5 Novels by Thomas Kirkwood
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Overview: Thomas Kirkwood is best known for his Cold War thrillers, The Quiet Assassin and The Svalbard Passage. After many years in the EU, he now makes his home in Denver, Colorado.
Genre: Fiction > Mystery/Thriller
The Trade
Small candles nestled in a silver candelabrum are ceremoniously lit to announce the start of a medieval Small auction. Sadly, however, we are not in the middle ages but in the first decade of this century. The auction is a nightly event somewhere in Eastern Europe. On the block are naked teenage girls, the latest casualties of the global flesh market. These sex slaves are not fiction: "Natasha girls" already number over a million, an atrocity that has joined weapons smuggling and drug trafficking as one of the largest and most lucrative criminal activities on earth. Kristýna Sondheim, at age 16, was among the first Natasha girls, but managed to break free of her captor and begin a new life in the States. That life turns ugly when she is sentenced to 25 years for the murders of her husband and young daughter – murders she did not commit. The novel opens with Kristýna’s breathtaking escape from Abbyville, a women’s prison built on land adjacent to Sing Sing. All we know at this point is that there is some link between the prologue and this remarkable woman; and that she knows her daughter, who witnessed Arthur Sondheim’s murder, is alive somewhere in Eastern Europe. Kristýna becomes the focus of both the public and the FBI because of her escape. What is not known is that she and her little girl are also the focus of Stepan Obruchev, the man from whose sexual servitude she had escaped, the man responsible for her husband’s murder, her daughter’s kidnapping and the set-up that landed her in prison. Obruchev, one of the Trade’s major players, has contacts everywhere. He must find the girl, Teresa, who knows too much. He must find Kristýna before she is hunted down by Interpol. She will lead him to the child; he will have his revenge while eliminating the threat that he will be revealed – both as a killer and a kingpin in the Trade. Thus begins an international race across continents, a frantic attempt by Kristýna to evade both Obruchev and the law in order to rescue her daughter. Her heart-stopping quest takes her and the FBI on a terrifying journey into the bowels of the Natasha Trade. In Genoa, Special Agent Connor and his international team have her cornered. Kristýna again escapes; her courage and cunning evoke the most suspenseful scenes in The Fugitive. With the help of Natasha rescue groups throughout Europe, she spots her ragged daughter traveling with a tribe of Gypsies. Connor becomes convinced he is dealing with more than an escaped convict. His attention shifts to the Russian Mafia, the seedy criminal element calling the shots in the former East Bloc. He learns who Obruchev is, learns that he is looking for Kristýna. Together with the Austrian police he carries out a sting to penetrate Obruchev’s operation in Slovenia. Posing as an insatiable buyer of teenage girls, he picks up the evil man’s trail. What has been kept from the reader to this point is that Obruchev’s auctioneer, Rasputin, a fake priest and castrato, seeks to dominate his inferiors – those driven by lust. What better way to do this than to set up Obruchev for the cops and take over his business? Rasputin kidnaps Teresa before her mother can free her. In a note tied to Teresa’s dog, Kristýna learns of a farm in Slovenia where she must go to find her daughter. Rasputin sends the same message to Obruchev, knowing the FBI will follow. All roads lead to the farm, desolate and enveloped in fog, for a nail-biting yet ultimately exhilarating denouement.
The Quiet Assassin
Here is a truly original thriller, comparable to the very best of vintage Le Carré. It is set behind the Berlin Wall in the heart of the East German police state and it features one of the most unique and winning heroines since Lucy in Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle. Her name is Käte Frassek, a resistance fighter since the age of eighteen, who over the course of twenty years leads a double life in her courageous campaign to rouse her countrymen to revolt against their repressive regime. She is a wife, a mother, a scientist, a lover… and an assassin. Against a backdrop of the Cold War in the 1960s, an abiding love develops between Käte, while still the young wife of an East German official, and an American physician innocent of who she is and what she is doing. In the remarkable climax to her years of plotting against the head of the State’s secret police, she finally must risk not only her own life but her son’s and lover’s as well. (From the original hardback edition) DEATH MATE To kill the man who had killed so many, Kate would do anything. She would use her brain to work herself to the top of her profession. She would yield her body to go even higher up the ladder of power. She would risk her own child as a pawn on a chessboard of cunning move and counter thrust. But now she was being asked to make a sacrifice she dreaded. Not her own life that would have been easy. But the life of the good and noble man she passionately loved — so that the beast she hated might die….
