Blake Salinger is a marketing executive.
Val Salinger is an agent with the Agency.
I mentioned Blake Salinger first because he is the first of the two that we meet. In that meeting, he is going about his normal workday when the police enter a presentation with the news that he is wanted for murder. His victim? Val Salinger.
Val Salinger is Blake's father and while it seems Blake did not have a reason for patricide before the arrest, he definitely had one afterwards. Blake tells the police detectives that he loved his father but that they had been distant for some time and it had been over a year since they last talked. The police did not buy it.
When we first meet Val Salinger, in the first chapter of the first book, he is being disturbed from his sleep with his wife by a man who has come from the Agency to kill him. It is interesting the number of people who want this man dead.
Speaking of the Agency and being dead, that is apparently the main purpose for this really unknown and unnamed piece of the government intelligence community. The Agency did not do espionage work so much as "for lack of a better term - solved problems". That solution usually came in the form of eliminating the problem, i.e., killing someone. Val Salinger was especially good at elimination. Which is definitely not like being the accountant that Blake thought his father was.
If the relationship between father and son was strange enough, it will become even odder when the son moves on to being a part of the very agency that wants the father dead.
Good Line:
- From a spymaster with the Agency: "When you're the head of an agency full of puppets, you had to stay active in order to work the strings."