An Accidental American

January 1, 2007
This thought-provoking thriller from the pseudonymous Carr features a heroine with an unusual background. Nicole Blake, the daughter of a Lebanese violin teacher killed by a car bomb and a corrupt American playboy whose primary contributions to her life have been U.S. citizenship and a prison term for forgery, reluctantly trades her quiet ex-con life in the French countryside for gunfire and skullduggery in Lisbon, where she tries to track down the players in a triple-cross that goes back to the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut. The smooth pacing is marred slightly by frequent flashbacks to her childhood and a long-ago romance, but the gritty atmosphere is perfectly drawn, and complex layers of lies and betrayal keep the reader happily guessing up to the end. Carr, the author of Flashback
and three other novels under her real name, Jenny Siler, adds a timely postscript on the difficulty and value of writing fiction about real events.

December 1, 2006
Nicole Blake, the accidental American of the title, is a forger who has gone straight after serving six years in a French prison. Her quiet life in the Pyrenees is shattered when American agent John Valsamis pressures her into tracking down her former lover, Rahim Ali, a suspected terrorist living in Lisbon. When Valsamis shoots Rahim, Nicole finds herself on the run and in possession of an invoice for five dirty bombs destined for Iraq. At the same time, Sabri Kanj, a captive being tortured in Amman, Jordan, asks to see former CIA director of operations Richard Morrow claiming to know the identity of an American mole who had advance knowledge of the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut. The connections among all these characters, who are not what they seem, are slowly revealed as Nicole struggles not only to survive but to understand a complicated past that includes the death of her Lebanese mother in a car bombing. A tightly entwined plot with numerous reversals, poetic descriptions, thorough research, and a lightly fictionalized treatment of America's Mideast travails make this an intriguing read. Recommended for popular fiction collections; Carr is a pseudonym for novelist Jenny Siler ("Easy Money").Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

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