Take a clean-cut middle-aged pilot--well, maybe he's a little further into the penumbra of the law that he wants you to think; charter him into Cyprus with a planeload of soidisant champagne that suddenly turns into far more lethal cargo; mix him up with a bankrupt hotel chain and a canny old smuggler of antiquities, and you have only the opening flourishes of this suave fasten-your-seatbelt thriller.
When Roy Case lands in Nicosia, he wants only to greet his partner, Ken Cavitt, fresh from a smuggling rap in a grim Israeli jail, and deliver to Beirut the twelve case of Kroeger Royale '66 for a gala hotel opening. Instead he is immediately plucked up and dangled over a perfect microcosm of the entire Eastern Mediterranean caldron. A small arsenal for terrorist, bankruptcy, blackmail, murder, espionage, Greco-Turkish and Arab-Israeli mayhem, and incongruously, the long-lost crusader sword of Richard Coeur de Lion all add deadly nightshade seasoning. Also playing key roles are the enigmatic daughter of a sinister German antiquarian and a striving and attractive museum scout for New York.
