Written with compassion and a true understanding of the current politics and business world of the Middle East, The Desert Contract paints a dead-on portrait of Saudi Arabia's near future and, at the same time, deftly examines what happens when passion, commitment, and loyalties collide.

Late at night on the eleventh-floor balcony of a deserted building on the Persian Gulf, American businessman Steve Kemp finds himself falling back in love with Helen--the Irishwoman he'd left more than a decade before--as bombs explode below.

Kemp returned to the Eastern Province of Saudi...