuit of Khalil, a mission complicated by Corey's suspicions of the CIA contingent assigned to the case and by Corey's un-PC, antiauthoritarian sarcasm. Flouting orders at every opportunity, Corey gradually puts the pieces together to figure out what readers have long known: Khalil is systematically knocking off the pilots of the 1986 raid. The wild climax leaves the coast clear for a sequel, and why not? DeMille again puts daylight between himself and the competition in the international-thriller sweepstakes. ((Reviewed December 15, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)