The Loo Sanction

A First-Rate Thriller from a Legendary Master Jonathan Hemlock, the art professor and mercenary who first excited readers with his daring exploits in The Eiger Sanction, returns in an even more masterful adventure in The Loo Sanction, Trevanian’s second thrilling spy novel. Hemlock has gone to England to rest, but his vacation is interrupted when the head of British Intelligence needs his highly skilled services. Jonathan must take over the mission of an agent whose murder was so bizarre and terrifying that no other agent was willing to replace him. His task: to locate a set of secretly made films that incriminate a number of high-ranking British officials. His target: a top underworld figure who delights in debauchery and torture. Facing this threat, Jonathan is drawn into a labyrinthine network of intrigue and depravity. As all the pieces in the dangerous puzzle begin to come together, Jonathan is trapped, almost fatally drugged, and forced to attempt one of the most daring escapes ever conceived. The Loo Sanction is sure to keep readers frantically turning pages until the thrilling climax. Also available as an eBook Look for these other Trevanian classics from Three Rivers Press: Shibumi, The Eiger Sanction, The Main, and The Summer of Katya.

Jonathan Hemlock lives in a renovated Gothic church on Long Island. He is an art professor, a mountain climber, and a mercenary, performing assassinations (i.e., sanctions) for money to augment his black-market art collection. Now Hemlock is being tricked into a hazardous assignment that involves an attempt to scale one of the most treacherous mountain peaks in the Swiss Alps, the Eiger. In a breathtakingly suspenseful story that is part thriller and part satire, the author traces Hemlock’s spine-tingling adventures, introducing a cast of intriguing characters—villains, traitors, beautiful women—into the highly charged atmosphere of danger. The accumulating threads of suspicion, accusation, and evidence gradually knit themselves into a bizarre and death-defying climax in this exciting, entertaining novel that will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the last absorbing page.

The Main is Montreal’s teeming underworld, where the dark streets echo with cries in a dozen languages, with the quick footsteps of thieves and the whispers of prostitutes. It is a world where violence and brutality are a way of life. To the people of the Main, police lieutenant Claude LaPointe is judge and jury, father confessor and avenging angel. Montreal’s police force has changed over time, but LaPointe has not. His commitment to justice is total, as is his devotion to the Main and its underworld community. But when a cold-blooded murderer invades LaPointe’s territory, he is forced to examine his long-held beliefs and secrets and to confront his own loneliness and mortality. With a cast of unforgettable supporting characters and an unusual and remarkable hero, The Main is another gripping tale of death and danger, of action and mystery, by the incomparable Trevanian. Look for these other Trevanian classics from Three Rivers Press: The Eiger Sanction, The Loo Sanction, Shibumi, and The Summer of Katya.

Part love story and part psychological thriller from best-selling author Trevanian, "a tour de force... A story that explores meticulously some of the darker corners of the human soul." -- The Washington Post In the quiet Basque countryside in 1914, Jean-Marc Montjean, a handsome young doctor, moves to the small French village of Salies to assist the village physician. It's there that he meets the seductive, beautiful Katya Treville. Jean-Marc is bewitched, driven to know everything about her. But as he and her family become friendly, he realizes they are haunted by an old, dark secret. When Jean-Marc learns that the Trevilles are planning to leave the village forever, he insists on a final meeting with Katya. That meeting and the events that follow turn what was an idyllic romance into an unending nightmare. And when Katya’s secret is revealed, the chilling climax will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned. "A most exquisite, elegant, ingenious thriller." -- The New York Daily News

Legendary writer Trevanian brings readers his most personal novel yet: a funny, deeply felt, often touching coming-of-age novel set in 1930s America. Six-year-old Jean-Luc LaPointe, his little sister, and his spirited but vulnerable young mother have been abandoned—again—by his father, a charming con artist. With no money and nowhere else to go, the LaPointes create a fragile nest in a tenement building at 238 North Pearl Street in Albany, New York. For the next eight years, through the Great Depression and Second World War, they live in the heart of the Irish slum, surrounded by ward heelers, unemployment, and grinding poverty. Pearl Street is also home to a variety of “crazyladies”: Miss Cox, the feared and ridiculed teacher who ignites Jean-Luc’s imagination; Mrs. Kane, who runs a beauty parlor/fortune-telling salon in the back of her husband’s grocery store; Mrs. Meehan, the desperate, harried matriarch of a thuggish family across the street; lonely Mrs. McGivney, who spends every day tending to her catatonic husband, a veteran of the Great War; and Jean-Luc’s own unconventional, vivacious mother. Colorful though it is, Jean-Luc never stops dreaming of a way out of the slum, and his mother’s impossible expectations are both his driving force and his burden. As legendary writer Trevanian lovingly re-creates the neighborhood of his youth in this funny, deeply moving coming-of-age novel, he also paints a vivid portrait of a neighborhood, a city, a nation in turmoil, and the people waiting for a better life to begin. It’s a heartfelt and unforgettable look back at one child’s life in the 1930s and ’40s, a story that will be remembered long after the last page is turned.

Trevanian's Shibumi was a landmark bestseller, one of the classic international bestselling thrillers of the twentieth century. Now, chosen by Trevanian's heirs, the hugely admired writer Don Winslow returns with an irresistible "prequel": Satori. It is the fall of 1951 and the Korean War is raging. Twenty-six-year-old Nicholai Hel has spent the last three years in solitary confinement at the hands of the Americans. Hel is a master of hodo korosu or "naked kill," and fluent in over six languages. Genius and mystic, he has honed extraordinary "proximity sense" — an extra-awareness of the presence of danger — and has the skills to be the world's most formidable assassin. The Americans need him. They offer Hel freedom in exchange for one small service: go to Beijing and kill the Soviet Union's Commissioner to China. It's almost certainly a suicide mission, but Hel accepts. Now he must survive violence, suspicion and betrayal while trying to achieve the ultimate goal of satori — the possibility of true understanding and harmony with the world.

For fifteen years he has been silent. Now, the legendary #1 New York Times bestselling author of such classic suspense novels as The Eiger Sanction and Shibumi returns-- unleashing a stunning thriller set against the backdrop of the American West. A godforsaken town. A young, eager-to-please stranger carrying a homemade shotgun and a staggering secret. And a madman escaped from the Territorial Prison at Laramie, cutting a swath of sadistic violence with two killers at his side. Now, for the people of Twenty-Mile-- the God-fearing and the godless, heroes, whores, lovers and a boy teetering on the edge of madness-- a siege is about to begin amidst a harrowing mountain storm. And when the killing, the thunder, and the terror are over, some will live, some will be buried, and the myth of the American frontier will never be the same...

A classic spy novel from the bestselling author, Trevanian, about a westerner raised in Japan who becomes one of the world's most accomplished assassins. Nicholai Hel is the world’s most wanted man. Born in Shanghai during the chaos of World War I, he is the son of an aristocratic Russian mother and a mysterious German father and is the protégé of a Japanese Go master. Hel survived the destruction of Hiroshima to emerge as the world’s most artful lover and its most accomplished—and well-paid—assassin. Hel is a genius, a mystic, and a master of language and culture, and his secret is his determination to attain a rare kind of personal excellence, a state of effortless perfection known only as shibumi. Now living in an isolated mountain fortress with his exquisite mistress, Hel is unwillingly drawn back into the life he’d tried to leave behind when a beautiful young stranger arrives at his door, seeking help and refuge. It soon becomes clear that Hel is being tracked by his most sinister enemy—a supermonolith of international espionage known only as the Mother Company. The battle lines are drawn: ruthless power and corruption on one side, and on the other . . . shibumi.