In a renovated Gothic church on Long Island lives Jonathan Hemlock, an art professor and world-renowned mountain climber who finances his black-market art collection by working as a freelance assassin.
Now, Hemlock is being tricked into a hazardous assignment that involves an attempt to scale one of the most treacherous mountain peaks in the Swiss Alps: the Eiger. His target is one of his three fellow climbers. The problem is that the people who hired him at CII can't tell him which one.
In a breathtakingly suspenseful story that is part thriller and part satire, Trevanian traces Hemlock's spine-tingling adventures, introducing a cast of intriguing characters—villains, traitors, beautiful women—into the highly charged atmosphere of danger. The accumulating threads of suspicion, accusation, and evidence gradually knit themselves into a bizarre and death-defying climax.
Trevanian (Rodney Whitaker, 1931–2005) was the bestselling author of Shibumi, The Eiger Sanction, The Loo Sanction, The Main, The Summer of Katya, and Incident at Twenty-Mile. He was also an educator in communication and dramatic arts and wrote nonfiction books under his own name. His books have been translated into more than fourteen languages.
Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto... with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.