The Colonel's Mistake Audiobook

Mark Sava, former CIA station chief of Azerbaijan, lives a quiet life as a professor at Western University in the city of Baku. But his peace is shattered by both the assassination of a high-level American during an international oil conference and the arrest of CIA operations officer Daria Buckingham for the crime.

Sava knows the Iranian American Buckingham well—he personally trained her—and doesn’t believe she had anything to do with the murder, so he visits a CIA control center to discuss the situation with the new station chief. When no one answers the outside intercom, Sava overrides the security code and stumbles upon the grisliest scene of his career. Now, he can’t help but wonder if he really knows Buckingham as well as he thought.…

Determined to find out, Sava soon finds himself and a partner caught in the middle of the new Great Game—a deadly intelligence war over oil that has Iran, China, and the United States clawing at each other’s throats. Meanwhile, Colonel Henry Amato, assistant to the US national security advisor, is keeping a close watch on the situation from Washington. His stake in the Great Game is high—and personal.

From the shadows of the world’s most volatile region to the highest levels of Washington politics, The Colonel’s Mistake takes listeners on an unforgettable ride where the good, the bad, and the brutal play a deadly chess game of global espionage.

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"My friend and classmate Dan Mayland has produced a bare-knuckled thriller that is an exemplar of the genre. Mayland's protagonist is Mark Sava, a cynical ex-CIA operative -- he's kind of like a down-at-heels American James Bond, without the clothes and gadgets -- who gets sucked into a brutal series of killings related to a shipment of stolen uranium and some pan-Islamic skulduggery. The plot is incomprehensible gibberish, but the atmosphere of obscure Central Asian backwaters and the rot and decay of former Soviet satellites is crisply sketched. The milieu is out of Graham Greene or Casablanca, seedy places where spies and turncoats run amok and bribery and duplicity is the lay of the land. Good, tough, quick-moving stuff. The first of a series."

— Mike (5 out of 5 stars)