One bright summer morning, Ryan’s wife Susan suffers an embarrassing incident involving their neighbor Greg. In the aftermath, neither Ryan nor Susan can believe how much this simple “incident” has fired up their marriage. Was it just a quirk? Along with their friend Marci, Ryan and Susan are determined to find out. As their plan unfolds, they find themselves on a shocking and often comical new trajectory. A no-holds-barred trip to a Mexican beach paradise escalates matters to the point of combustion. Will it also seals their fates?

March 2008 Readers hungry for sex, bloody action and flag-waving patriotism will best appreciate this sequel to Stone's debut, The Echelon Vendetta, which likewise starred CIA agent Micah Dalton. The disparate elements of this testosterone-fueled thriller gradually come together, including a stabbing in Venice; the hijacking of a freighter in the South China Sea; a rogue SAS (Special Air Service) agent, Ray Fyke, imprisoned in Singapore's notorious Changi prison; and a Serbian mafia leader with grandiose ambitions. Each piece of the puzzle carries its own carnage and enough international intrigue to effectively make Dalton and his putative allies the only ones who can salvage the situation. Stone handles with aplomb such details as weapons technology, bureaucratic bumbling and ship navigation in treacherous seas, then tests the limits of human endurance with his heroes Dalton and Fyke.

Apr 2009 At the start of bestseller Stone's formulaic third thriller to feature CIA cleaner Micah Dalton (after The Orpheus Deception), Dalton takes revenge late one night outside Venice's Piazza San Marco on one of the Serbian thugs responsible for the death of his lover, Cora Vasari. Dalton's actions result in his becoming involved in the search for a high-level traitor in the CIA's ranks, who's believed to be behind the brutal murder of elderly Mildred Durant, an unofficial adviser to an NSA decryption team known as the Glass Cutters, in her London home. Durant worked on the Venona Project, the interception of Soviet cable traffic, during the cold war. It appears Stalin had a source close to Roosevelt who was never exposed. While no one will mistake Stone for John le Carré, series fans are sure to root for the unstoppable Dalton, compared at one point to the newly risen Christ, only blond and not quite so loving, with a bullet scar on one cheek and no intention at all of turning the other.