Empire State. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Empire State

The head of the US National Security Agency is assassinated in a spectactular set-piece killing at Heathrow. A Pakistani employee at the airport and his family are found murdered in their council house in Uxbridge. In New York, a fashionable Upper East Side osteopath, who's treating Robert Harland, receives two postcards of the Empire State Building from someone called Karim Khan, one posted in Turkey, the other Iran. A group of migrant workers, including Khan, en route from Afghanistan to the EU, is brutally gunned down in Macedonia. Khan escapes death, but is captured to endure worse - terrible torture. The quest to find the link between these apparently random events is pursued by Harland, with the help of Isis Hernick, a young female officer of MI6, in a remarkable thriller that explores our frightening post 9/11 world. It is a world that inspires paranoia on a grand scale, where international agencies give no quarter and show no scruple in hunting down supposed terrorists, and where torture is used by democratic societies who cite defence as the justification for their acts.

Henry Porter has written for most national broadsheet newspapers. He was editor of the Atticus column on the Sunday Times, moving to set up the Sunday Correspondent magazine in 1988. He contributes commentary and reportage to the Guardian, Observer, Evening Standard and Sunday Telegraph. He is the British editor of Vanity Fair, and lives in London with his wife and two daughters.