It is early summer of 2009, an uneasy time in the American capital. Washington is tense over a showdown between the United States and the new ruler of Libya. Laura Chapman is a U.S. Secret Service agent assigned to the White House. She is quirky, solitary, and frequently unorthodox. She is sexy and fit, adept with a pistol as well as with a hundred-pound Everlast bag. But she is also a brilliant intelligence analyst. That’s why she has been assigned to the Presidential Protection Detail for the past eleven years. The CIA assigns Laura to a case that borders on the unthinkable: an assassination plot against the new president. Shockingly, the trigger man will be a member of the United States Secret Service. Since the CIA knows that the assassin is male, Laura is not a suspect. The odds are heavily against her locating an alleged assassin within the Service, and even more heavily against her surviving the assignment. Beyond that, problems abound: First, because of her age and gender, members of the Service as well as agents in the CIA and FBI are waiting for her to fail. Second, Laura’s personal life is in disarray, and her secret drinking is about to get out of hand. Third, the hit is scheduled to take place on July 4, 2009, in the Oval Office. Less than two weeks from now. As her investigation proceeds, Laura cannot shake the suspicion that there are things she has not been told, that she is being set up. . . . In her increasingly frequent moments of paranoia, she wonders: Am I going to be the new Lee Harvey Oswald? Described by the publisher as " 24 meets Alias meets The Day of the Jackal ," this tightly plotted novel is not, in fact, a mere hodgepodge of familiar themes. Yes, it features a female intelligence agent assigned to ferret out a would-be presidential assassin who may be lurking in the ranks of the Secret Service. But Laura Chapman isn't a clone of Alias ' Sydney Bristow; the story bears only the slightest resemblance to Day of the Jackal; and there is no 24 -like episodic structure (or single-day story, either, for that matter). Hynd, whose previous efforts have mixed horror and crime ( A Room for the Dead, 1994), is a solid, dependable writer with enough literary flair to move him up a few notches above the Ludlums and Clancys of the world. With the right kind of word of mouth--something beyond facile comparisons to TV shows--this high-octane thriller with just enough political edge should find the eager audience it deserves. David Pitt Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “ The Enemy Within is loaded with fascinating details about how federal-level investigations can waste time and lives. . . . A muscular story with great bones.”— USA Today “ The Enemy Within is a great story, written intelligently and introducing a very sympathetic main character.”— The Dallas Morning News “[A] high-octane thriller.” —Booklist Noel Hynd has over four million books in print throughout the world. He lives in Culver City, California. Chapter One Arlington, Virginia December 20, 2009; 8:30 a.m. It is cold on December mornings when the wind howls in from the Potomac and cuts icily across the National Cemetery. It is colder still when a young woman is being buried. The coffin was above an open, patient grave, draped with the fifty-star flag of the United States. A young military chaplain named Sullivan presided. He was already frozen. It was twenty degrees. It felt colder. Sullivan glanced at his watch. Eight thirty a.m. He eyed the one man and one woman in attendance. There was also an honor guard of four soldiers, one from each branch of the armed forces. The woman in the coffin had paid a terrible price to have them there. The chaplain gave a nod, not to the soldiers but to the civilian witnesses. "Let us begin," he said softly. As if on cue, a light snow began to fall. Two ironies simultaneously. The deceased had hated the cold. And this was not a beginning. It was an ending. Sullivan spoke softly, rapidly muttering a prayer that no one could hear because of the harsh wind. Words on the icy air, brief and appropriate, but impersonal. The snow thickened. At a few minutes before nine, the casket descended into the earth. The honor guard fired final salutes, rifles crackling toward an iron gray sky. The service was over. With a nod, the chaplain dismissed the soldiers. The man and the woman who had been observers looked at each other, each silently connecting to a sadness that was difficult to describe. The man walked with a severe limp. It was not that there was nothing to say. It was that it had all been said already. Their thoughts, however, could have filled volumes, not the least of them being that cemeteries are filled with memories and spirits. Neither was any stranger to these. The woman reflected on a quote from John F. Kennedy. "Life is unfair." It was. And Kennedy, murdered while in office, was buried only a hun