Publishing Date: 2011-06-02

Sales Start Date: 2011-06-02

Language: English

FIC002000  –  Fiction / Action & Adventure

FIC031000  –  Fiction / Thrillers

Worldwide

It began in the quiet smugness of an elegant club in St. James, and ended in a nightmare of brutality and deception. Mike Locken, a former specialist in security and transport, takes on a job to shepherd an exiled African politician in a risky transit across London, the first step in a triumphant return to his homeland. But out there somewhere waits an elite team of international assassins contracted to take him down -- one of whom not so long ago but three bullets into Locken that should have left him a corpse, but didn't... one bad guy's big mistake. So Mike Locken -- unofficial now, an expendable gun-for-hire, reenters the war zone driven by his own demons. Ostensibly to foil a political assassination but willing to use the African as bait if it gets him a shot at the man who put Locken out of business forever, or so it seemed to everyone but Locken. Following a path from stakeout to shootout, from deception at a London airport to betrayal in a remote Welsh village, returning finally to London where it began -- and a savage finish. "Rostand knows how to let action like this explode all over the place," says Bestsellers. A Delacorte Suspense Novel of the Year. Filmed by Sam Peckinpah/United Artists.

Robert Rostand

Writing as Robert Rostand, novelist and screen writer Robert Syd Hopkins is the author of a dozen books, three non-fiction works and nine novels under his own name and the pseudonym Rostand including The Killer Elite, the first of the Locken trilogy of hardedged, Cold War-era thrillers and the soon-to-be republished Viper's Game and A Killing in Rome. All featuring specialist in security and transport (and magnet for nasty people), Mike Locken. Hopkins has worked for the U.S. government, and lived long periods in Brazil, England, Canada and France. His books have been translated into eleven languages.