Friday, April 15, 2016

What is Christopher Morgan Jones reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Christopher Morgan Jones, author of The Searcher.

His entry begins:
Postwar by Tony Judt

I’ve been reading this for a while; it must be half a million words and I’m in awe of all of them. It’s about Europe after World War II: the peace, the Marshall Plan, the reconstruction, the partition of Germany, the beginnings of the Cold War, the Sovietisation of Eastern Europe, Western Europe’s groping towards some kind of union. Tony Judt was an English historian, a formidable intellectual and a great writer who can take even the driest-looking material - Franco-German steel union? - and make it sing. Somehow he manages to hold the whole continent in his head over decades and answers dozens of questions that...[read on]
About The Searcher, from the publisher:
An unlikely hero dives into the chaotic madness of Russia and Georgia’s deadly covert conflict, in this rapid-fire tale of corporate espionage gone awry

The acclaimed author of The Silent Oligarch and The Jackal’s Share, Christopher Morgan Jones returns to a murky world where corporate spies and government agents battle far from the public eye. Focusing on Georgia, a mountainous republic threatened by Russia to the north, Morgan Jones carries readers deep into an ancient land of chilling compromises and foolhardy valor.

Morgan Jones’s novels center on a unique London corporate espionage firm spearheaded by Ike Hammer and Ben Webster, which follows criminal money anywhere it leads: be it Moscow or Dubai, Monaco or Kazakhstan, a bureaucrat’s pockets or a politician’s bank account. While Webster was the star of the earlier novels—investigating Russian businessmen and KGB operatives in The Silent Oligarch, Persian billionaires and Tehran terrorists in The Jackal’s Share—in The Searcher the focus shifts provocatively to Hammer, making this a perfect starting point for old fans and new readers alike.

Journeying to Georgia for the funeral of a friend, a journalist who inexplicably committed suicide after publishing the exposé of a lifetime, Webster mysteriously disappears. As the country rumbles ominously with civil strife and Russian aggression, Hammer rushes to Tbilisi to track down his missing friend. Once in Georgia, Hammer is forced to confront the country’s tragic chaos: civilians bombed either by cruel Russian spies or by deceitful Georgian soldiers; violent riots instigated by amoral oligarchs or government saboteurs; double and even triple agents who play all sides against each other at once. Threatened by enemies he cannot name and “friends” he cannot trust, Hammer rushes north—into the lawless mountains bordering Russia itself—to discover the true fate of his friend and Georgia’s future.
Visit Chris Morgan Jones's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Searcher.

Writers Read: Christopher Morgan Jones.

--Marshal Zeringue