Being in a graphic binge with my fantastic cover designer Todd Hebertson in far away Salt Lake City, I just put a colorfuil new lid on Thursday at Noon, my exciting Middle East suspense thriller. Take a look. A dead Mossad agent, Nazi rocket scientists in Cairo, the Muslim Brotherhood, a corrupt American ambassador, two missing Egyptian tank regiments, and Richard Thomson, a burnt-out CIA agent who is dumped in Egypt because the Agency can’t think of a worse place to send him.
Already gnawed on by Langley and set-up by the Cairo police, Thomson thinks his day can’t get much worse, until someone leaves a dead body on the rear steps of his hotel with its head lopped off like a ripe melon. A message? No doubt about it. The body belongs to Mahmoud Yussuf, a fat, petty thief and wannabe spy who is peddling photographs of a long-abandoned RAF base in the Egyptian desert. Someone is trying to start another Arab-Israeli war, and it’s all going to start at Noon on Thursday unless Thompson can stop them. This Cold War spy thriller will sweep you back to when John Kennedy is in the White House, Nikita Khrushchev rules the Kremlin, and Abdel, Gamal Nasser sits precariously in Cairo, threatened by the radical Islamist fringe of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But while the world focuses on Russian missiles in Cuba, no one notices the ones being rolled out in the Egyptian desert pointed at Israel, no one, except Thomson. Alone and on the run, treachery and double-dealing are the rule. No one believes his story — not the CIA, the US Ambassador, and most assuredly not Captain Hassan Saleh, Chief of the Homicide Bureau of the Cairo Police, who wants to hang Thomson for murder. Like Night of the Generals, this is a murder mystery wrapped inside an international political thriller. Tick Toc, Tick Toc…
