Burying the Dead

Playing off today's headlines, Burying the Dead serves up a high stakes game of love and death set on the power courts of Washington, DC, and other glittering world capitals. There Dimitri "e;Dimi"e; Orlov is a rising Russian tennis star whose glamorous, globetrotting career provides the perfect cover for his real day job -- agent and assassin. Trained by his government from the time he's discovered in an orphanage, Dimi is assigned to assassinate the president of the United States -- a brilliant but arrogant onetime New York prosecutor who's proved too independent for his Russian backers -- by romancing and enlisting his abused first lady, Catherine Darlington. Dimi courts the lovely, loveless Catherine at Renaissance House, a new cultural center in historic Dupont Circle that's a front for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and at the US Open. There he's shadowed by CIA agent Mitch Abramson, who has begun to connect the dots. But just as the various matches Dimi and Catherine, Dimi and Mitch -- heat up, Dimi makes a choice that could have his bosses take him out of the game permanently.