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. Robert Olen Butler 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 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. Mark Jacobs is a former foreign service officer who served as cultural attaché and information officer in Spain, Turkey, and several posts in Latin America. He has published three previous books and more than sixty short stories in a range of literary and commercial magazines. Chapter 1 An American woman of thirty-three, standing on a very old black iron balcony in a very old Spanish village at night, was supposed to get a serenade, not a tirade. Vicky Sorrell got a tirade. The moon was bright. Night-blooming jasmine on a trellis in the garden below shot up sticks of sweet fragrance in her direction. One street away, a restless dog yapped. It was late. Inside the Claustro Cobalto, everybody was asleep. And below her in the cobbled plaza, totally pissed, Wyatt Willis ragged on her in a voice bigger than he was. "Goddamn it, Vicky, this is your fault," he shouted up at her. He waited a moment, appreciating the echo of the shout he had loosed in the plaza. Then for some reason he repeated his accusation in Spanish. "Tú tienes la culpa." "Shut up, Wyatt. You'll wake up everybody in the neighborhood." She wondered why she was shouting, too, and why shouting felt so good. The Claustro Cobalto took up the north end of the plaza. Wyatt yelled something outrageous and insightful linking constant love with constant betrayal, and a light was switched on behind a shutter in a low, dark house in the middle of the south end. He went on for a couple of minutes, then stopped and struggled to come up with the Spanish equivalent. It was a paraphrase, but when he got there his string of accusations sounded even better in Spanish, which was known for its iron categories describing sin and guilt and individual responsibility. A second light went on inside the bedroom of a house on the little plaza's eastern edge. Vicky and Wyatt were making a scene. They were diplomats. Diplomats were not supposed to cut loose in public -- being discreet was one of the rules of the profession. Vicky was tired of obeying the rules of her profession. Wyatt wasn't tired of the rules, he was just drunk. And angrier at her than she had believed it was possible for him to be. In the year and a half that they had been together, she had never heard him shout before. She could not help feeling a sense of accomplishment at being the cause of his explosion. "Victoria Sorrell," he hollered, "You tricked me! You made me come here!" "Here" was a bright white town in a cove on the western nub of the Costa de la Luz. Sor Epi was heavy with history. According to legend, for a brief period at the end of the fifteenth century, paving stones bled in the village, gulls became doves, cooking pots sang, horses grew wings, and the hands of women making love with stone-hearted men turned into flames. But Vicky was not in the mood to carry the load of grief Wyatt was trying to unload on her. "You're drunk." She pointed out the obvious to him, more loudly than was strictly necessary, to get his attention. "You'll say anything as long as