An Enemy in View

How well do you know your colleagues? Are they really what they seem? And what would you do if someone suspected them of working for the enemy? David Hoffman may well have asked himself those questions when he sat down to write, An Enemy in View, a spellbinding suspense story that gives lie to Ottawa's image as a sleepy government town. Charles Haversham, a former journalist and rising mandarin in the Privy Council Office, is asked to investigate a colleague's travel expenses. Although reluctant to spy on his friend, Charles soon becomes intrigued by the man's strangely empty office. And what exactly does Dan Carpenter do? Some cryptic notes, a badly dubbed CD-Rom, and an unexplained trip to Barbados soon have Charles feeling that old investigative tingle from his newspaper days. A rush that years in Ottawa and a bad marriage have almost extinguished. But CSIS and the drug cartel are also on Dan's trail. And with the suspicious death of a Mexican contact-and the murder of Dan-Charles realizes that his days are numbered, too. As a former federal public servant and professor of political science, David Hoffman draws back the curtains on the often mysterious power games played out in Canada's capital. His attention to detail reveals a bureaucratic world unknown to most, while his skills as a storyteller have the reader wondering "what next?" until the very last page. Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, and raised in Hamilton, David Hoffman has lived in Toronto, London (England) , Glasgow, and Montreal. Today, he lives in semi-retirement from one of Canada's leading policy-research firms in Ottawa's downtown, within easy walk of the locations that play so prominent a part in this, his first book.