Salar Abdoh — Opium

Faber 2004 Paperback, 302pp. Opium is the story of a world-weary young American who has spent a substantial part of his thirty-something years in the Middle East. Formerly a low-level drug-runner along the Afghan/Iran border, he is now living in New York and keeping a low profile as a simple hotel clerk. But in the new age of mass terror Chase's past inevitably catches up to him, and he finds himself on a quest that thrusts him through three continents where he is confronted by drug dealers and assassins, Middle Eastern agents and embittered Western converts to Islam, as well as powerful Moslem Shiite clerics who run the clandestine arm of one of the most insidious security services ever assembled. Finding himself in this maze of intrigue, murder and double-deals, he sees no option but to play a lethal end-game in the heart of the Axis of Evil. Ex Library. Ex library; pages tanned, cover faded. (ISBN: 9780571221172). Good.