A Matter of Honor

International bestseller Jeffrey Archer picks up the sweeping story of the Clifton Chronicles with A Matter of Honor--featuring a bonus interview with author.

It seems innocent enough. A disgraced British colonel bequeaths a mysterious letter to his only son. But the moment Adam Scott opens the yellowing envelope, he sets into motion a deadly chain of events that threatens to shake the very foundations of the free world.

Within days, Adam's lover is brutally murdered and he's running for his life through the great cities of Europe, pursued not only by the KGB, but by the CIA and his own countrymen as well. Their common intent is to kill him before the truth comes out. While powerful men in smoke-filled rooms plot ever more ingenious means of destroying him, Adam finds himself betrayed and abandoned even by those he holds most dear.

When at last he comes to understand what he is in possession of, he's even more determined to protect it, for it's more than a matter of life and death-it's a matter of honor.

Only days before Britain declares war on Germany, Harry Clifton, hoping to escape the consequences of long-buried family secrets, and forced to accept that his desire to marry Emma Barrington will never be fulfilled, has joined the Merchant Navy. But his ship is sunk in the Atlantic by a German U-boat, drowning almost the entire crew. An American cruise liner, the SS Kansas Star, rescues a handful of sailors, among them Harry and the third officer, an American named Tom Bradshaw. When Bradshaw dies in the night, Harry seizes on the chance to escape his tangled past and assumes his identity.

On landing in America, however, Bradshaw quickly learns the mistake he has made, when he discovers what is awaiting him in New York. Without any way of proving his true identity, Harry Clifton is now chained to a past that could be far worse than the one he had hoped to escape.

Read more Continue reading Read less FROM LIBRARY JOURNAL
In 1966, Adam Scott, an unemployed British ex-army officer with an uncertain future, attends the reading of his disgraced father's will. Part of his inheritance is a letter detailing the events of Hermann Goering's suicide and two unopened letters from the Nazi general giving him access to a Swiss bank vault and the valuable Russian icon it contains. However, a veritable state secret is concealed in the painting and the KGB and the CIA both want it before the expiry of a crucial deadline. Scott's perilous journey across Europe to the questionable safety of England is by plane, car, foot, bus, ambulance, van, and ferry as he stays one step ahead of death with the assistance of farmers, salesmen, racing cyclists, hoodlums, and an entire orchestra. An epic chase thriller tidily concluded with a series of neat twists. Highly recommended. Literary Guild main selection. John North, L.R.C., Ryerson Polytechnical Inst., Toronto
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. REVIEW
"Sizzles along at a pace that would peel the paint off a spaceship." -The New York Times Book Review

"Jeffrey Archer has written the equivalent of an Alfred Hitchcock movie." -Baltimore Sun

"A wild, no-hold-barred slam-bang, pell-mell international thriller." -Buffalo News

More Praise for Jeffrey Archer:
"A master at mixing power, politics, and profit into fiction" -Entertainment Weekly

"Archer is a master entertainer." -Time Magazine

"One of the top ten storytellers in the world" -Los Angeles Times

"Archer plots with skill, and keeps you turning the pages." -Boston Globe

"Cunning plots, silken style...Archer plays a cat-and-mouse game with the reader." -The New York Times

"A storyteller in the class of Alexander Dumas...Unsurpassed skill...making the reader wonder intensely what will happen next." -Washington Post
FROM THE PUBLISHER
8 1.5-hour cassettes ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JEFFREY ARCHER was educated at Oxford University. He has served five years in Britain's House of Commons and nineteen years in the House of Lords. All of his novels and short story collections -- including Best Kept Secret, Sins of the Father, Kane and Abel, and False Impression -- have been international bestselling books. Archer is married with two sons and lives in London and Cambridge.

EXCERPT. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
A Matter of Honor
PART ITHE KREMLINMOSCOW May 19, 1966CHAPTER ONETHE KREMLIN MAY 19, 1966"IT'S A FAKE," said the Russian leader, staring down at the small exquisite painting he held in his hands."That can't be possible," replied his Politburo colleague. "The Czar's icon of Saint George and the dragon has been in the Winter Palace at Leningrad under heavy guard for over fifty years.""True, Comrade Zaborski," said the old man, "but for fifty years we've been guarding a fake. The Czar must have removed the original sometime before the Red Army entered Petrograd and overran the Winter Palace."The head of state security moved restlessly in his chair as the cat-and-mouse game continued. Yuri Zaborski knew after years of running the KGB who had been cast as the mouse the moment his phone had rung at four that morning to say that the General Secretary required him to report to the Kremlin office--immediately."How can you be so sure it's a fake, Leonid Ilyich?" the diminutive figure inquired."Because, my dear Zaborski, during the past eighteen months the age of all the treasures in the Winter Palace has been tested by carbon dating, the modern scientific process that does not call for a second opinion," said Brezhnev, displaying his newfound knowledge. "And what we have always thought to be one of the nation's masterpieces," he continued, "turns out to have been painted five hundred years after Rublev's original.""But by whom and for what purpose?" asked the Chairman of the Committee for State Security,