Malcolm Vershun, a prosperous Antigua businessman, is about to be knighted by the Queen of England. Minutes before her majesty’s arrival, Malcolm is called to his ailing wife’s bedside. Running like a madman to reach her, British guards took him for a terrorist, and shot him. Malcolm recovered, but his wife suffered a fatal heart attack.

A year later, Jim and Loni, college grads, pass an active volcano on their forty-one foot, sailing sloop. The volcano is on Montserrat, a Caribbean island.

In space, the decaying orbit of a NASA satellite is realized, hurtling radioactive debris at Jim and Loni’s sailboat. Navy Lieutenant Hugh Tam, an expert on cleaning up radioactive messes, is called upon to find the satellite’s wreckage.

The writing team of Noel Carroll knit these characters and scenarios expertly together into a woven tapestry of an international political thriller. The Exclusion Zone feeds our fear of Islamic terrorists by exploiting the emotions of revenge, confusion, and disobedience—as Jim and Loni fall into a nest of men bent on the destruction of Queen Elizabeth.

The Exclusion Zone is a fast paced thriller with a mesmerizing arc. The plot is fluid, and the scene settings are cinemascopic. The reader finds himself rooting for the good guys and waiting for disaster to befall the antagonists.

The only weak link to the book was the use of two names for the terrorists—their Islamic names and their island names—confusing for this reader. However, anyone drawn into the political maelstrom of today’s war on terrorism will be riveted to The Exclusion Zone.