The Poppy Broker
From the pink cliffs of Brittany to the painted wagons of Sicily, from the slums of Paris to the medieval estates of Europe, this romantic adventure moves at breakneck speed through a land of crime, love and deception. The kidnapping of beautiful French actress, Chantal Armand, forms the hub of a wheel around which art and science, sacrifice and arrogance, love and hate spin at a dizzying pace. The Poppy Broker leads us into the world of Tommaso Scalzone, a man as brilliant as he is glacial; a man who has masterminded a plot to associate Al Qaeda with the Mafia. His hunger for Chantal spawns an unforgettable cast of characters ─ Nadja, a sexy teenage runaway; Don Greco, a Mafia boss with a neck like a stack of tires; and Jean-François, an art collector whose love for Chantal leads him on a relentless but seemingly doomed quest to rescue her … Chantal Armand, a beautiful French stage actress, is trapped in a loveless marriage to the Deputy Minister of Culture. On tour in Bordeaux, she meets and falls in love with Jean-François Duret, a French aristocrat, art collector and patron of the theater. (He lives in an elegant château in the nearby wine country.) Thus begins a passionate, clandestine affair that seems certain to destroy the remnants of Chantal’s marriage and create a national scandal, only to end happily in an inevitable union with Jean-François. At about the same time in Rome, a lucky hit by an obscure Italian geneticist produces a virus lethal to the opium poppy. It’s like winning the lottery, thinks Noto, who takes his dangerous creation to Tommaso Scalzone, the Italian Interior Minister and head of the national police, on whose estate Noto grew up. Scalzone, brilliant and unassailable, will know where to sell a virus that will wipe out heroin and make them both rich beyond measure. He has no idea that Scalzone’s immense power comes from the Mafia as well as the police, that Scalzone is one of the great criminal minds of our time and that Noto will lose his lottery ticket and his life.
SAVE ITALY! Forget the Rest
Dante Passoni, the long awaited Italian counterpart to James Bond, is a man of this century, not a relic of the cold war. He embodies the dynamism of the high-tech world rather than the public corpse of England’s MI-6. Dante is as dashing as James in his prime, as charming as Italy herself, as bold and fearless as we imagine ourselves to be. Passoni brings nail-biting suspense, fun and fresh air wherever he goes. If you love Italy, its food, drink, cars and women; if you love adventure and romance touched by an occasional whiff of the outrageous; if you’re in need of something legal that will quicken your pulse and reignite your senses . . . SAVE ITALY is for you.
Lacking Virtues
Steven LeConte has all the qualities that propel a young man to success. He is bright, handsome, charming . . . the list is long. Yet, at age 27, this scion of a prominent Connecticut family is teaching tennis in Paris. His journalistic aspirations have produced a few dazzling leads but not a single completed article. If he can take pride in one achievement, which he does not, it is the prodigious number of girls he has coaxed from the tennis club into his bed. A small inheritance from his aunt is nearly exhausted; he faces an uncertain future. As if to highlight his professional shortcomings, he has befriended his neighbor, Sophie Marx, the retired Paris bureau chief of the New York Times. In contrast to his own lack of output, her freelance articles appear at a dizzy pace in the Western world’s best newspapers and magazines. Sophie has just embarked on a new venture: to chronicle the life of France’s leading right-wing politician. At age 70, she is unable to do the legwork herself, and opts to involve Steven. It is an offer he can’t refuse, though he isn’t sure her plans meet even his own low moral standards. She wants him to go to the Riviera, where her subject’s daughter is spending the summer. And then? He is to follow the guiding light of his golden schwanz (her terminology) and see if he can get close to the father through 19-year-old Nicole. His initial hesitation is quickly overcome by a photograph of this ravishing beauty. How could he have said No anyway: his soul mate, Sophie, will become his protege and unlock the doors he has not been able to open on his own. Or such is his belief. He accepts, he succeeds – and falls deeply in love. Simultaneously, a dark remnant of the Cold War makes its debut. An unemployed KGB agent, East German Walter Claussen, has become an entrepreneur in the new free market created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. He alone controls a weapon of mass destruction that has slipped beneath the radar of American intelligence: after the Cuban missile crisis, several of the best minds in the Kremlin developed the means to sabotage American jetliners, should the US ever decide to mount a conventional war in Europe. In France, Claussen finds a group willing to buy his services for their own political and financial gain. American passenger jets undergo a series of deadly mishaps that seem unrelated. Frank Warner, the meticulous head of air crash investigations at the NTSB, is unable to find a common thread. The public experiences a collective fear of flying as never before. In a prelude to 9/11, the economy reels and the government – helped along by Claussen – becomes a blundering pawn of its own Iraq fixation. Warner is about to be fired and the wrong culprit is about to be incinerated in an eerie foreshadowing of the future. Then, at the eleventh hour, comes Steven’s chance discovery: the usual Arab suspects are not behind the diabolical attack on American aviation. Sophie is unable to convince American government and intelligence officials of the truth, so set in their thinking are they. Near despair, with the clock running out, she remembers Frank Warner, an acquaintance from a previous collaboration. Warner, who is convinced, takes word of Steven and Sophie’s discovery to a White House briefing, only to encounter war fever so virulent the facts fall on deaf ears. Warner must go to France – to hell with his job description. He and Steven, in a series of harrowing surveillance attempts, come face-to-face with Claussen, a professional killer. It is a confrontation needed to prove the truth with concrete visible evidence, a confrontation in which someone must die. Can Steven, underachiever cum laude, succeed at last? And if he does, can he convince Nicole that his love for her – initially based on deception – is real?
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