Landing the most promising assignment of her career, Secret Service agent Holland Tylo is charged with protecting Senator Charles Westbourne, whose untimely death locks Holland in the vise of a conspiracy. 200,000 first printing. Rookie Secret Service agent Holland Tylo, daughter of the late Senator Beaumont, has a plum assignment in guarding Senator Westbourne during a meeting of Washington moguls at his estate. As she escorts the senator to his guest house for a late night tryst, he's suddenly shot dead, and her career with him. As the investigation progresses, more bodies fall while a professional assassin stalks Washington. Holland becomes both hunter and hunted as she fights to vindicate herself and sort out the good guys from the bad. Why is she a target? Is the president next? The Secret Service is caught in a crossfire of murder and political blackmail that threatens to destroy the administration and discredit the country's intelligence network. Author Shelby (Oasis of Dreams, Bantam, 1993) has a real winner with this fast-paced, highly engrossing thriller. Movie rights have already been sold. For most popular collections. -?Susan Clifford, Hughes Aircraft Co. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. Rookie Secret Service agent Holland Tylo is assigned to protect the charming, powerful Senator Charles Westbourne. Due to a procedural slipup, the senator and his mistress are brutally murdered, but not before he slips Tylo a diskette containing explosive material about a group of influential senators. Tylo is singled out to take the heat for the senator's murder and is cut loose from the service. But the killer comes after Tylo next. Alone and disgraced, she's unclear about who she can trust and who ordered the hit. She reaches out to her former mentor, and they soon discover that the killer is a rogue agent and that the senator's assassination was an inside job that reaches to the upper echelons of the Secret Service. Shelby delivers an edge-of-the-seat page-turner with a likable, cool-headed heroine. Tossing off at least a half-dozen distinctive characterizations in the space of a few paragraphs, he uses a minimalist style to great effect, paring down the prose while ratcheting up the tension. Joanne Wilkinson