Desperate Measures

This story begins as Matt Pittman, a once famous journalist whose life has fallen apart because of overwhelming personal tragedy, prepares his own suicide. Suddenly, what was to have been the final act of Matt's ruined life is interrupted by a phone call. Matt's editor has an assignment for him: write an obituary of a man who is not dead yet.Plucked from the edge of oblivion, plunged into the unexpected, Matt finds himself accused of killing the very man whose premature death notice he was to write.As he races to untangle the most dangerous story of his career, Matt seeks redemption in a deepening love for Jill Warren, who becomes his accomplice in survival. He finds himself thrust into the heart of a conspiracy of aging power brokers whose lethal influence in America and throughout the world remains terrifyingly unsurpassed. And he stumbles across a devastating secret forged in the birth of the Cold War--and decades before that, in the intimate and treacherous rites of passage among the nation's youthful, golden elite.
"The pistol, a Colt .45 semiautomatic, was capable of holding seven
rounds in its magazine. But at the moment, it held only one, which Pittman fed into the firing chamber by pulling back the slide on top of the weapon. The well-oiled metal made a smooth snicking sound. Fourteen years earlier, when Pittman had written his first newspaper story, it had been about a retired policeman who had committed suicide. Pittman had never forgotten a conversation he had overheard, the respectful tones with which two patrolmen at a coffee machine in their precinct headquarters had referred to their former comrade's death."