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A Line in the Sand  By  cover art

A Line in the Sand

By: Kevin Powers
Narrated by: Christine Lakin
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Publisher's summary

A sinuous, powerful and white-knuckle thriller, from the award-winning author of The Yellow Birds, shot through with treachery, trauma and the long tentacles of war.

An early morning on a beach in Virginia. As he is taking his daily swim, Arman Bajalan - formerly an interpreter in Iraq - discovers a dead body. After surviving an assassination attempt that killed his wife and child, Arman has been given lonely sanctuary in the US. Now, sure that the murder is connected to his past, he knows he's still not safe.

Seasoned detective Catherine Wheel and her fresh-off-the-beat partner have little to go on beyond a bus ticket in the man's pocket. It leads them to Sally Ewell, a local journalist as grief-stricken as Arman by the Iraq war, who is investigating a nefarious corporation: one on the cusp of landing a multi-billion-dollar government defence contract.

As victims mount around Arman, taking the team down wrong turns and towards startling evidence, they find themselves in a race, committed to unravelling the truth and keeping Arman alive - even if it costs them everything.

©2023 Kevin Powers (P)2023 Hachette Book Group

Critic reviews

"A riveting powerhouse of a book, A Line in the Sand pits two small town cops - and a mysterious Iraqi interpreter whose secrets have already gotten a lot of people killed - against corruption and violence at the highest levels of government. A spellbinding and totally original thriller; Kevin Powers has reinvented himself as novelist yet again." (Philipp Meyer)

"Sure to rank among the year's best thrillers, A Line in the Sand is a tense, twisting, and thoughtful story of the intersection between grief and greed - and the human lives crushed in the middle. Kevin Powers writes with uncommon grace, delivering the rare novel that is both propulsive and contemplative, calling to mind writers as varied as Tim O'Brien and Michael Connelly." (Michael Koryta)

"A thriller, with a crime so big and characters so flawed, you'll be holding your breath the whole time... The book's got all the stuff you've always loved...a deep and abiding understanding of what soldiers sacrifice, a thoughtful examination of the place he grew up, and prose so beautiful it'll make you weep." (Rachel Beanland, author of Florence Adler Swims Forever)

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