Blue Hearts: A Novel
by By Lehrer, Jim
Category: Fiction , Literary

You can never really retire from the Agency. Charles Avenue Henderson, who now runs a pricey bed-and-breakfast in West Virginia and spends his days hiking trails, not following them, is about to be reminded of that salient fact more vividly than he'd like.All he really wants is a little recognition for his covert work on the Kennedy assassination with his cold-war buddy Bruce Conn Clark, a powerful Washington consultant and distinguished elder statesman. But it's not so simple, as he learns one morning when his hotel room in D.C. is bombed just as he's going out to buy the paper. In fact, Charlie's quiet, uncomplicated life turns terrifying faster than he could have imagined; the next day someone severs the brake line in his car. Forced to scrape the rust off spook skills he hasn't used in years, he begins to investigate and finds that all the signs point to Bruce Conn Clark. But why would the former secretary of state want Charlie dead?As the investigation deepens and the stakes grow higher, Bruce and Charlie discover that while decades-old promises and secrets could destroy them, they might also give them back their youth. The ensuing game of spy versus spy may be their toughest yet.Blue Hearts is filled with characters from real life, such as James Jesus Angleton, John McCone, and Alexander Gannady Petrov, and other spies and public figures both real and imagined. It's also replete with Washington gossip and tidbits that only a writer with sources inside Langley could provide. Blue Hearts is as thrilling a ride through the assassination conspiracies, cold-war battles, and covert operations of the last thirty years as any spy-novel aficionado could hope to find.