Department of Homeland Security agent Charley Castillo conducts a discreet investigation involving a murdered diplomat's brother-in-law, a man possessing key information about the scandalous United Nations oil-for-food program in Iraq.

When Harry arrives in New York, his publisher Harold Guinzberg tells him he has been elected as the next president of English PEN, which will give him the opportunity to launch a campaign for the release of a fellow author, Anatoly Babakov, who is languishing in a Russian Gulag in Siberia. His crime: writing a book Uncle Joe, which gives an insight into what it was like to work for Josef Stalin. So determined is he to see Babakov released, Harry puts...

In a late 1990s North Korea, a younger Inspector O is working Pyongyang as the country's nuclear missile program begins to escalate and as the wife of a North Korean diplomat turns up dead in Pakistan under suspicious circumstances, but as Inspector O investigates, he discovers that the woman's death could lead to a larger conspiracy.