A spy thriller set along the geopolitical fault lines of South Asia, from an author who “knows how to keep things zipping along and dial up tension” (Kirkus Reviews).
Colonel Imtiaz Afridi, India’s legendary spymaster, has zeroed in on a new threat emanating from the borderlands over which he keeps watch from his surveillance center in the Himalayan foothills. An elusive warlord—faceless, nameless, and known only by his nom de guerre, Guldaar—meaning leopard in Urdu—has built an illicit empire throughout the lands that Alexander the Great once conquered, based on extortion, money laundering, corruption, and murder.
His reach extends across national boundaries, and with support from elements in the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, he plays tribal factions and sovereign nations off each other and threatens to destabilize the entire, nuclear-armed region.
Seizing on Guldaar’s one vulnerability, Afridi begins working with a female agent to lay a trap. Meanwhile, when an American journalist reporting from Pakistan comes too close to the inner workings of Guldaar’s empire, he is kidnapped by the Taliban and traded to the warlord as a hostage. As Afridi closes in, the American will become a critical bargaining chip in Guldaar’s ruthless battle for survival.
“Alter’s vibrant depictions of Pakistan and India serve well to draw the reader into the intrigue.” —Publishers Weekly
Genre: Thriller
Colonel Imtiaz Afridi, India’s legendary spymaster, has zeroed in on a new threat emanating from the borderlands over which he keeps watch from his surveillance center in the Himalayan foothills. An elusive warlord—faceless, nameless, and known only by his nom de guerre, Guldaar—meaning leopard in Urdu—has built an illicit empire throughout the lands that Alexander the Great once conquered, based on extortion, money laundering, corruption, and murder.
His reach extends across national boundaries, and with support from elements in the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, he plays tribal factions and sovereign nations off each other and threatens to destabilize the entire, nuclear-armed region.
Seizing on Guldaar’s one vulnerability, Afridi begins working with a female agent to lay a trap. Meanwhile, when an American journalist reporting from Pakistan comes too close to the inner workings of Guldaar’s empire, he is kidnapped by the Taliban and traded to the warlord as a hostage. As Afridi closes in, the American will become a critical bargaining chip in Guldaar’s ruthless battle for survival.
“Alter’s vibrant depictions of Pakistan and India serve well to draw the reader into the intrigue.” —Publishers Weekly
Genre: Thriller
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Used availability for Stephen Alter's The Dalliance of Leopards