The Other Me

HE NEVER SAID IT. FORTY MILLION PEOPLE WATCHED HIM SAY IT.At 4:02 a.m., a video appears online. In it, Martin Ashby, a seventy-four-year-old retired American Foreign Commercial Officer, calmly confesses to thirty years of selling his country’s secrets. By sunrise, forty million people have watched it. By noon, his bank accounts are frozen, his friends have stopped calling, and the FBI is at his kitchen table.There is only one problem. Martin never said a word of it.The face is his. The voice is his. Even the nervous way he taps his glasses is his, except that the man on the screen uses the wrong hand. Only Helen, his wife of fifty years, notices. Nobody believes her.Then a longtime colleague is found dead. New videos appear, each more damning than the last. A federal warrant is issued, and the people who could clear Martin are being silenced one by one.With his memory, a lifelong habit of keeping paper copies, and a few unlikely allies, Martin follows the trail from the Catskill Mountains to a powerful Washington defense contractor, a buried 1991 embassy report from postwar Kuwait, and a Senate confirmation hearing broadcast live to the nation.He has eight days to prove the hardest thing of all: that the real man is the one standing in front of you.THE OTHER ME is a fast-paced, all-too-plausible thriller about truth, power, and the one thing no machine can fake: being truly known by the people who love you. Perfect for readers of political thrillers, technothrillers, and espionage fiction.