Int'l Rescue Negotiator Daniel Levin

Daniel Levin was at his office in New York when he got a call from an acquaintance with an urgent, cryptic request to meet in Paris. A young man had gone missing in Syria. No government, embassy, or intelligence agency would help. Could he? Would he? This begins the suspenseful, shocking, and at times brutal true-life story, PROOF OF LIFE: Twenty Days on the Hunt for a Missing Person in the Middle East (Algonquin Books: May 18, 2021), that finds Levin, a lawyer turned armed-conflict negotiator, navigating the seedy and dangerous underbelly of the Middle East, where he encounters powerful sheiks, drug lords, and sex traffickers in pursuit of the truth. This is a job he now takes on every day…

Over the course of twenty intense days, Levin barters and negotiates his way through Istanbul, Beirut, Amman, and Dubai on a quest to find a young man who disappeared under suspicious circumstances. This dangerous journey brings him into contact with the shadowy world of the underground war economy where everything is for sale, and he sees first-hand the power of the industries that endlessly fuel these conflicts—the trade of cash, goods, weapons, drugs and most devastatingly, people.