The latest thriller featuring the sleek and sinister Silver Bear—from leading Hollywood scriptwriter Derek Haas.Columbus has retired. or so he thinks. He and his lover, Risina, a mysterious rare-book dealer, have fled to a tiny Italian coastal village where no one knows their names. And yet Columbus has trouble letting go. His paranoia is justified when, one day, he notices a suspicious man following him, and within days he’s back in Chicago trying to figure out why his old fence has been kidnapped and maybe even killed. The ransom note left behind demands Columbus by name. The Silver Bear must now sever this last link with his dark past if he and Risina are to ever have hope at a new life. yet Risina seems to show a remarkable knack for the kill herself . . . and perhaps there won’t be a chance for turning back.Review"At the start of Haas's solid third Silver Bear thriller, the assassin known as Columbus has retired.  Then Columbus learns that his former fence, Archibald Grant, has been kidnapped, and that a ransom note demands Columbus's return.  Poetic prose helps propel a plot... keeps readers guessing throughout." - Publisher's Weekly"Haas brings his cold, canny professional hit man back in this cold, canny thriller. Intricate and fascinating. Heartless Columbus offers cold comfort on dark nights." - Kirkus Reviews"When push comes to shove, the bullets don't just fly. They find their targets." - New Jersey Star Ledger"The assassin who calls himself Columbus and plies his trade in a devastatingly cool series is back. It's a pleasure to watch him go up against an adversary with a modus operandi even more diabolical than his own." - The New York TimesAbout the AuthorDerek Haas is the author of the novels The Silver Bear and Columbus. Derek co-wrote the screenplays for 3:10 to Yuma, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, and Wanted, starring James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie.  His latest film, The Double, starred Richard Gere and Martin Sheen.  Derek lives in Los Angeles.

A hitman isn't allowed to have a life... He calls himself Columbus. Some call him the Silver Bear. All know him as one of the deadliest assassins in the world. Now, as he tracks a powerful politician with presidential aspirations, the fragmented pieces of his own life begin to point to a terrible truth that will unmake everything he is, tear apart the shadowy, criminal world he rules-and put him right in the crosshairs.

Meet Austin Clay, the CIA's best-kept secret. There has always been a need in the spy game for operations outside the realm of legality-covert missions so black no one in the American government, and almost no one in intelligence itself, is aware of their existence. The left hand can't know what the right hand is doing. Austin Clay is that right hand, executing missions that would be disavowed by his own government were he ever to be compromised. His team consists of only his trusted handler and himself. His missions are among the most important and dangerous in U.S. history.Clay is sent to track down a missing American operative, a man who was captured outside of Moscow, in the Russian countryside. Soon he discovers the missing officer is only the beginning of the mission, and finds himself protecting a desperate woman who believes a mole has penetrated the top levels of the U.S. government, throwing the international...

Columbus is back and as deadly as ever. But the hunter has now become the hunted, in this sequel to the national bestseller The Silver Bear. He told you not to like him. To get close to Columbus, the Silver Bear, means death. Exactly whose death remains to be determined in Derek Haas' highly anticipated new thriller.Recouping in Europe after loosing his fence and best friend during his mission to assassinate his father, Columbus now finds his reverie interrupted by multiple assassins searching for the elusive Silver Bear. As Columbus eliminates each killer, more and more appear - a hydra effect he can only eliminate by finding the origin of the hit, a source connected to his own past. Racing across the globe, as both hunter and hunted, Columbus' travels take him to Italy, where he meets a mysterious woman named Risina. A woman with her own secret past, she may be Columbus' only hope of salvation.

"The intense psychological portrait of a hitman--the anti-Jason Bourne--as he stalks his prey from Boston to LA. He wants you to know him, maybe even admire him, but only for his excellence in his craft. Perhaps he was even born for it. ""A natural killer,"" his mentor--a middleman named Vespucci--said he was. He proved it with his first professional hit: a Fifth Circuit Court judge in Boston, executed with a sheet of Saran Wrap in the stairwell of her own courthouse. He's proved his merit often, usually with a Glock semiautomatic, but he's improvised too, with his bare hands, the heel of a shoe, knives, even a sewing machine. He is the consummate assassin, at the top of his form, immune to the psychological strains of his chosen profession. He is what the Russians call a Silver Bear. He calls himself Columbus. It's the name Vespucci gave him, ten years ago, when he discovered a dark, new world of fences, clients, marks, jobs, jack. Not that his real name meant much to him anyway. He never knew his father or his mother, a prostitute who became dangerously involved back in the seventies with an earnest young congressman named Abe Mann, then a rising star in the Democratic Party. The magnetic Abe Mann has since become the Speaker of the House. He is currently running for the Democratic nomination in an exhausting presidential campaign, weaving his way across the country. Columbus is not far behind. But as he pieces together his past and prepares the seamless assassination of his mark, the criminal underworld he has always ruled begins unraveling violently around him."