In a sun-splashed seaport on the Italian Riviera, a timid curio shop owner lives a double life. By day he sells dusty clocks and fifteenth-century weapons to tourists; by night he watches harbor traffic for an intelligence network and pockets the extra money his extravagant young wife demands.
When a nondescript courier summons him to a decaying villa, the shopkeeper learns that a rival network has sent a professional assassin to eliminate him. His own superiors offer protection—but only if he assists a smug, cold-blooded specialist in arranging a fatal ‘accident’ for the enemy agent.
Trapped between terror and a desperate need for security, the mild man is drawn into a nightmarish game of surveillance, deception, and violence along cliff-hanging roads and cobbled streets. As the plan unfolds, he knows he is in over his head—but does he have the nerve to refuse, and what will survival cost him?
Genre: Thriller
When a nondescript courier summons him to a decaying villa, the shopkeeper learns that a rival network has sent a professional assassin to eliminate him. His own superiors offer protection—but only if he assists a smug, cold-blooded specialist in arranging a fatal ‘accident’ for the enemy agent.
Trapped between terror and a desperate need for security, the mild man is drawn into a nightmarish game of surveillance, deception, and violence along cliff-hanging roads and cobbled streets. As the plan unfolds, he knows he is in over his head—but does he have the nerve to refuse, and what will survival cost him?
Genre: Thriller
Used availability for Robert Edmond Alter's Who Lives By the Sword