The Parsifal Mosaic by Robert Ludlum (1982)

The Parsifal Mosaic
by Robert Ludlum
Publisher:  Random House
Copyright:  1982
Book Club Edition

On a dark night along a deserted beach on Spain's Costa Brava, a blond woman races across the sand, the sounds of the crashing surf and gunfire intermingling.  She is hit repeatedly, and sprawls on the edge of the coastal road, while high above, crouched in shadows, her lover watches the terrible violence below.  He satisfies himself that the woman is dead, and disappears into the night.

Who is this woman?  Why was she killed and, above all, why does Michael Havelock, a veteran field agent for a clandestine branch of the U.S. State Department, who deeply loves her, witness the killing with resignation and even relief?  Why, especially, since three months later he sees the same woman rushing across a crowded platform in Rome's central train station?

These are the questions that haunt The Parsifal Mosaic, a novel in which Robert Ludlum, author of such number one best sellers as The Holcroft Covenant, The Matarese Circle and The Bourne Identity, once again masterfully weaves a riveting tale of espionage and intrigue at the highest -- and lowest -- levels of international deception.  At the center of the action is Michael Havelock -- born Mikhail Havlicek in the Czech village of Lidice, and smuggled out of Prague and into America at the age of twelve.  By the time he is twenty-eight Havelock has earned a Ph.D. from Princeton and become the protege of Anton Matthais, a fellow Czech and brilliant geopolitical thinker who has since become the most highly regarded Secretary of State in U.S. history.  Matthias, who is no less than a surrogate father to Michael, long ago understood the furies that propelled his graduate student to forgo an academic career for that of a brutally effective deep-cover agent, specializing in espionage and defection.

But after sixteen years the tensions of underground service have exhausted Havelock.  When he meets Jenna Karas, a Czech national assigned to him in Prague, he feels his life is about to change.  Soon they are deeply in love, and Havelock feels the torments of his early life fading.

Until a devastating cipher arrives from Washington -- for his eyes only.  It has been established beyond doubt that Jenna Karas is a double agent, a Soviet officer in the dreaded Voennaya, an elite corps of KGB fanatics committed to international terrorism.  Her guilt is confirmed, and the execution takes place on the isolated beach at Costa Brava, with Havelock in grim attendance.  This is the first of the terrible deceptions Havelock must endure -- and it threatens to tear him apart.

Months later, resigned from the government service, he learns the truth about that night.  Thus begins his odyssey, a desperate search for liars that takes him from a dingy and violent Italian seaport to the nerve centers of Soviet and American power.  From Amsterdam, Rome, Athens and Paris to New York City, to a small mysterious island off the coast of Georgia where he learns an appalling truth so shocking that governments everywhere would tremble at the thought of it; and lastly, to a cabin in the Shenandoah Valley where he discovers the final, irrevocable deceit, the ultimate lie in a string of lies that has gripped not only the lives of Michael and Jenna but all those around them.  It is a deceit that, if revealed, threatens to plunge the world into an unthinkable war.  From then pn, all is a race to preserve the sanity of a world perched on the very edge of madness.

The Parsifal Mosaic is without a doubt the fastest-paced, most complex and deeply satisfying novel Robert Ludlum has yet produced.  It confirms his storytelling genius and illustrates once again why he is among America's most popular novelists.

Condition:  Used.  Hardcover.  Dust cover is lightly discolored and shows shelf wear, edge creases and scuffing. Pages are tanning from age.  Previous owner's "Library Of" stamp is on the front endpaper.

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