Beirut - An Explosive Thriller (46 page)

I owe a great
deal to the support of Jashanmals, my distributor, in particular
Narain Jashanmal and Siju Ravi and also Therese Nasr at Levant
Distributors. Derek Kirkup gave me the
Arabian Princess
and a great deal of
help and guidance on matters nautical, while Andy Drew helped with
the whizzbangs. Jessy Shoucair designed the ‘bulletstick’ for the
cover.

Beirut was
originally written in 2009 and takes the form it does today because
of that rarest of things, a helpful literary agent, in this case
the most kind Andrew Lownie, who saw something in it and encouraged
me to bring that something out. Thanks, too, to Robin Wade, my own
agent, for trying gamely to flog this book to an unreceptive
publishing industry and to Robb Grindstaff, my editor, who curbed
many of my more outrageous tendencies.

Finally, most
importantly, thanks to my long-suffering wife Sarah, for putting up
with a husband who has his head in the clouds 99 percent of the
time.

Reading club
notes and more at:

www.Beirutthebook.com

www.alexandermcnabb.com

Complaints
and demands for refunds can be directed at
@alexandermcnabb

After a
lifetime of service around the Middle East, retired diplomat Jason
Hartmoor is dying of cancer. He embarks on a last journey back to
Lebanon where he studied Arabic as a young man at the Middle East
Centre for Arabic Studies, the infamous ‘British spy school’ in the
village of Shemlan far up in the hills overlooking
Beirut.

Jason wants
to rediscover the love he lost when the civil war forced him to
flee Lebanon. Instead his past catches up with him with such speed
and violence, it threatens to kill him before the disease does. The
only man who can keep him alive long enough to face that past is
Gerald Lynch.

To be
published 2013