Bloodmoney

by David Ignatius

Overview

From the author of the best-selling Body of Lies and The Increment: in a tragedy of revenge, the CIA falls victim to its own daring operation in the Middle East.

Someone in Pakistan is killing the members of a new CIA intelligence unit that is trying to buy peace with America's enemies. It falls to Sophie Marx, a young CIA officer with a big chip on her shoulder, to figure out who's doing the killing and why. Her starting point is Alphabet Capital, the London hedge fund that has been providing cover for this secret operation, but the investigation soon widens to include the capitals of the Middle East and the cruel hills of South Waziristan.

Sophie thinks she has the backing of her hard-nosed boss, Jeffrey Gertz, and his genial mentor at headquarters, Cyril Hoffman. In addition, she gets help from the well-mannered lieutenant general heading Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. But the closer Sophie gets to her quarry, the more she realizes that nothing in this gallery of mirrors is quite what it seems. This is a theater of violence and retribution, in which the last act is one that Sophie could not have imagined.

David Ignatius has written a disturbing and compelling novel where the price of unchecked government is paid in blood, and peace can be bought only through betrayal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393078114
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/06/2011
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	549,083
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

David Ignatius is a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for four decades. He has written several New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Washington, DC.

Editorial Reviews

Although her last outing nearly got her killed, CIA field operative Sophie Marx is eager to get out of the office again. She gets her chance with a dangerous assignment: She's charged with tracking down the source of a leak that has gotten four agents killed. What she uncovers leads to Pakistan and Afghanistan, but also to a wheeler-dealer on her own side. Once again, David Ignatius (Body of Lies; The Increment) delivers the goods with a realistic foreign intrigue thriller.

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 source—a highly illegal strategy to skim money from the world's financial markets—is 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. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"In addition to being a solid page-turner, [Bloodmoney] 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 don’t."

Booklist

Action junkie Sophie Marx works for a secret CIA unit formed after 9/11 to avoid the sclerotic Langley headquarters. Suddenly, four agents are assassinated, and her job is to find and plug the leaks. She goes deep into suspicious territory to discern the facts from the careful camouflage. To her horror, she learns that her own side is rotten with deceit as her boss is using the powerful instruments of modern finance in London to fund the alternative unit. Unbeknownst to anyone, a Pakistani professor bent on revenge for the drone-caused deaths of his family had penetrated the electronic defenses and killed the vulnerable agents. VERDICT Ignatius leverages a colorful cast of fresh characters and the mystique of the Internet to weave a compulsively readable story about the profound hostilities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The author's eighth novel (The Increment; Body of Lies) is essential for all active readers of spy thrillers and suspense and will leave them happily hungry for the ninth one. [See Prepub Alert, 12/6/10.]—Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA

Library Journal

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 theWashington 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.

Kirkus Reviews

Revenge is a jagged-edged puzzle, and within the espionage community it can be even more lethal. Firdous Bamji grounds us firmly in the unfamiliar settings of Pakistan and the Middle East with clear, fluid name and place pronunciations. They’re never stumbling blocks though the intricate mesh of relationships, clans, and shifting loyalties are all part of the deadly game played by the CIA, ISI, and now a new off-the-books, super-clandestine American outfit. Informed details and cultural anthropology are hallmarks of David Ignatius's intelligent thrillers, and that richness carries well into the audio format. Narrator Bamji hides in plain sight, a spy's trick. For listeners this means no overly strong presence—but instead the recessive storyteller making sure all goes according to plan. If you liked BODY OF LIES, find more engaging listening here. R.F.W. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

JULY 2011 - AudioFile