The Zero Option

by Peter Tonkin

President Lincoln Hawk calls a Summit Meeting for Independence Day. His apparent reason is concern about social unrest. But there are those who wonder whether Hawk, ex-head of the CIA, is secretly more interested in meeting Premier Andropov, ex-head of the KGB . . . Meanwhile in North Korea, English reporter Samantha Webster stumbles across the wreck of Hawk's Sabre-jet, and a corpse bearing all Hawk's identification papers. Back in London, Samantha is arrested as soon as she tries to file her story and falls into the hands of Intelligence officer Derek Mills. He is custodian of a Cold War file detailing Stalin's programme to use every Soviet advance in surgery, psychology and spycraft to clone and replace a leading American. No one has ever discovered who was duplicated - until now . . . Samantha and Mills fly to Washington and are instantly hurled into a deadly race against time. They have until Independence Day to reveal who the President really is. Against an enemy who will stop at nothing to prevent them.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1997

About the author

Peter Tonkin's first novel, KILLER, was published in 1978. His work has included the acclaimed "Mariner" series that have been critically compared with the best of Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley and Hammond Innes.

More recently he has been working on a series of detective thrillers with an Elizabethan background. This series, "The Master of Defense", has been characterised as 'James Bond meets Sherlock Holmes meets William Shakespeare'. Each story is a classic 'whodunit' with all the clues presented to the reader exactly as they are presented to the hero, Tom Musgrave. The Kirkus Review described them as having 'Elizabethan detail, rousing action sequences, sound detection...everything a fan of historical mysteries could hope for."

Reviews

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you like books for 14 yr olds this is one

A good concept and story is destroyed by events so stupidly implausible that it's a dreadful mass of disjointed disappointing hyperbole. I reckon this was written when the author was 14 yrs old. Teenage exaggeration wrecked a good idea.