Taking Liberty

In this sprawling novel of suspense and terror, a ruthless professional killer, a disillusioned career spy, and a beautiful Sorbonne professor cross paths with Moscow intelligence. They are all in a race to find the fabled Romanov jewels, smuggled out of Russia a century ago and secreted inside the Statue of Liberty before it was shipped from France to New York. The scene shifts compellingly from the present-day United Nations building to the Czarist Russia of Alexander II, the elegant boulevards of Paris and the sun-drenched Cote d'Azur, and ends in a spectacle of violence at America's shining symbol of freedom standing in New York Harbor. The international hunt is interwoven with the efforts of Paris-based CIA agent Martin Toberts, his new-found love Solange Cordier who holds a secret more than a hundred years old, and his bloody-minded nemesis Pell Bruckner, a rogue agent intent on only one thingsatisfying his lust for personal wealthat the expense of anyone or anything that stands in his way. It is, finally, a story of staggering wealth secreted in a place no one can believe, causing individuals and nations to kill for it and, in some cases, die for it.