Synopses & Reviews
HONOR YOUR WIFE.
SERVE YOUR COUNTRY.
CONCEAL THE TRUTH.Do you ever really know the person you married?
Claire Heller Chapman, a Harvard Law School professor and a high-powered attorney, has just attained a national reputation for her work on several high-profile cases. Her second husband, Tom Chapman, is a successful moneymanager who adores Claire and her six-year-old daughter. They live in a beautiful house and lead a glamorous and happy life.
Then a random burglary turns their world upside down. A routine police investigation reveals that Tom is not who he says he is. He never attended the college he said he did. He once had a different name. He once was, Claire learns, a secret operative for the U.S. government. When he is suddenly arrested and put on trial for a crime he insists he didn't commit -- an unspeakable atrocity carried out thirteen years ago -- she puts her reputation on the line to defend him. The case is tried in a top-secret court-martial conducted by the Pentagon, in which all the evidence is classified, and the rules are unlike any Claire has ever known.
She struggles to work within the system, passionately trying to believe in Tom's innocence, even as all the evidence seems to indicate that her husband is a cold-blooded murderer.
MURDER IN THE LINE OF DUTY
A MARRIAGE IN THE LINE OF FIREA Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club
About the Author
Joseph Finder was born in Chicago in 1958 and spent his early childhood in Afghanistan and the Philippines. He was educated at Yale College and the Harvard Russian Research Center. An expert on the CIA and international politics, he has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post and he taught at Harvard. His first novel, The Moscow Club, published to great acclaim in thirty countries, predicted the coup that ended the Soviet Union. Extraordinary Powers, his second novel, anticipated by several months the explosive revelation of a mole high in the ranks of the CIA. His most recent novel with Morrow, The Zero Hour, sold before publication to twenty foreign countries, and a motion picture is in production with Twentieth Century Fox. Finder lives in Boston with his wife and daughter.