The Matlock Paper [VINTAGE 1973] [FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING] Ludlum, Robert

Fine unread condition silver boards, black cloth spine, red front cover lettering, and silver spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped color illustrated dust jacket. Includes List of Other Books by Robert Ludlum and Author Dedication. "First found on a dead man, the filthy, mutilated, silver-coated paper has made its way from the Turkish hills of Toros Daglari to Ankara, from Rashid to Marrakesh, from Washington, D.C., to a small college town named Carlyle. The writing on the paper is Corsican, in a little known strain called Oltremontan. Yet it is understood quickly by those who see it, for it is an invitation to an urgent meeting of the overlords of crime. It is an invitation as well to an innocent man named James Barbour Matlock - an invitation to horror, to pain, to the savage torture of the girl he loves, and almost surely to his death. For Matlock, Associate Professor of English at Carlyle University, ahs been selected by Washington's data banks to discover where and when the meeting is to take place, and to do by himself precisely what the crime chiefs have called the meeting to do: Break up an immensely powerful organization known only as Nimrod. Nimrod - ruler of Babylon and Nineveh - distributor of narcotics, overseer of prostitution, gambling, loan-sharking, and corporate - even government - corruption throughout the Northeast, affecting every college and university on the academic landscape. An inexorable machine destroying everything in its path, a force wherein the elite have taken control of too much, too willingly surrendered - and yet, an orgainization not unloved. For, in the words of a young Yale student, a Vietnam veteran caught in its gears: It's mid-America, man! It's company policy! By coming face to face with Nimrod, Matlock comes face to face with the ultimate terror. And through his odyssey the reader is led through a heart-stopping chain of events so frighteningly plausible that the view of a peaceful college campus can never again be exactly the same." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.