The Brotherhood of the Rose

Title: The Brotherhood of the Rose
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Synopsis

They were orphans, Chris and Saul—raised in a Philadelphia orphanage, bonded by friendship, and devoted to a mysterious man called Eliot. He visited them and brought them candy. He treated them like sons. He trained them to be assassins. Now he is trying desperately to have them killed. Spanning the globe and full of heart-stopping action, The Brotherhood of the Rose is an astonishing novel of fierce loyalty and violent betrayal, of murders planned and coolly executed, of revenge bitterly, urgently desired.

Praise

“Impossible to put it down.”
—San Francisco Chronicle 

“Imagine a suspense thriller as riveting as The Thirty-Nine Steps or Rogue Male, featuring heroes the equal of Adam Hall’s Quiller, and crackling with more action that The Road Warrior, Dirty Harry, and The Seven Samurai combined. Sounds too good to be true? Then just read David Morrell’s The Brotherhood of the Rose.”
—Washington Post Book World 

“Tough, ingeniously plotted, and always gripping, this thriller will stir the blood of even the most jaundiced reader.”
—Publishers Weekly

Backstory

This was my first big international thriller. Two boys in an orphanage (Saul, a Jew; Chris, an Irish Catholic) are befriended by an elderly man, who unknown to them works for the CIA. He makes the boys love him as a substitute father, then trains them to be his personal intelligence operatives when they are adults. Eventually, to protect himself, he turns against them. The emotions in The Brotherhood of the Rose come out my experiences in an orphanage when I was three, after my father died. When my mother remarried, it was to a man who didn’t like children. The arguments between him and my mother were so fierce that I slept in fear under my bed. In a way, this is a novel about an evil stepfather. It’s filled with all kinds of authentic CIA history and tradecraft. Eliot is based on a real CIA counter-espionage master, James Jesus Angleton.