Hot Night in the City, Incident at Twenty-Mile, Shibumi, and The Summer of Katya

Overview: Rodney William Whitaker was an American film scholar and writer who wrote several successful novels under the pen name Trevanian. Whitaker wrote in a wide variety of genres, achieved best-seller status, and published under several other names as well, including Nicholas Seare, Beñat Le Cagot and Edoard Moran. NICHOLAI HEL.... Born in the ravages of WWI China to an aristocratic Russian mother and a mysterious German father, raised in the spiritual gardens of a Japanese Go master, he survives the destruction of Hiroshima to emerge as the world's most artful lover and it's most accomplished and highly paid assassin. Genius, mystic, master of language and culture, Hel's secret is his determination to attain a rare kind of personal excellence, a state of effortless perfection..... shibumi. Now living in an isolated mountain fortress with his magnificent Eurasion mistress, Hel faces his most sinister enemy --- a super-monolith of espionage and monopoly. The battle lines are drawn, ruthless power and corruption on one side and on the other...... SHIBUMI Maybe the best book I've ever read. A Russian-Japanese assassin uses his nearly superhuman mental and physical prowess to destroy political terrorists--from PLO to the CIA