[Mac McCorkle 02] • Cast a Yellow Shadow

An old friend draws barman Mac McCorkle into a deadly international game

As the saying goes, you can’t pick your friends. If you could, Mac McCorkle would disown Padilla. They owned a bar together in Bonn, the West German capital, and stayed partners even after Padilla’s sideline as a CIA operative got the bar blown up. Padilla was thought to be dead and erased from the CIA’s files—but now he’s back on the agency’s turf.

Mac moved to Washington, DC, after the trouble in Bonn to get married and open his bar anew. His new bride is beautiful, the bar is a success, and Padilla’s reappearance threatens everything. A group of African terrorists want Padilla to assassinate the prime minister of their small sub-Saharan republic—and they’ve kidnapped Mac’s wife to use as leverage.

Review“Ross Thomas is without peer in American suspense.” — The Los Angeles Times 

“What Elmore Leonard does for crime in the streets, Ross Thomas does for crime in the suites.” —The Village Voice 

“Ross Thomas is that rare phenomenon, a writer of suspense whose novels can be read with pleasure more than once.” —Eric Ambler, author of The Mask of Dimitrios

About the AuthorThe winner of the inaugural Gumshoe Lifetime Achievement Award, Ross Thomas (1926–1995) was a prolific author whose political thrillers drew praise for their blend of wit and suspense. Born in Oklahoma City, Thomas grew up during the Great Depression, and served in the Philippines during World War II. After the war, he worked as a foreign correspondent, public relations official, and political strategist before publishing his first novel, The Cold War Swap (1967), based on his experience working in Bonn, Germany. The novel was a hit, winning Thomas an Edgar Award for Best First Novel and establishing the characters Mac McCorkle and Mike Padillo.

Thomas followed it up with three more novels about McCorkle and Padillo, the last of which was published in 1990. He wrote nearly a book a year for twenty-five years, occasionally under the pen name Oliver Bleeck, and won the Edgar Award for Best Novel with Briarpatch (1984). Thomas died of lung cancer in California in 1995, a year after publishing his final novel, Ah, Treachery!