Topol might be the most riveting spy-adventure writer in America today. Dark Ambition is his second novel, and it continues the pacing and excitement of Spy Dance, his first novel (which you should read immediately if you enjoy Dark Ambition).

Dark Ambition unveils the perplexing murder of an indiscreet Secretary of State, combining powerful maneuverings in Washington, tangled detective work, and underhanded court dealings. Various characters are linked to the murder, from corrupt Chinese government officials who detested the Secretary of State for his support of Taiwan's weapons' buildup, to the most intimate of the presidential Oval Office advisors.

The masterful plot moves seamlessly between Washington, China, Zurich, London, and New York, while at the novel's core is the American process of honest, courageous people battling bureaucracy to ascertain the truth. I found myself solidly immersed in Topol's multi-faceted conspiracy and am eagerly anticipating his next work.

The State Department's Office of Diplomatic Security has two experienced agents guarding Secretary of State Robert Winthrop. After his wife Ann leaves, only gardener Clyde Gillis remains on the property until George Nesbitt arrives for his appointment. George is actually a woman who kills America's top diplomat before leaving for her home in Connecticut. Clyde finds the body, but fears what happened to his father in Mississippi will happen to him and flees the scene.

With strong circumstantial evidence, the FBI quickly concludes that Clyde killed Robert though no one can locate Nesbitt. Justice Department Attorney Ben Hartwell leads the prosecution team but also wants to insure that the government does not use Clyde as a convenient scapegoat just in case the man is innocent. Anne believes Clyde is innocent and hires her friend lawyer Jennifer Moore to defend him. Jennifer and Ben have a history, but both will do the right thing though that is not safe as this simple robbery gone bad case has more of an international flavor than either lawyer realizes.

Legal procedural fans will relish this strong novel starring a delightful duo, but the female assassin steals the plot. DARK AMBITION never slows down as the case against Clyde seems airtight and he changes his innocent attitude after a visit from the Connecticut killer. Readers will question more so than even Ben does how a vanished Nesbitt fails to place doubts on the case and why no one wonders why the missing visitor left no fingerprints in Winthrop's home. Still readers will follow the lead of the Attorney General's Office and not object because Allan Topal provides quite a thriller.

Harriet Klausner

I have never started a book and been unable to finish it, especially an espionage novel that boasts to be in the same tradition of Ken Follett and Robert Ludlum. Unfortunately, there is always a first for everything. Spy Dance has an interesting plot that has the potential to be good, but the writing is so poor that I couldn't even finish half of the novel. The dialogue is cheesy and the characters are one-dimensional. You never get to really know the David, Daphna, Sagit, or Madame Blanc and they certainly aren't believable.
I can't even describe how bad this book is and can't believe it was published... Too bad, because as I said, it could be an intersting story.

This is a superb first novel about a military coup in Saudi Arabia, a French oil company run by a megalomaniac woman determined to use the coup to seize control of Saudi oil away from the Americans and then use it to raise the price of oil and therefore her company's profits, an American CIA agent on the run and hiding in an Israeli Kibbutz and the efforts of Mossad and the American agent to sort everything out.

The novel starts with the very persuasive premise that the American rejection of the threat to the Shah was a major factor in his being replaced by Khomeini. Topol asserts that Jimmy Carter's Washington analysts grossly underestimated how radical and how anti-American Khomeini was and therefore were far too willing to have the Shah fall. Topol's bias is clearly that modernizing military are far preferable to reactionary religious dictatorship as a solution to a corrupt and decaying regime.

Topol then paints a very depressing (and largely accurate) portrait of a corrupt Saudi monarchy which maintains power through repression and which is not dramatically better than the Taliban in its treatment of women in public rights and legal rights. No one who has been excusing the Saudis' behavior toward their own population and toward the United States and Israel will feel comfortable with this section of the book.

Topol postulates that the Saudi system hangs between a reactionary terrorist faction that is growing in strength as the public despairs of declining standards of living and rising repression and a military coup by American trained Saudis who are modernizers and democratizers and who loath both the current system of corruption and the reactionary religious terrorists.

This is both an enjoyable book and a useful book in suggesting new thoughts about a country that is important but may be on the edge of substantial change.

Watching a Saudi cleric smile and laugh as bin Laden reported gleefully on the killing of Americans and listening to that Saudi cleric reassure bin Laden that there were many supporters of anti-American terrorism in Saudi Arabia ("my mother's phone kept ringing all day with congratulations" was a direct quote from the Saudi visitor) is a useful prelude for reading this novel and thinking about its implications.

Spy Dance was a great read on the beach in Puerta Vallarta, even if some aspects that were hard to swallow. Nitpicking, Stafford Turner, the CIA Director under President Carter, was Stansfield Turner. More important, it is well-nigh impossible to accept the time frame. We are asked to believe that Greg/David, our former CIA hero, was station chief in Teheran under Carter and helped get the Shah out of Iran in January 1979, and that he is now operating/acting at least 26 years later. Why at least 26 years
later? Because you can't invent a president, as the author does, without dating him after the incumbent, and that has to be 2005 at least. Do the math. Then ask yourself the probable minimum age for a station chief in Teheran in the midst of a crisis. Is it probable that Greg/David was less than 35. Give him that age or even a bit less and 26 years later he has to be 61 or close to it. It's impossible to believe that. Furthermore, I have no problem believing that Greg/David knew Farsi and Arabic, but
both Hebrew and Russian as well. It would be interesting to know how he got himself established in Russia, or was it the Soviet Union. Then, too, why does the Mossad pick him up for the Kouresh murder? On the other hand, why quibble with a book that keeps one turning pages. Oh! As for twofor, I had in mind the Mossad woman who is at first suspicious and then works with him.