A tall, blond Englishman with opaque, gray eyes. A killer at the top of his profession. A man unknown to any secret service in the  world. An assassin with a contract to kill the world's most heavily guarded man.One  man with a rifle who can change the course of history. One man whose mission is so secretive not even his employers know his name. And as the minutes count down to the final act of execution, it seems that there is no power on earth that can stop the Jackal.

    The unexpected arrival of a new apprentice jockey at his father's racing stables heralds the beginning of a series of dark happenings for Neil Griffon. First his father suffers a grisly accident, and then Neil is brutally assaulted and abducted. The price for his freedom will mean the betrayal and deception of those who trust Griffon most. But he has no choice: a no-compromise crime czar has made an ultimatum--that his own eighteen-year-old son be hired by Griffon's stables to ride the superstar horse, Archangel, in the Derby. And the young man must be trained to win. Or else....

    

    Stewart in this engrossing novel of a fire started by lightning in the dry heat of September, and fanned out of control by unexpected winds. The book begins with the origins of the fire—smoldering quietly at first, unnoticed, then suddenly bursting into a terrifying inferno, devouring trees and animals over acre after acre and leaving nothing but desolation in its wake.Firefighters and lookouts, forest rangers and smokejumpers—as well as animals in the forest, many of them the bewildered victims of the blaze, and all the varied tress and bushes there—are characters of this realistic story.

    This murder mystery set in Bourbonville, Tennessee, in the aftermath of the Civil War won the Friends of American Writers prize for best first novel when it was first published in 1969.