With explosive tension and masterful suspense, A Handful of Kings is a page-turning thriller about what really happens in the world of espionage, by an insider who has lived it.
American diplomat Vicky Sorrell learns the hard way that all is fair in love -- and espionage. A Handful of Kings, the latest novel by prolific author and former foreign service officer Mark Jacobs, follows Vicky's fast-paced tour of duty -- one where she must decide who the bad guys are, who is lying, and who just might be telling the dangerous truth.
Vicky is changing her life. She is leaving the foreign service and her lover at the same time. But before she departs the U.S. embassy in Madrid for home, a well-known American writer shows up with a strange request. Vicky knows that what the writer wants from her is not necessarily what he is asking. But curiosity leads her to play along, and she is quickly drawn into the murky underground of terrorists and spies into which the writer himself has been reluctantly led. The track she takes is full of wrong turns. And at the end of the tunnel, it's not light she sees but an unspeakable threat to people she loves.
Recalling Graham Greene in The Comedians, Jacobs weaves an engrossing story that takes place over three continents and illuminates the unexpected ways people betray and defend one another and, ultimately, how they learn to love
American diplomat Vicky Sorrell learns the hard way that all is fair in love -- and espionage. A Handful of Kings, the latest novel by prolific author and former foreign service officer Mark Jacobs, follows Vicky's fast-paced tour of duty -- one where she must decide who the bad guys are, who is lying, and who just might be telling the dangerous truth.
Vicky is changing her life. She is leaving the foreign service and her lover at the same time. But before she departs the U.S. embassy in Madrid for home, a well-known American writer shows up with a strange request. Vicky knows that what the writer wants from her is not necessarily what he is asking. But curiosity leads her to play along, and she is quickly drawn into the murky underground of terrorists and spies into which the writer himself has been reluctantly led. The track she takes is full of wrong turns. And at the end of the tunnel, it's not light she sees but an unspeakable threat to people she loves.
Recalling Graham Greene in The Comedians, Jacobs weaves an engrossing story that takes place over three continents and illuminates the unexpected ways people betray and defend one another and, ultimately, how they learn to love
In praise of A Handful of Kings.
If John le Carré were an American, his name would be Mark Jacobs.”
— Kinky Friedman
No writer is as brilliant as Mark Jacobs at exploring the rich fictional realm of the American abroad. He blends the literary traditions of Henry James and Graham Greene in work that is truly his own and truly wonderful. A Handful of Kings is his best book yet."
— Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction
Mark Jacobs's A Handful of Kings was published by Simon and Schuster in 2004. It is a novel of terrorism and diplomacy, and peopled by an impressively multifarious cast. Jacobs's prose can stun, and his characters' meditations on how best they might serve their cause or country are filled with insight of vital newness and urgency. It is certainly a novel of Now, but it has a psychological acuity and ceaseless insistence upon dowsing the complications of character and motive. This helps propel it to atmospheres of sophistication miles above that of typical thrillers... With this novel, Mark Jacobs has written neither Greene-like prophecy nor submitted one of le Carré's artful diagnostic analyses of the psychic health of espionage's hidden realms. He has written a novel rich with feeling for the mysterious world his characters inhabit, and he has put them, and us, through hell in a very small space. The novel is thrilling not for its action or some vestigial obedience to its supposed genre, but for its moments of human recognition and harrowing yet still human surprise."
— Tom Bissell in The Believer