THE IMMORTAL PART

"Thirteen days ago I made a mistake," begins this pulsing debut thriller about a single act of carelessness that begins the abrupt downward spiral of a bright young London lawyer. His boss asks Lewis Penn to sit in on a meeting with client UKI, an important Ukrainian minerals company refinancing its subsidiaries. Penn, preoccupied with the impending death of his younger brother, Dan, from cystic fibrosis, doesn't pay close attention when the UKI manager slides a file across the table toward him. By the time he's in a cab heading to his brother's hospice, he realizes he's misplaced the file. Penn panics, rushes back across town, hastily grabs what he thinks is the missing file and sends it to the law firm's Washington office as planned. What he doesn't realize, but soon learns, is that he's just inadvertently stolen another set of documents that contain information about the illicit Project Sevastopol, a vast cache of UKI money held off the books. Needless to say, UKI will do anything to get them back. A nightmarish scenario unfolds as Penn, unwilling to admit his initial mistake, takes desperate measures to retrieve the incriminating file from Washington and smooth things over with the increasingly irate UKI bosses. Each time he thinks he has the situation under control, it slips out of his grasp; soon UKI has sent a beautiful thief to seduce him and security thugs to trail him. In the meantime, he's faced with the obvious ethical dilemma regarding UKI's corruption: to squeal or not to squeal? Like the best espionage thrillers, Wakling's taut debut is a study of human foibles, with a vivid and all too fallible hero at its center. (Apr. 14)