Bride of a Bygone War (Beriut Trilogy 2)

The second book in the Beirut Trilogy, BRIDE OF A BYGONE WAR is set in the spring of 1981, following the American elections, when Lebanon hopes for fresh political winds that might end their seven-year civil war. Enter Walter Lukash, a midlevel CIA officer assigned as intelligence liaison to the Phalange militia. Lukash soon becomes a pawn in a Levantine game intended to draw the U.S. into conflict with Lebanon's Syrian occupiers. Unfortunately, Lukash is too distracted by problems arising from having abandoned his Lebanese bride five years earlier to see the trap until it springs. SYNOPSIS:Beirut, 1981. Walter Lukash, a journeyman CIA case officer, has been posted in the Middle East for eight straight years and is ready for a quiet desk job back in Washington. When he is ordered to Beirut instead for a two-month secret liaison assignment with the Phalange militia's intelligence unit, his superiors believe they understand his reluctance to accept. What they don't know is that, five years earlier, Lukash secretly married a Lebanese woman against Agency rules and abandoned her soon after the outbreak of war. More than that, his new Irish live-in girlfriend, whom the Agency considers a security risk, has followed him to Beirut from Amman and Lukash has defied orders to break off the relationship. When the two-month assignment is extended to two years, Lukash realizes he can no longer avoid painful realities and choices. But before he can straighten things out, he is caught in a deadly three-way intrigue between the Phalange, the U.S. government and Lebanon's ruthless Syrian occupiers that threatens to unleash the full force of Syrian-backed terrorism against Americans in Beirut. BRIDE OF A BYGONE WAR captures the unique atmosphere of Civil War Beirut with a lively and intelligent style that draws the reader into deep identification with the characters and the action.Review"A CIA agent in Beirut fears his past has caught up to him in the riveting second volume of the Beirut Trilogy.  The winding plotlines make for a gloriously elaborate story as the drama plays against a fiery backdrop of civil war. The inescapable violence acts as a foreboding presence: a cease-fire breaks the night the agent arrives in Beirut, where he sleeps in a building riddled with bullets as explosions light up the sky. The rapidly developing plot burns through pages faster than the first time Fleming took us to Beirut.  An intelligent thriller teeming with vigor." KIRKUS REVIEWS "Fleming provides a sharp sense of place and time. The various threads mesh fairly well in a believable portrait of how professional liars and secret-keepers navigate love and war. The well-machined flow of the story displays Fleming's skill as a writer of literate, thoughtful thrillers that have more to share than a mastery of genre mechanics." PACIFIC BOOK REVIEW "BRIDE OF A BYGONE WAR is an engaging look at the Lebanese war. BRIDE has the feel of an insider's look behind the secrecy and complexity of the multiple players in the region. Beyond the people that Fleming writes about, it is the setting that really shines. The descriptions of the city and the countryside, along with the ebb and flow of daily life really make BRIDE shine outside of the conventional spy thriller." SAN FRANCISCO BOOK REVIEW"An intelligence officer who has dodged making decisions and cleaning up his messes is forced to face the consequences, showing resourcefulness and decency...when at last he must. Fleming does know how to spin a yarn... his fiction has more verisimilitude than many others in the genre." BOOKPLEASURES.COMFrom the AuthorI wrote Dynamite Fishermen and Bride of a Bygone War to clear my head after eleven years of government service in places like Beirut, Cairo, Tunis, Jeddah, and Amman.  I had already decided to write novels at age fourteen, during my first year as a boarding student at Exeter.  My English instructor, a World War II combat veteran, advised those of us who wanted to follow the path of Melville, Conrad and Hemingway to first go out and live some adventures so that we would have stories that people might want to read. My adventures started in the Middle East and continued in Washington, Europe, the Russian Far East, Maui, Utah, New York and Boston.  Though my most recent novels are set in a future dystopian America, I intend to write more stories set in the Middle East before long.