Odoacer (Paperback)

The Chevalier Johann Peter Friedrich Ritter von Stilicho! "Hanno" to his friends. Roué, rake, scapegrace, raconteur, boulevardier -- and consummate scoundrel! He is also, secondarily, the greatest jewel thief of his, or any other, generation. And he is about to do something he swore he would never do -- indeed, something that hardly even seemed possible. The Chevalier Johann Peter Friedrich Ritter von Stilicho is going to betray a client. But not just any client. The Chevalier is going to betray the President of the United States. And the reason he'll do it is as simple as it is unfortunate. It is this: the President of the United States has gone completely and irrevocably insane. The Chevalier's plan to turn the tables on the raging chief executive is so crazy it might just work. (It won't.) But the Chevalier needs help. If at all possible, sexy help . . . Enter Mona France, Esq., mild-mannered, long-suffering New York attorney, Mona France. She's not quite sure how she got involved in this caper, and she doubts it will succeed (again, it won't), but she'd been asked to "document" the Chevalier's complicated plot, and, well, a client is a client . . . And so Mona France enters a demimonde (the Chevalier's word) she'd never imagined: a world that is mysterious, deadly, and alluring. It is a world of subterranean coffee houses and forbidding mountain chateaus. It is a world of high political drama and low cultural slumming. It is a world in which a small-time con can ride the thermals of popular irrationality to the pinnacle of power -- and then go splat. It is, in other words, our world. ODOACER is the novel this moment in American history demands. It is timely political commentary touching on media, cable news, twitter, blackmail, susceptibility to blackmail, and the power and the vulnerability of image in modern America. And, finally, it is our story: the story of a psychically lost, spiritually depleted people hurtling toward a dark age of its own half-intended making -- and, perhaps, trying to decide whether it will seize it's one remaining shot at redemption.