Little America

A suspense novel, a political thriller, a novel of discovery?Little America opens in Boston today and tells the story of a man in search of the truth about his father?s past, a past locked away in the C.I.A.?s code of silence.Terry Hooper?s father?Quaker-raised, Yale-educated, a sometime poet, now a retired (is he?) State Department veteran?was, in the 1950s, the C.I.A. station chief in Kurash, a small, newly constituted Middle Eastern country, a country caught in the grip of cold war politics, a country of beautiful and frightening Otherness (Arab women hidden behind their veils, scar-faced men on horseback with curved sabers, and streets that melted in the heat), 90 percent Muslim, lodged like a walnut between Syria and Iraq. Mack Hooper?s assignment: to win the confidence of the King of Kurash, an enigmatic, British-educated desert aristocrat to whom no one, not even the U.S. Ambassador, had been able to get close.In a narrative that moves backward and forward in time, Terry puts together the pieces of the puzzle that has haunted him. Is his father a good man? Was he a friend to the young King, or a diplomat-seducer sent to betray him?What Terry unearths about the American intrigues in Kurash, about promises made, about monies delivered, about betrayal, about courage, about ?us? and ?them, ? is brilliantly told in a novel that royally entertains while it evokes the conflict between private morality and public policy as it recaptures a time gone by, a time when Americans set out armed with ?good intentions, ? youthful desire for adventure, and the belief that they could save the world.From the Hardcover edition.