The Color of Night

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Former intelligence officer Harry Strand learns that a secret agent can never retire--and never surrender. A widower, he has started his life over and fallen in love with Mara Song, a beautiful Asian art collector. But Harry's peaceful world is shattered when he discovers a shocking videotape of his wife's death in Mara's tape collection.From Kirkus ReviewsAn engrossing thriller about autumnal Cold Warriors. Harry Strand, erstwhile super spy, has been in from the cold for five solid years. The art dealer's world, once his cover, is now his reality. Though still in a kind of half mourning for his wifekilled 11 months earlier in an automobile collisionhe is reasonably content, at least as content as melancholy Harry ever expects to be. His routines, his business, and his select company of friends solace and comfort him so that, in all, its a manageable life. But enter Mara Song, a gorgeous Chinese- American divorce with a collection of valuable drawings she wants him to sell for her. Before he knows it, Harry is head over heels. But just who is this remarkably attractive person? Is she at all who she purports to be? The question intensifies when Harry finds a certain shocking videocassette in her room detailing an auto smash-up, the very one that cost him his wife. And, clearly, what Harry had always supposed was an accident was anything but. Harry, though, convinces himself that Mara is true-blue and the cassette a plant. And almost instantly, he realizes who must have planted it. The implications are disruptive and scary: a deadly secret, which hed long felt was safely buried, has been disinterred by a powerful enemy whos no longer a sleeping dog. Once duped by Harry, he now seeks retributionon Harry and on the group of intelligence agents Harry once ran. What it comes down to, Harry grimly decides as one former ally after another is isolated and brutally dealt with, is kill or be killed. Lindsey (Requiem For a Glass Heart, 1996, etc.) is in that army of thriller writers who are regularly measured against le Carr. And hes one of the few who consistently bears up. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.About the AuthorAfter beginning his writing career in 1983 with the publication of two mystery novels in the same year, David Lindsey's tenth suspense novel, The Color of Night, was published by Warner books in April 1999. In the early years of Lindsey's writing career he published five psychological mystery novels featuring Houston homicide detective Stuart Haydon. In 1990 Lindsey began featuring protagonists other than Haydon, including a Latina homicide detective named Carmen Palma in the critically acclaimed Mercy, and Irina Ismaylova (a Russian assassin) and Cate Cuevas (an FBI undercover agent) in 1996's Requiem for a Glass Heart. As Lindsey's popularity has grown so has his international reputation. His books are now translated into 17 languages and in 1992 Body of Truth, set in Houston and Guatemala, won Germany's Bochumer Krimi Archiv award for the best suspense novel of the year. Lindsey's novels have also attracted the attention of Hollywood. Mercy completed filming in late 1998 and will be released as a feature film in 1999, and the several of the Stuart Haydon novels are currently in option negotiation. Lindsey grew up in the ranch country and oil fields of west Texas, studied English literature in university, and was an editor for many years with small publishers in Texas. He lives in Austin with his wife.