The Prince of Bagram Prison

A riveting and intricate literary thriller from the author The New York Times Book Review says "speaks up in a voice that gets your attention like a rifle shot...clean, direct, and a little dangerous."

Army Intelligence reservist Kat Caldwell is teaching Arabic at a military college in Virginia when the order comes: Retired spy chief Dick Morrow needs to find a CIA informant who has slipped away from his handler in Spain and may be heading to Morocco.

Jamal was a prisoner whom Kat interrogated when she worked at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. Having gained his trust, she is now expected to discover his whereabouts on a treacherous trail that leads from Madrid's red-light district to the slums of Casablanca. But when a British Special Forces soldier is murdered just as he is about to give testimony on the death of a Bagram detainee, Kat begins to suspect that the real story here is one of the cover-up of U.S.-sanctioned torture. And when in desperation Jamal contacts his former CIA handler, he unwittingly rekindles a bitter struggle between the one man who can save him and the one who wants him dead.

"At the start of this intelligent spy thriller from the pseudonymous Carr (the author of Flashback and other novels under her real name, Jenny Siler), Kat Caldwell, a gutsy U.S. Army interrogator stationed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, takes charge of Jamal, a 15-year-old Moroccan boy caught in a jihadi sweep by a British Special Forces team. Having fled a degraded existence as an orphan in Morocco, the resourceful Jamal is no terrorist, Kat decides. After Jamal escapes custody, a team of American intelligence agents, working in both an official and unofficial capacity, go in search of him. Because of their earlier relationship, Kat is recruited to help locate the boy. When she realizes that something bad will happen if she finds him, she also goes on the run. Effortlessly shifting point of view and back and forth in time, Carr (An Accidental American) well deserves comparisons with the early John le Carr." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"It is a tribute to Alex Carr's considerable skill as a novelist that I hugely enjoyed 'The Prince of Bagram Prison' without having much of a clue as to what was going on. I knew that a lot of Americans are trying to find a Moroccan teenager named Jamal — some to save him, others to kill him — but I was never entirely sure why he was worth all the trouble. I kept reading anyway, quite happily, partly... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) in hopes of solving the mystery but mostly because Carr writes so well. Her novel supports a no-doubt-unoriginal theory of mine: that the best art — from 'Hamlet' to T.S. Eliot's 'Waste Land' to certain Bob Dylan lyrics — is deeply mysterious. This book may not be in that league, but it's one of the more interesting spy novels we're likely to see this year.

In the brief, agonizing opening scene, a young woman named Manar, a political prisoner, is giving birth in a Moroccan prison. She had been a college girl who protested against the country's dictatorship, but now she's been raped and tortured, and she prays that both she and her child will die.

They don't.

She is allowed to hold her son only once before he is taken from her. In the next scene, an American intelligence officer in Madrid questions the teenage Jamal about a missing terrorist named Bagheri. In a third scene, an American and an Englishman who had served together in Afghanistan meet in an English pub, and the American proceeds to murder the Englishman.

That's how the novel unfolds, in brief segments that do not immediately fit together. We suspect that Jamal was the infant who was born in the opening scene. In time, we realize that his story began at the prison on the U.S. Air Force base in Bagram, Afghanistan, when he, Bagheri and another man were brought in for questioning. The third man died — presumably under torture — and Bagheri escaped, perhaps with some assistance because he was a secret U.S. ally. Before getting out of prison, Jamal was befriended by the novel's most appealing character, Kit Caldwell, a soldier assigned to the prison because she spoke Arabic. In time, everyone is looking for Jamal because he seems to be the key to finding Bagheri, but this is one of those stories, like the movie 'The Usual Suspects,' where not much is really clear.

The novel moves effortlessly through different time periods. Several of the American intelligence officers — some CIA, some with shadowy connections to the Pentagon — served together in Vietnam. We see them in their youth, out to conquer the world, and now as burnout cases in their 60s who can't even track down one frightened teenager in Casablanca. Back in their salad days in Saigon, two of these men, Harry Comfort and Dick Morrow, were both in love with the gorgeous Susan. She married Morrow, but now, 30-odd years later, she's dying of cancer and the two men are enemies. Comfort had known Jamal before he retired to Hawaii, and now he sets off halfway around the world to join forces with Kit Caldwell in trying to save his life.

It's a complicated plot, and sometimes a murky one, but for a certain sort of reader that won't matter because of the quality of the writing. The American base in Afghanistan is 'hunkered in the footprint of some two thousand years of bloodshed and defeat.' A Moroccan locale is 'Not so much a city as an ugly sprawl of gray buildings fringing an even uglier port.' The eyes of a man in the sex trade are 'moist with greed.' Prisoners arrive at the Bagram prison 'blind and confused, shackled, shuffling forward. Naked as newborns, some wailing, others soiling themselves. Not men but cattle to the slaughter.'

Carr notes, of Jamal's entry into prostitution, 'On the spectrum of hunger, there is really only one moment that matters: the instant when one's loyalty shifts irrevocably from pride to survival.' And this, near the end of the book, about a character we've come to admire: 'Suddenly Harry understood, as he had not allowed himself to understand before, that things were going to end badly for him. He would die as he had so often feared he would, faithless and unredeemed, in some foreign city to which he had no claim.'

There are echoes of Graham Greene in this, and perhaps of Eric Ambler. But, most important, this is a writer with a distinct voice, a mature understanding of the world and exceptional narrative skill.

Alex Carr is, in fact, the pen name of Jenny Siler, and if you poke around on the Internet you can find Siler's unabashed personal history, which includes growing up rebellious in Missoula, Mont., dropping out of Columbia, knocking about the world, spending time as a waitress, then 10 years ago, at the age of 27, publishing her first novel. At this point, she has settled down with her husband and child in Lexington, Va., and produced several more books, including 'An Accidental American' (2007). This is the first of her novels I've read, and now I'd like to read them all."

Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers(at symbol)aol.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"American readers will gain insight into [Morocco's] oppressive Years of Lead.....[A] worthy addition to the spy genre." Library Journal

Carr pens a griping international thriller that explores the murky and dangerous relationship that exists between the CIA and its spies.

A riveting and intricate literary thriller from the author The New York Times Book Review says “speaks up in a voice that gets your attention like a rifle shot . . . clean, direct, and a little dangerous.”

Army Intelligence reservist Kat Caldwell is teaching Arabic at a military college in Virginia when the order comes: Retired spy chief Dick Morrow needs to find a CIA informant who has slipped away from his handler in Spain and may be heading to Morocco.

Jamal was a prisoner whom Kat interrogated when she worked at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. Having gained his trust, she is now expected to discover his whereabouts on a treacherous trail that leads from Madrids red-light district to the slums of Casablanca. But when a British Special Forces soldier is murdered just as he is about to give testimony on the death of a Bagram detainee, Kat begins to suspect that the real story here is one of the cover-up of U.S.-sanctioned torture. And when in desperation Jamal contacts his former CIA handler, he unwittingly rekindles a bitter struggle between the one man who can save him and the one who wants him dead.

Praise for Alex Carrs An Accidental American

“A swift, clean, nuanced thriller . . . deeply atmospheric.”

–The Seattle Times, Best Crime Novels of 2007

“Demonstrates fictions power to follow a shard of glass from the great explosion, to examine its bloodstained edges and explore the passion, foolishness, tragedy and flawed humanity traced by its journey toward discovery . . . In this novel, we learn how to decipher the language of war, its mismanaged intent and complex ramifications.”

–January Magazine, Best Books of 2007