Sean Eagan

Jay Hawk Sean Eagan

If you liked ARGO, the Oscar-winning best picture of the year, you'll like Jay Hawk: The Assassin's Lover. The real-life character played by Ben Affleck, Tony Mendez, tutored the author at CIA HQ to refine this extensively researched story of agonizing personal choices, individual responsibility and unintended consequences. Framed against real world geopolitical threats-including Al Quds commandos, the first Iranian warships entering the Mediterranean, via the Suez Canal, the assassination of Iran's nuclear physicists and the Fire and Stuxnet viruses, Jay Hawk is a story as current as tomorrow's headlines. Britt Jaeger, fleeing an abusive marriage, suffers a terrifying assault on her bus ride from Kansas to New York, where she is embroiled in a cauldron of lies, violence, intrigue and sex. With only one suitcase and money running out, she lands an entry-level Wall Street job where the charismatic, CEO Mackenzie Collingwood, introduces her to "all the right people." The right people become the wrong people when Britt is mistaken for the firm's most important client, Colonel Rebekah Chayat, a former Mossad assassin, and is kidnapped in a conspiracy that could change the world's balance of power. It's left to rivals in a love triangle to try to save her? Or will one decide, if I can't have her, no one can. Tight, plausible connections move the conflict from New York to London, Tel Aviv, Tehran and Athens, even a private Caribbean island owned by seven of the richest women in the world, in ways that are unnervingly creepy and very tense.