Just how far will a journalist go to get a story? What happens when he crosses the line from observer to newsmaker? Those questions are at the heart of this smart thriller, in which reporter and narrator Eric Truell's every action forces him into a moral dilemma involving the conflict between the private and the public good. Beginning with the funeral of respected New York Mirror reporter Arthur Bowman, Truell tells the story behind Bowman's death, which is also the story of how Truell started painting himself into an ethical corner. A hostage situation in a French restaurant leads Truell to contact a CIA source, who hooks him up with disaffected agent Rupert Cohen. Wanting to parlay his government experience into a reporter's job, Cohen feeds Truell secrets, and the moral stakes keep rising. Truell finds himself in the thick of the downfall of a French government, a senator's forced withdrawal from the U.S. presidential race, and a laboratory in Beijing where a deadly new biological weapon is being developed. Truell's actions become more and more catalytic, and less and less objective. Using a cleverly detailed plot, Ignatius (Agents of Innocence) makes it very clear that journalists are in truth newsmakers, whether they know it or not, and that their high-minded claims of objectivity blind them to their complicity in the events they report. Thanks to great writing and an all-too-human protagonist, the preaching is kept to a minimum, but the sermon‘about good journalism and bad, truth and lies‘is there in bold letters. You can easily understand why Paramount Pictures and Tom Cruise scooped up this thriller for more than a million dollars. Just say a prayer that they don't pave over the moral quagmire with easy answers. Major ad/promo; simulataneous Random House audio; author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Trumpeted as a new genre category‘the news thriller‘this new novel from Washington Post editor Ignatius concerns a reporter drawn into an international conspiracy through his CIA ties. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Reporter Eric Truell is a young, rising star at the influential but financially shaky New York Mirror. He's talented but also lucky, and luck and pluck get him page-one stories written from Beirut and Paris and assignment to the Mirror's Washington bureau. There he picks up the thread of a bitter, covert economic war being waged by the U.S. and France, and the hint that the dean of Washington's press corps, Mirror-man Arthur Bowman, is shilling for the French--a firing offense detailed in the paper's style manual. Much of Truell's information is supplied by a bizarre CIA agent, and soon enough he is in as deep as Bowman. The intrigue is played out against the background of the paper's struggle to survive; the cultures of Washington, the CIA, journalism at center stage, and global economic interests; and Truell's floundering relationship with Newsweek pundit and talk-show star Annie Baron. The intrigue is compelling and plausible, the subtexts are beautifully crafted, and the characters are vividly rendered. In fact, Ignatius, an editor at the Washington Post, has produced a tremendously satisfying entertainment that richly deserves the best-seller status sure to come: Tom Cruise is set to star in the film treatment. --Thomas Gaughan

In a break from the Middle East focus of his first three thrillers (The Bank of Fear, 1995, etc.), Ignatius forces the hero of this tense new novel to walk a tightrope between digging up foreign-intrigue stories for his paper and doing increasingly dangerous chores for the CIA. It all begins innocently enough, when Rupert Cohen, an Agency loose cannon who wants to trade his cloak and dagger for a reporter's notebook, tells the New York Mirror's Paris bureau chief, Eric Truell, that there's no reason why the paper shouldn't hire an ex-spy--after all, they've already got one working on their foreign desk: legendary chief diplomatic correspondent Arthur Bowman, a man who's been taking payoffs from the French government for years. Truell, still aglow with success after breaking a Cohen-enriched story that brought down the French defense minister, goes to his editor, Ed Weiss, with Cohen's bombshell, but Weiss refuses to believe such a story about Bowman, and Truell isn't gutsy enough to press it. Instead he takes it to somebody who'll take him seriously: Tom Rubino, head of the CIA's European division. Meantime, Cohen, still looking for his big break, continues to feed Truell inside stuff, focusing on biological warfare weapons in China, and Bowman and Truell head uneasily for Beijing. By now Bowman knows that Truell suspects his French connection, but he doesn't know that Rubino has asked Truell to pass a Chinese contact a message that'll help him escape--and, in the process, endanger both the reporters' lives. Ignatius doesn't stint on tradecraft details, but puts his own perverse spin on them (Truell's crash course on CIA procedure is hilarious), and keeps the focus right where it belongs: on Truell's frantic dance to bridge the gap between his Agency errands and his eroding journalistic ethics. Brilliantly twisty while you're reading it, though you may find yourself scratching your head when it's over. (Author tour)