Frederick Forsyth · 1989 · thriller

Frederick Forsyth's 1989 thriller. The President's son is taken while out running near Oxford, and the man brought in to buy him back is a retired hostage negotiator who works alone and trusts nobody. The kidnap turns out not to be about money at all, but about a treaty, an oilfield and people on both sides who need the President broken.

1. 1
   Oxford

   Simon Cormack, son of the President of the United States and a student at Oxford, is snatched off a country road while out running with his Secret Service escort strung out behind him - a professional lift, over in seconds.

2. 2
   London

   Quinn, the best hostage negotiator of his generation and retired from it, is fetched out of a French vineyard and installed in a London flat with a telephone - and begins the slow business of talking to men who intend to be paid.

3. 3
   Washington

   In Washington the President is unravelling and a disarmament treaty with Moscow is in the balance - and the people who most want that treaty dead are not in Moscow at all, which is the discovery the book is built on.

4. 4
   The Gulf

   The money behind it runs back to oil, to men in the Gulf and Texas with a common interest in a weakened presidency - and Quinn, who has delivered the ransom and lost the boy, sets out to find every one of them.