Liberation Day By Andy McNab

Doubleday Canada, $36.95

After keeping a suitably respectful distance from the sensitive events of Sept. 11, 2001, the thriller business is now gearing up to cash in with post-terrorist-attack plotlines.

Andy McNab's Nick Stone is out of the gate, his latest mission taking place in the months after the attacks as American troops are mopping up in Afghanistan. Stone, a British agent eager for a U.S. passport, reluctantly agrees to join a U.S. project to seize al-Qaeda fundraisers in the south of France.

His American girlfriend -- daughter of his shadowy boss -- has threatened to disown him if he doesn't quit the business and settle down with her in New England. Their relationship flows from a previous adventure in Latin America, but readers won't need to know of any of the four earlier Stone books to catch on.

Stone is paired with two Egyptian allies -- Islamic idealists who volunteered to fight against al-Qaeda -- in a razor's-edge assignment to snatch three members of the "hawalla," the centuries-old Middle Eastern honour-based system of banking and transporting of money.

The idea is to stop millions of dollars in terrorist funding from falling into the hands of Osama bin Laden and his henchmen, to finance a suicide bomber assault on the massive Mall of America in Minnesota on Christmas Eve.

Most of the book is taken up with a tense second-by-second high-tech surveillance that takes the team from Monaco to Nice and Cannes as they track a mysterious yacht used by the hawallada to move the cash. That part begins with nail-biting tension, but despite the authentic detail, it soon becomes repetitive and could have been tightened to allow for an expansion of plot developments elsewhere.

Still, McNab seems to know of what he writes. He's a former member of the SAS, Britain's crack elite special forces, and the dust cover copy says he is the only fiction writer whose books are so authentically sensitive that they require vetting by the British Ministry of Defence.