The negotiator - Frederick Forsyth

A young university student is on a training run near Oxford. As he pounds along the deserted country track on Shotover Plain, the early morning stillness is shattered in a single explosive moment – and in that moment a deadly game begins.

The recently elected, idealistic American President John Cormack is about to sign the most sweeping US-Soviet disarmament treaty ever envisaged. But there are others who believe that America can only survive the world shortage of oil in the 1990s by gaining control of one of the richest of the energy-rich Middle-Eastern states. Cormack himself would never countenance such a move, but suppose he were somehow ‘disabled’, forced to hand over to the hawkish Vice-President Michael Odell? And suppose the kidnapping of a young Oxford student were but the first brutal step in an ever more brutal plot to engineer the psychological destruction of the President…? Only one man would stand in the way of such a scheme: Quinn is the Negotiator, the man chosen to bargain for the life of the kidnap victim.

From the incident centre of one of the biggest police search operations ever mounted in the UK, to the White House situation room where a treacherous insider monitors the President’s demise, to the shadowed corridors of the Kremlin, The Negotiator unfolds with the spellbinding suspense, unceasing surprise and riveting detail that are the hallmarks of the world’s greatest master of international intrigue. And in Quinn, the Negotiator, hounded by past killings and past treachery, who must strive for peace in the face of his own more violent instincts, Frederick Forsyth has created his most unusual and compelling hero yet.