The Wanted

When he leaves the orphanage at age 18, Joseph McMurray, aka Sharky, Joe Mack, Jim Terry, or Marcus Harris (whatever name currently appears on his fake passport) choses to live his life on the edge as a high-stakes gambler. Beginning his adult life in Atlantic City, he continues to live however and wherever destiny takes him--perhaps as written in the cards--as a gambler and a wanted man, He moves to Las Vegas and gambles his way through the casinos until he eventually flees from the mob and leaves his ex-showgirl wife with an unborn child, He next finds himself in Baghdad, where, after some stormy years, he escapes from a local prison and finds himself in Istanbul. He establishes himself in Istanbul but then leaves to join Taahira, his beautiful Egyptian mistress, under a new identity in Costa Rica. He is by then wanted by Interpol, the IRS, the FBI, the Baghdad police, the mob, and his ex-wife, and he grows tired of looking over his shoulder for the enemy who would recognize him and reveal his whereabouts. He remains in Costa Rica with Taahira until his disclosure is threatened by circumstances in Chicago. He thus institutes a plan to make himself disappear with the help of two Americans from the Chicago area, Porter and Curt, who had worked with him in his gambling and strip club in war-torn Baghdad.
Porter and Curt are indicted with Sharky in Chicago for an alleged offense committed in Baghdad, but Sharky of course does not appear in court, causing the issuance of an additional warrant for his arrest. Porter and Curt are represented by Ben Diamond, a distinguished Chicago lawyer on the verge of retirement. Sharky's plan to disappear includes the involvement of Diamond who lives with his wife in a northern Chicago suburb in a house of steel and glass on a bluff overlooking a Lake Michigan beach. Sharky's plan begins on that beach where the book begins, and where, a few years thereafter, the story ends.. Sharky's and the Diamonds' lives become inextricably entangled as the story advances, bringing it to an exciting climax. Some would say the ending was inevitable, some would say it was manipulated by God or the gods, and others might say its climax was the inevitable and necessary consequence of antecedent states of affairs.