Charles McCarry 'remains the greatest espionage writer that America has produced,' wrote Otto Penzler in the New York Sun. He is the author most recently of the acclaimed thriller Christopher's Ghosts. He established an international reputation with the publication of the worldwide bestseller The Tears of Autumn in 1975 and is the author of nine other critically acclaimed novels. During the Cold War he was an intelligence officer operating under deep cover in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Shelley's Heart was first published in the United States in 1995, and never before available in Australia, this is the best novel ever written about Washington, D.C.
The first presidential election of the twenty-first century has been stolen, after having been bitterly contested by two men who are implacable political rivals but lifelong personal friends.
The riveting plot turns on the consequent battle for power between President Bedford Forrest 'Frosty 'Lockwood, the current occupant of the White House, and his supposedly defeated rival, former President Franklin Mallory. In this vast, captivating novel, Washington's high-powered world of enmity and friendship, and loyalty and cunning, is rendered with a unique, behind-the-scenes realism.
Shelley's Heart is so gripping and so striking, even frightening, in its plausibility, that McCarry's devoted readers may have difficulty bearing in mind that this tale of love, murder, betrayal, and life-or-death struggles for the political soul of America is a work of the imagination rather than an act of prophecy.
