Publisher's Synopsis
Rave reviews: "The Enemy Within is loaded with fascinating details about how federal-level investigations can waste time and lives. . . . A muscular story with great bones."-USA Today"The Enemy Within is a great story, written intelligently and introducing a very sympathetic main character."-The Dallas Morning News"[A] high-octane thriller, Hynd is a solid, dependable writer with enough literary flair to move him up a few notches above the Ludlums and Clancys of the world. -BooklistFrom Publishers WeeklyIn this exhaustive political action thriller, it's 2009, and Secret Service agent Laura Chapman is pulled off her White House detail to identify and thwart an assassin... The only clues: the assassin is male and he's a Secret Service agent himself. Laura, who has spent more than a decade on duty at the White House, is not your standard, black suit and earplug-wearing poker-faced agent: she drinks too much, smokes pot, sees apparitions and gets depressed. Noel Hynd knows the ins and outs of Washington's agencies both public and secret. He meticulously describes Laura's investigation step by frustrating step. There are subplots dealing with an American attack on Libya, sleazy American spies, Laura's love life and the question of whether those ghosts she keeps seeing are real or not. When the ending finally lopes onstage, it's not as spectacular as most readers would wish, but Hynd ties up all his loose ends, freeing the likable Laura for duty in subsequent volumes. (Mar.) Copyright (c) 2004 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistDescribed by the publisher as " 24 meets Alias meets The Day of the Jackal," this tightly plotted novel features a female intelligence agent assigned to ferret out a would-be presidential assassin who may be lurking in the ranks of the Secret Service. But Laura Chapman isn't a clone of Alias' Sydney Bristow; the story bears only the slightest resemblance to Day of the Jackal; and there is no 24 -like episodic structure (or single-day story, either, for that matter). Hynd, whose previous efforts have mixed horror and crime ( A Room for the Dead, 1994), is a solid, dependable writer with enough literary flair to move him up a few notches above the Ludlums and Clancys of the world. With the right kind of word of mouth--something beyond facile comparisons to TV shows--this high-octane thriller with just enough political edge should find the eager audience it deserves. -- American Library Association. Product DescriptionIt is early summer of 2009, an uneasy time in the American capital. Washington is tense over a showdown between the United States and the new ruler of Libya.Laura Chapman is a U.S. Secret Service agent assigned to the White House. She is quirky, solitary, and frequently unorthodox. She is sexy and fit, adept with a pistol as well as with a hundred-pound Everlast bag. But she is also a brilliant intelligence analyst. That's why she has been assigned to the Presidential Protection Detail for the past eleven years.The CIA assigns Laura to a case that borders on the unthinkable: an assassination plot against the new president. Shockingly, the trigger man will be a member of the United States Secret Service.Since the CIA knows that the assassin is male, Laura is not a suspect. The odds are heavily against her locating an alleged assassin within the Service, and even more heavily against her surviving the assignment.
