The Devil's Juggler - Softcover

Smith, Murray

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140173471 ISBN 13: 9780140173475

Publisher: Pocket, 1994

Synopsis

While a tough New York cop investigates a young woman's drug overdose, an Irish judge is blackmailed into helping the IRA, and the British Secret Intelligence Service attempts to plant an informer inside Colombia's most ruthless drug cartel. A first novel. 50,000 first printing. $30,000 ad/promo.

About this title

From AudioFile

"David McCallum does an excellent job narrating, but the story is cut in the abridgment and is very difficult to follow." M.B.K. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Kirkus Reviews

First novel about an attempt by British Intelligence to bring down Colombian druglord Pablo Envigado by placing an agent among the upper-level ranks of the Medell¡n cartel--an attempt that's tragically undermined by unwitting cross-plotting among Envigado's enemies. When romantic, guilt-ridden superspook David Jardine, whose platonic marriage is punctuated by intense, irregular adulteries, is ordered to choose a new agent to infiltrate Envigado's upstart drug ring, he prepares a list of candidates, then whittles it down to two: Scottish-Argentinean barrister Malcolm Strong and Special Forces Capt. Harry Ford--and finally, after chapters and chapters of training and indecision, decides to send Harry, at just about the same time he starts sleeping with Harry's wife Elizabeth. Meantime, in New York, Homicide Lt. Eddie Lucco finds his attempt to identify a teenage girl killed by bad drugs stymied by an unusually high mortality rate among possible informants who could explain her connection to Medell¡n hanger-on Ricardo Santos. And in Dublin, rising judge Eugene Pearson, all but promised the Attorney General's slot after the next election, is blackmailed by Envigado strongman Luis Restrepo into laying an ongoing cocaine trail into Europe in return for a regular commission that Pearson's fellow-IRA higher-ups are desperate to get their hands on. It's obvious that Pearson's wayward daughter Siobhan is Lucco's Jane Doe, but Smith takes his sweet time stringing the three plots together, feverishly introducing supporting characters and spinning out subplots as Lucco warily agrees to become the DEA's inside man, and Pearson sets himself against his chums in the IRA, and Jardine finds himself falling hard for Elizabeth, and Harry, finally nestled securely in Envigado's bosom, realizes he liked taking $2 million for saving his boss's life by killing a former colleague. British TV writer Smith's debut is immensely promising in individual scenes and episodes--especially in Lucco's gripping, believably heroic story--but overslung, overinsistent, and finally anticlimactic in its so-what holocaust. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pocket
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140173471
• ISBN 13: 9780140173475
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 720