Publisher, Blackstone Audiobooks (September 2003)

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France, infuriated by Charles de Gaulle's withdrawal from Algeria, had failed in six known attempts to assassinate the General. This book assumes that the seventh, most deadly, attempt involved a professional killer-for-hire who would be unknown to the French police. The code name of this killer: Jackal. His price: half a million dollars. His demand: total secrecy, even from his employers.

Step by painstaking step we follow the Jackal in his meticulous planning, from the fashioning of a collapsible but powerful rifle, the theft of passports, the forging of documents, the devising of alternate identities, to the laying out of his maze-like approach to the time and the place where the General is to meet the Jackal's specially-made bullet.

Though he cannot know it, the main obstacle standing athwart his path is a small, diffident, and rumpled policeman, Deputy Commissaire Claude Lebel. Lebel's boss considers him the best detective in France, but he himself cannot feel much confidence as he begins to track down a killer he knows exists but whose plans and identity are-a blank. Deliberately, with round-the-clock assistance from police all over Europe and in London and America, Lebel pieces together the Jackal's image. As the last second approaches, when the Jackal's crosshairs come to rest on that unmistakable profile, it is all the listener can do not to cry out in warning.