Kirkus Reviews QR Code
STALKING-HORSE by Michael Delahaye

STALKING-HORSE

By

Pub Date: May 31st, 1988
Publisher: Scribners

An English Eurobureaucrat sets out on a spying mission to Sofia, Bulgaria, and an American detecto-technocrat on Cape Cod seeks the reasons for a crash over the Atlantic, unaware that they pull opposite ends of the same thread. From the author of On the Third Day (1984). Adrian Medcalf, a fusty functionary at NATO headquarters, is disagreeably surprised to find himself suddenly transferred to the bureaucratic Siberia of Central Monitoring, even though he has never made a false career move. But Central Monitoring is more than it seems to be. It is NATO's secret intelligence wing, and Medcalf's new assignment is to go to Bulgaria and find out from NATO's mole there why an unknown assassin missed what should have been a clear shot at the Prime Minister. At the same time, across the Atlantic, Matthew di Coiano is summoned by his employers, the National Transportation Safety Board, and sent to Chatham, Mass., to find out why all three engines of a transatlantic jet flamed out, sending the full airplane to the bottom of the sea. While Medcalf begins to learn rather more than his superiors meant for him to, di Coiano proves to be more diligent than the cynical and highly placed engineers of the aviation accident expected--and gradually, on two continents, these two begin to expose a dreadful plot to dismantle Yugoslavia and defang NATO. The prose is graceless, but the relentless and clever merging of the two plots is nonetheless quite absorbing.