Klavan

In 1991, a spartThe first Andrew Klavan novel I read was Don’t Say a Word. It was part of my job as a New York book club editor, two years after the Salman Rushdie fatwa required we post an armed guard in our drab reception area and two years before the WTC was attacked the first time, also by Islamic fanatics. I didn’t like the book. Don’t Say a Word was a thriller about a Manhattan couple whose young daughter is kidnapped; when they receive a call from the culprit telling them not to do a thing if they want to see their daughter alive again, they don’t. They sit and wait. I didn’t buy it for a second (but my .

fairy tale thriller

Set in an EveryCity Where Democrat Policies have left the streets in darkness, ruin and violence

Augie Lancaster a smooth-talking, untouchable local politician on a meteoric national rise “a transitional moment” – “City of Hope, City of Justice”at

“reporters were in ecstasy over him, not even reporters anymore but simply heralds of his rise, trailing in the clouds of his glory like mandolin-bearing cherubs on a church ceiling”

New Emblem of the Transfigured African-American Narrative

Lt. Brick Ramsey, a jaded (black) follower of Augie’s (with an equally phony image of virtue and dignity) now just a slave to do Augie’s dirty work

ambiguous race unclear who is black and who is white

John Shannon aka Henry Conor in love with war widow and single mom Teresa – “Somewhere inside, he knew it all had to come apart at some point, because he knew he was a fraud… a fugitive fraud with a murder rap hanging over his head.”

He becomes willing to die in a sting operation to bring down Ramsey and Augie if it will prove to Teresa afterwards that he really wasn’t a bad guy – he would die knowing she understood him

a page too long (a less pat ending would have been just as effective – with the promise of hope, if not the instant gratification)