At the start of America at Night, with its title referring to the generally murky atmosphere in which such individuals operate, Kolb is asked to help identify "Richard Marshall," a lawyer who may be abetting terrorists. Since all photographs of Marshall have conveniently vanished, Kolb must find other ways to pursue his hunch that Marshall and Hirschfeld are one and the same.
This leads him on a twisted path, and quite an entertaining one. It draws him into the kind of story about which fiction writers can only dream. One of its minor figures got rich selling shoes to the Turkish army, for example. This man's son ran a hugely profitable mail-order contact lens company from prison while doing time on charges involving cocaine. "And you should see the guy's wife!" a CIA official tells Kolb.
In the course of America at Night, the author uncovers a potential dirty trick that may influence the 2004 presidential election. It is a link between John Kerry's unwitting campaign treasurer, Robert Farmer, and money laundering for al-Qaeda, but it turns out to be only one piece of this book's larger puzzle. In breathless, overcrowded fashion, America at Night looks under a rock and finds a staggering array of crooked, ruthless activities attributable to Sensi and Hirschfeld — and, by implication, their friends in the world of politics.
"How high up do you think this goes?" someone asks Kolb. It goes as high up as reading All the President's Men. But this book, for all its wild and entertaining cloak-and-dagger crime stories, can't otherwise compare with that one.
PUBLICATION NOTES:
AMERICA AT NIGHT
By Larry J. Kolb
305 pages
Riverhead Books
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