The Garden of Betrayal

By: Lee Vance

Narrated by: Mark Deakins

Manhattan, 2002: Mark Wallace has it all - he’s married to Claire, the love of his life; they have two bright, beautiful children, and his is a high-powered Wall Street job. Until one night while on a neighborhood errand by himself, his 12-year-old son, Kyle, vanishes, brutally snatched off the streets of New York.

Seven years later, Kyle has never been found. The loss, guilt, and mystery surrounding their son’s disappearance have almost destroyed the Wallaces’ marriage, leaving their daughter alienated and distant. Mark has thrown himself into his work - he is now an energy markets consultant for a private hedge fund run by the father of a friend - and, though successful, is living on emotional autopilot.

Now, on the same day that a natural gas pipeline in remote western Russia is blown up by suspected terrorists, a new lead opens in Kyle’s case. When the very next day a colleague slips Mark classified information on Saudi oil production and then suddenly turns up dead, apparently a suicide, it remains for Mark, with the help of his technophile daughter and still-grieving wife, to find the sinister connections among everything that’s going on. Their personal struggle is equally compelling - three people who must once again learn how to be a family.

Politically savvy, emotionally complex, and frighteningly believable, The Garden of Betrayal is a tense and timely imagining of the casualties of recession-era Wall Street gaming and the backroom global oil wars, a riveting, compulsive listen that will grip you from first sentence to last. It also places Lee Vance on the level of today’s best and best-selling thriller writers - Richard North Patterson, Christopher Reich - who not only thrill us but make us think.

©2010 Lee Vance (P)2010 Random House

Critic reviews

"The tension mounts relentlessly. Every short chapter offers a jolt." ( Booklist)