Innocent Blood: A Novel

He is the perfect terrorist.
He's an all-American boy.
Kurt Kurtovic is someone you might know -- and ought to fear.

Kurt was a U.S. Army Ranger. Born and raised in Kansas, he was trained to kill for -- what? Once he might have said "for God and country." Kurt searches in the former Yugoslavia, the land of his parents, for a place, for faith, for a cause. In the midst of the horrors in Bosnia, Kurt is recruited to fight by a holy warrior, a terrorist Iago, who plays on all of Kurt's doubts and fears: America is the evil behind the horror, but Kurt can change it. He can take the war home. He can penetrate to the heart of the U.S. elite. He can teach his country a lesson so horrible it will never forget.

In this riveting story of war, love, and deception, Christopher Dickey takes us to the white-hot core of the terrorist mind. "Innocent Blood" is as real as today's headlines -- and tomorrow's.

Publishers Weekly

Dickey, a journalist who is now Newsweek's Paris bureau chief, pulls a lot of recent headlines into a surprisingly stable synthesis in order to get inside the head of a terrorist. "I come from Westfield, Kansas, down near the Oklahoma border. Flat lands. Pickup truck lands." Thus does Kurt Kurtovic introduce himself. The very fact that Kurt, the son of Yugoslavian immigrants, could be the boy next door carries us along through the first section of the book. After an alienating childhood and his Muslim father's death, Kurt becomes a U.S. Army Ranger. Dickey shows us his arduous training and moves on to the richly detailed horrors of duty in Panama and the Gulf Warall of this informed by Kurt's inability to make personal connections in a smug America. By 1991, when Kurt has left the Army and is in Zagreb trying to find some traces of his father's life, we know him so well that his decision to join up with the mysterious Rashid seems natural. When that decision brings him to New York and a looming act of terror, it's all made credible by what we have learned about the men behind it. By adding Panama and the Gulf War to the Bosnian plot, Dickey does slightly overstuff his novel with yesterday's news. But at the center of it all is a powerful, plausible story of one man's transformation from a Kansas schoolboy into a Muslim terrorist. The pace is fast, and Dickey succeeds admirably in showing both the psychology and the impeccable, chilling logic that can underlie the most violent behavior. (June) FYI: Christopher Dickey is the son of the late poet and novelist James Dickey, author of Deliverance.