Assumed Identity - Softcover

Morrell, David

3.79

1,494 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446600709 ISBN 13: 9780446600705

Publisher: Vision, 1994

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From the author of The Covenant of the Flame and The Fifth Profession. Brendan Buchanan is an undercover intelligence operative who has impersonated more than 200 people in the last eight years. But now his multi-personality occupation threatens to destroy him.

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From the Back Cover:

The protagonist is Brendan Buchanan. He also goes by other names - Potter, Crawford, Block, Davis - in fact, over two hundred others. A member of a special-operations until so covert it may as well be run by ghosts, Buchanan is a master of impersonation, a specialist in assuming false identities. But now his unique gifts - and desperate pathology - threaten to destroy him. The beginning of his nightmare occurs in Cancun, Mexico, where Buchanan's latest alias is brutally unmasked. Racing through a torturous escape route, he is shocked to discover that his controllers will no longer give him a new identity. For the first time in eight years, he will have to be himself. But after spending so much time assuming different identities, he no longer knows who he is. Suddenly, he receives a mysterious postcard, a coded, unmistakable plea for help. Its source is Juana Mendez, a former partner who had posed as his wife six years earlier, countless missions ago. In his quest for Juana, Buchanan is thrust into a stark wilderness of mirrors and faced with a harrowing conspiracy. Yet he finds the unreadable maze of his own mind as dangerous as the harsh, chilling world that assails him from without. His partner in the search is Holly McCoy, a reporter whose beauty is matched only by her determination to penetrate Buchanan's multilayered psychological armor and write her subject's real story. Seeking one woman, while inexorably drawn to another, Buchanan relentlessly follows a seductive but deadly trail from Key West to New Orleans, from San Antonio to Mexico City. Ultimately, he will find the truth about Juana, and even the truth about himself - if he can survive.

About the Author:

My father was killed during World War II, shortly after I was born in 1943. My mother had difficulty raising me and at the same time holding a job, so she put me in an orphanage and later in a series of boarding homes. I grew up unsure of who I was, desperately in need of a father figure. Books and movies were my escape. Eventually I decided to be a writer and sought help from two men who became metaphorical fathers to me: Stirling Silliphant, the head writer for the classic TV series "Route 66" about two young men in a Corvette who travel America in search of themselves, and Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), a novelist who taught at the Pennsylvania State University where I went to graduate school from 1966 to 1970. The result of their influence is my 1972 novel, First Blood, which introduced Rambo. The search for a father is prominent in that book, as it is in later ones, most notably The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), a thriller about orphans and spies. During this period, I was a professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. With two professions, I worked seven days a week until exhaustion forced me to make a painful choice and resign from the university in 1986. One year later, my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from bone cancer, and thereafter my fiction tended to depict the search for a son, particularly in Fireflies (1988) and Desperate Measures (1994). To make a new start, my wife and I moved to the mountains and mystical light of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where my work changed yet again, exploring the passionate relationships between men and women, highlighting them against a background of action as in the newest, Burnt Sienna. To give his stories a realistic edge, he has been trained in wilderness survival, hostage negotiation, executive protection, antiterrorist driving, assuming identities, electronic surveillance, and weapons. A former professor of American literature at the University of Iowa, Morrell now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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