"Jack Dana is a star history student at Yale with a bright career in academia ahead of him. But after 9/11 he feels it is his duty to change course. As a Marine infantry officer he is deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Severely wounded in combat, he begins writing a novel about his wartime experiences while surgeons at the Walter Reed Hospital patch up his pelvis. Jack then moves to Manhattan to live with his Uncle Harry, a partner in a leading New York law firm and Jack's surrogate father. With Harry's help he quickly finds a publisher, and the book's swift success launches Jack as a professional writer. After a second successful publication, Jack feels entitled to a vacation and leaves for a three-month trip to South America. The isolation from modern life on a ranch in western Brazil suits him perfectly, but on his way back home he looks at his emails and finds shocking news: his Uncle Harry is dead, hanged in his Sag Harbor summer home, clearly a suicide. Horrified and incredulous, Jack digs into the facts surrounding his uncle's death. Aided by Harry's most trusted associate, Kerry Black, with whom Jack falls in love, and by his college friend Scott Prentice who now works for the CIA, Jack discovers that Harry had pierced the secret of his most important client, Abner Brown, a rightwing multibillionaire notorious for backing extremist causes: Alongside his legitimate businesses, Brown owns and operates parallel criminal enterprises. The stakes and dangers are huge. Harry's death now seems anything but a suicide. And in order to avenge his uncle, Jack might have to circumvent the law and take matters into his own hands"--

With the death of his nemesis, corrupt business mogul Abner Brown, retired Marine Jack Dana thought he could finally return to his peaceful career as a novelist. And after falling hard for Heidi Krohn, the glamorous high-powered lawyer who helped avenge his best friend's death, Jack is beginning to dream of starting a family of his own. But dark forces intervene to upend Jack's comfortable new life. When two of his Uncle Harry's closest friends are brutally murdered in their own home, Jack swears he will get to the bottom of what could have prompted such a vicious attack. The answers he begins to uncover are shocking. A career criminal, long hidden in the shadows of Abner Brown's organization, has gone rogue after his benefactor's death and has made it his mission to get even with the man who ruined Abner- Jack Dana. With the help of his old friends in the CIA, Jack scrambles to bring down this terrifying new threat, and when Heidi and her family are kidnapped, Jack is forced to make the most painful choice of all. In Killer's Choice , master stylist Louis Begley returns to Jack's Upper East Side millieu in full force, reprising familiar characters and introducing memorable new faces, and concluding Jack's chilling saga with his most violent crescendo to date.

"Master stylist Begley continues the story of Jack Dana, the former Marine Corps officer turned novelist whose quest to avenge his murdered uncle takes a new, more dangerous turn. The man who brutally murdered Uncle Harry is dead. In an effort to recover from the confrontation and collect himself, Jack takes refuge on Torcello, a small island in the Venetian lagoon, to return to his writing career. Even more urgently, he wants to win back Kerry, the beautiful lawyer who rejected him after the bloody episode with Harry's assassin. But events beyond Jack's control intervene: Kerry loses her life in circumstances that contradict everything Jack thinks he knew about her. Soon death begins to stalk Jack himself. It is impossible not to recognize in its drumbeat the machinations of Abner Brown, the man who orchestrated Harry's demise. Jack fights back, driven by cold rage and determination to complete his revenge. At his side is Kerry's best friend, the glamorous and enigmatic Heidi Krohn. Their quest will force Jack to plumb the abyss of depravity into which Kerry had sunk and face one of his fellow Marines who has embarked on a violent feud of his own. Reprising memorable characters from Killer, Come Hither and introducing dangerous new ones, Begley concludes Jack's harrowing vendetta with one last shocking twist"--

Beloved author Louis Begley returns to the monied halls of the Upper East Side with a sharp new comedy of manners. Divorced after decades of comfortable marriage, retired journalist Hugo Gardner sets out to explore paths not travelled. After four decades of what he believes to be a happy, healthy partnership, Hugo Gardner's world is overturned when he learns that his wife, Valerie, is not only requesting a divorce but has left him for a younger, more vital man. Hugo, an octogenarian political writer and retired journalist for Time , must rethink the way he's lived, and reassess how he'd like to spend his remaining years. Reconsidering past relationships in his mind, with years of distance, Hugo begins to see things in a new light: Valerie, whose youth and ambition eventually came between them; his children, whose support might be more financially than emotionally motivated; and his friends, who, like him are rapidly aging before his very eyes. With an ominous oncologist's report hanging over his head, Hugo decides to get away for a bit, to a conference in Paris. There, a new romance blooms and Hugo finds himself wondering if growing old in Paris might be the perfect antidote to the drama he left behind in New York. Unflinching, witty, and urbane as ever, Louis Begley delivers a spot-on satire of the world of New York's aging elite, and uncovers the unexpected delights a late-in-life change can offer.

At Harvard in the early 1950s, three mismatched freshmen are thrown together as roommates--Sam, an aristocratic Yankee; Archie, an affable Army brat; and Henry, a Polish refugee--in the story of their college years and their unique friendship.

Two men are classmates and friends at Harvard, though never all that close: Max, a brilliant student with a touch of the aesthete's affectations about him, and Charlie, some years older, having served in the Korean War. As Max sees it, Charlie excels in a single scull, soaks up martinis, and enjoys the favors of a particularly glamorous Radcliffe girl. Twenty years later, not having seen each other since college, the two men meet unexpectedly as guests at a villa on the shore of Lake Como. Max is now a law professor, circumspect and slightly sorry for himself - a man to whom relationships do not stick. Charlie has become a celebrated architect, the most successful member of their class. Beautiful when a young man, he has ripened into a foul-mouthed, golden-tongued giant: a demigod and a bully. In his imperious way, he proclaims that Max will henceforth be one of his chosen intimates. Charlie is right. Max's life becomes increasingly intertwined with Charlie's, and with that of Toby, Charlie's adolescent companion. When Toby is stricken by a devastating illness, Charlie performs an act of coolly calculated self-sacrifice, the only gesture he thinks will make a difference. Max bears witness, and learns a lesson that may at last complete his sentimental education. With all the force and elegance of his earlier work, Louis Begley's masterful new novel tells a gripping story of friendship and mortality.