- Klavan, Andrew.
Empire of Lies.
New York: Harcourt, 2008.
ISBN 978-0-15-101223-7.
-
One perfect October Saturday afternoon, Jason Harrow,
successful businessman, happily married father of three,
committed Christian whose religion informs his moral sense,
is sharing a lazy day with his family when the phone rings and
sets into a motion an inexorable sequence of events which
forces him to confront his dark past, when he was none of
those things. Drawn from his prosperous life in the Midwest
to the seamy world of Manhattan, he finds himself enmeshed in
an almost hallucinatory web of evil and deceit which makes him
doubt his own perception of reality, fearing that the dementia
which consumed his mother is beginning to manifest itself in
him, and that his moral sense is nothing but a veneer over
the dark passions of his past.
This is a thriller that thrills. Although the story is
unusual for these days in having a Christian protagonist who is not a
caricature, this is no
Left Behind
hymn-singing tract; in fact, the language and situations are
quite rough and unsuitable for the less than mature. The author,
two of whose earlier books have been adapted into
the films
True Crime
and
Don't Say a Word,
has a great deal of fun at the expense of the legacy
media, political correctness, and obese, dissipated,
staccato-speaking actors who—once
portrayed—dashing—spacefarers.
If you fall into any of those categories,
you may be intensely irritated by this book, but otherwise
you'll probably, like me, devour it in a few sittings. I
just finished it this perfect October Saturday afternoon,
and it's one of the most satisfying thrillers I've read in
years.
A spoiler-free
podcast
interview with the author is available.
October 2008 