Innocent Blood: A Novel

The years that journalist Christopher Dickey spent covering wars in the Middle East and Central America for Newsweek and the Washington Post give almost every page of his first novel an impressive verisimilitude. But even more impressive is his ability to take that stock figure of fiction on the page and screen--the Muslim terrorist--and turn him into an understandable and sympathetic human being. By making his central character a tall, blond, blue-eyed American boy, Dickey probably leaves himself open to charges of playing it safe, of ignoring ethnic realities. But it's the very fact that Kurt Kurtovic could be the boy next door that carries us along through this powerful, plausible story of Kurtovic's journey from Kansas schoolboy to Army Ranger hero to World Trade Center bomber, and helps to show us how America's actions in Panama and the Persian Gulf did indeed bring terrorism to its own shores. Dickey's nonfiction books in paperback are Expats: Travels in Arabia, from Tripoli to Teheran and With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua.