Killer, Come Hither

"Jack Dana is a star history student at Yale with a bright career in academia ahead of him. But after 9/11 he feels it is his duty to change course. As a Marine infantry officer he is deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Severely wounded in combat, he begins writing a novel about his wartime experiences while surgeons at the Walter Reed Hospital patch up his pelvis. Jack then moves to Manhattan to live with his Uncle Harry, a partner in a leading New York law firm and Jack's surrogate father. With Harry's help he quickly finds a publisher, and the book's swift success launches Jack as a professional writer. After a second successful publication, Jack feels entitled to a vacation and leaves for a three-month trip to South America. The isolation from modern life on a ranch in western Brazil suits him perfectly, but on his way back home he looks at his emails and finds shocking news: his Uncle Harry is dead, hanged in his Sag Harbor summer home, clearly a suicide. Horrified and incredulous, Jack digs into the facts surrounding his uncle's death. Aided by Harry's most trusted associate, Kerry Black, with whom Jack falls in love, and by his college friend Scott Prentice who now works for the CIA, Jack discovers that Harry had pierced the secret of his most important client, Abner Brown, a rightwing multibillionaire notorious for backing extremist causes: Alongside his legitimate businesses, Brown owns and operates parallel criminal enterprises. The stakes and dangers are huge. Harry's death now seems anything but a suicide. And in order to avenge his uncle, Jack might have to circumvent the law and take matters into his own hands"--

Louis Begley's previous novels are Memories of a Marriage, Schmidt Steps Back, Matters of Honor, Shipwreck, Schmidt Delivered, Mistler's Exit, About Schmidt, As Max Saw It, The Man Who Was Late, and Wartime Lies, which won the Hemingway/PEN Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work has been translated into eighteen languages.