Morality tale in thriller's clothes

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L'ASSASSIN

By Peter Steiner

Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95, 276 pages

REVIEWED BY JOHN WEISMAN

One could call Peter Steiner's novel "L'Assassin" a thriller. But it's more than that. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, "L'Assassin" is a morality tale wrapped in a mood piece inside a thriller.

The book's unlikely hero is a 67-year-old American expatriate, a former CIA case officer named Louis Morgon. Thirty-some years before "L'Assassin" takes place, Morgon was hounded out of CIA by his one-time friend and mentor, Hugh Bowes. Morgon's marriage was shattered, and he became estranged from his children.

Disgraced, discredited, and dishonored, Morgon moved to France. There, he found by chance a house in the tiny, rustic, provincial Loire Valley village of Saint Leon sur Deme, a place where "the smell of rosemary hung in the air, like a promise, or a memory," and tried to put the shards of his life back together again. He took up with a local woman named Solesme Lefourier; he began to paint and started a garden.

During the ensuing years, his nemesis Hugh Bowes, "nearsighted, pallid, fat, and dangerous," becomes an American Mandarin — a secretary of state, the intimate of presidents, a powerful big-money lawyer and an archetypal Washington insider. But there is a cancer gnawing at Bowes. It is a white hot hatred of Morgon "as profound and undeniable as it was unfathomable and absurd."

The bottom line: Hugh Bowes wants to see Louis Morgon ruined, dead, or both. To cause Louis Morgon's downfall, Hugh Bowes creates a malevolent geopolitical souffle that involves the White House, the State Department, the CIA, indeed, the full weight of the entire U.S. government. He convinces one and all that Morgon is a rogue who, from a tiny, anonymous village in rural France, is the leader of a dangerous al Qaeda cell that is plotting a spectacular, lethal strike.

The president is in the final lap of a tough re-election campaign. And he's behind. Osama bin Laden is still at large. The Global War on Terror is flagging. The president needs some kind of palpable victory to guarantee a win. And so he unleashes Hugh Bowes to neutralize Louis Morgon's (nonexistent) terror cell.