Bloodmoney: a Novel of Espionage

Bloodmoney: A Novel of Espionage
by David Ignatius
W.W. Norton, 2011. 372 pgs. Thriller.

When Omar al-Waziri's family, home, and previous life are vaporized by the strike of a Predator drone in Pakistan, he vows the vengeance required of him by his culture and his own grief. But he waits. In California, a self-financed, off even the CIA's books espionage outlet begins to lose agents in the Middle East--one kidnapped and tortured, others gunned down in the streets. Where is the leak? Jeffrey Gertz, mastermind and director of "The Hit Parade" undercover squad asks Sophie Marx, a junior agent, to try to smoke out both leak and assassin. In spite of herself being a target (a bodyguard is killed defending her), Sophie does well--so well, in fact, that her investigation is co-opted by the CIA in the person of Cyril Hoffman, a legend in his field. But as Sophie and Cyril, Omar and Jeffrey perform the delicate dance that may destroy them all, it becomes more and more difficult to separate right from wrong, good from evil, truth from a potentially fatal falsehood. Ignatius, a columnist and reporter for the Washington Post covering the Middle East and the CIA, has written an elegant, desolate thriller about war, its cause and continuance, and the perfidy that militates forever and ever against its end.