Book Description

For Scot Wallace, there seems no end to the demands and threats of a wild card in Saddam Hussein’s leadership pack. Even the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq provides no respite for Wallace, a Cyprus-based import-export trader. Against all odds, the wild card – a senior Iraqi bureaucrat – survives purges by the Americans and the new Iraqi administration. Despite international sanctions, Wallace has traded with the Iraqi government through contacts within Baghdad’s Trade Department. Then, out of the blue, he’s contacted by Baghdad’s feared and dreaded Interior Ministry. Against better judgment he meets the wild card, The Baghdad Chameleon, and problems begin.
Wallace is further entwined into this Levantine web of intrigue when the Iraqi puts him in touch with Boris, a Russian living in the Cypriot port city of Limassol. The Russian could be of help, the Iraqi declares. With most of Saddam’s senior officials captured, or dead, how does this Iraqi survive?
To help get an answer, the novel introduces a dubious Syrian businessman, an alluring East European woman, a former British soldier sacked for being gay, and the Russian who is said to manage the finances of some Moscow oligarchs.
But truth is elusive in the Middle East, where half-truth and gossip often pass for fact.
With America and its allies tied down in Afghanistan and about to invade Iraq, tragedy, loneliness and greed conspire to lure Wallace into the Iraqi’s trap. It becomes his own Middle East quagmire.
The Baghdad Chameleon is set in Cyprus, Syria, Iraq and Australia during the last months of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the emergence of an American-backed government in Iraq. It looks at how individuals – and nations – become trapped in the Middle East and explores the case that all nations – Western and emerging – can be accused of abusing human rights.

Extracts from reviews of the paperback edition:

‘The Baghdad Chameleon (Poppy Press, 273pp, $27.99) is the second novel by another journalist, The Age’s former Middle East correspondent, David Balderstone. Like its predecessor A Road from Damascus, this adventure is centred in the Middle East and sows a triangle of intrigue between Cyprus, Syria and Iraq…..The Baghdad Chameleon is an enjoyable instance of the recrudescence of the espionage thriller, which suffered more than most genres (with the exception perhaps of social realism) from the death of communism. There’s little idealism here; only a variety of characters with elastic ethical thresholds playing the angles. But it’s interesting to follow Wallace to these places as the bodies start to accumulate. Balderstone shows an understanding of the geopolitics of the region. When our Middle Eastern news diet is primarily pictures of violence and Islamic extremism, The Baghdad Chameleon provides the counter-image of complex interrelated cultures united by the pragmatism of doing deals. This evocation of a region, so easily characterised by our ignorance of it, makes it a better than average read.’
– The Australian Review November 24-25, 2012 – New Australian Fiction: Ed Wright

‘This action packed novel has Scot Wallace, a Lemesos (Limassol) trader, as its protagonist. It not only takes you to the Lemesos, Larnaca, and the mountain village of Kakopetria, but also to Syria, Iraq and Australia, where there is plenty of intrigue and more than a little “love interest”……Australian author David Balderstone has certainly penned a gripping novel that will keep you in suspense until its final pages.’
–Sunjet, the in-flight magazine of Cyprus Airways

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