At forty, Steve Decker is one of America's most accomplished anti-terrorist operatives. Then a bungled covert operation kills twenty-three people in Rome and leaves Decker shouldering the blame. Embittered by the fiasco, he retires to the mountains of New Mexico and there meets an extraordinary woman named Beth Dwyer. She changes his life. Suddenly Decker has the very things he had lived so long without: a beautiful, brilliant woman he longs to marry and a future that could include children. But when a terrifying assault rips his world apart, Beth disappears - leaving an agonizing mystery in her wake. Who is this woman he loved so completely, almost to the point of obsession? Is she still alive? Was she captured by Decker's enemies or her own? Did she love him or use him - possibly as bait in some sinister plan? Reaching back into his shadowy past, Decker discovers that two malicious - and diametrically opposed - forces have been stalking him. To stay alive, Decker must use all his carefully honed skills, stay one step ahead of his murderous enemies, and pray that luck is on his side as he moves from hunter to hunted, from the deserts of Santa Fe to the streets of New York City. For Decker the stakes couldn't be higher: Beth's life, Beth's love, and, most of all, the truth.
Sally W. (Inkstand) from SIMI VALLEY, CA wrote on 7/14/2006...
Steve Decker, an American intelligence operative whose specialty is counter-terrorism, has devoted his life to the protection of his country, denying his emotions in order to survive in a deadly shadow world of violence and deception. Desperate to find a new direction for himself, Decker makes a pilgrimage to Santa Fe, where he settles and at last finds peace and, eventually, love. His fantasies about marriage and children with Beth Dwyer, a captivating enigmatic woman, are destroyed when four gunmen break into his house in the middle of the night. Decker thought that he is being stalked by enemies from his other life proves incorrect when Beth suddenly disappears after a bomb destroys her house. He is forced to realize that Beth was the target and not him. He realizes that she is not the person he thought her to be.