W.E.B. Griffin: The Hostage: A Presidential Agent Novel

U.S. Army Special Forces Major Charley Castillo works with the Department of Homeland Security, but more and more he is the man to whom the President turns when he needs an investigation done discreetly. And no situation demands discretion more than the one before them now. An American diplomat's wife is kidnapped in Argentina, and her husband murdered before her eyes.

Her children will be next, she is warned, if she doesn't tell them where her brother is-a brother, it turns out, who may know quite a bit about the burgeoning UN/Iraq oil-for-food scandal. There is an awful lot of money flying around, and an awful lot of hands reaching out to grab it-and some of those hands don't mind shedding as much blood as it takes.

"Is Griffin our Homer or Tacitus? Those military experts wrote about real soldiers - and what the world needs now is a real-life Charley Castillo, Griffin 's smart and efficient Department of Homeland Security agent, who works directly for the president on cases calling for more than routine skills. Castillo is an excellent alternative to the usual crew who make it to the headlines. Told in Griffin's trademark clean and compelling prose, studded with convincing insider details, Castillo's second outing starts with an American diplomat's murder in Argentina, the kidnapping of his wife, and threats to murder her children unless she reveals the whereabouts of her brother, a U.N. diplomat involved in the food-for-Iraqi-oil scandal. Castillo and his team of tough and shrewd experts are just the kind of believable people we want in these situations. And if it takes a novelist like Griffin, who has honed his skills and weapons in five previous series, to bring them to life, at least their real counterparts will have some fictional role models to live up to." Publishers Weekly