Robert Ludlum's The Altman Code: A Covert-One Novel - Hardcover

Ludlum, Robert; Lynds, Gayle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0752857517 ISBN 13: 9780752857510

Publisher: Orion, 2003

Synopsis

On the dark waterside docks of Shanghai, a photographer records cargo being secretly loaded. He's brutally killed and his camera destroyed. Two weeks later on the dangerous high seas, the U.S. Navy covertly tracks a Chinese ship rumoured to carry tons of chemicals for Saddam Hussein to create new biological weapons. The President cannot let the ship reach Iraq. At the same time, he doesn't want the navy to attack and board it either, because decades of negotiations with China have at long last yielded a landmark human rights agreement that China is willing to sign.

The President orders Fred Klein, head of Covert One, to find solid proof of what the Chinese ship is ferrying. Operative Col. Jon Smith is sent to rendezvous in Taiwan with another agent who has acquired the ship's true manifest. But the second agent is murdered, the proof is destroyed, and Smith is left only with a verbal message - the President's biological father is still alive, held a prisoner by the Chinese for fifty years. Smith must find the truth about the ship, a truth that probes the deepest secrets of the Chinese ruling party...

About this title

Review

The posthumous Ludlum franchise is in safe hands; The Altman Code is a slick, classy dash through the undergrowth of international politics with an intelligent, but fallible, hero and villains whose motives make at least a kind of sense. A Chinese freighter is on its way to Saddam Hussein's Iraq with a load of the makings for chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction; the US can neither afford to let it arrive nor engage in a direct confrontation with post-Communist China without clear evidence that it is justified in doing so. Covert agent and microbiologist Jon Smith finds himself caught up in a plot that involves skulduggery in both American and Chinese cabinets, the Uighur separatist movement, the US president's long-lost biological father and the mistress-of-disguise agent sister of his own dead lover. Lynds has learned from Ludlum how to make researched material sound like deep expertise and how to keep a lot of plot angles in the air at the same time. --Roz Kaveney

Review

The review copy mailing and press release has been sent out, reviews to follow Review in COVENTRY EVENING TELEGRAPH

Edition details

• Publisher: Orion
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0752857517
• ISBN 13: 9780752857510
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 416