Skip to main content

Review: Capitol Reflections, by Jonathan Javitt


Marci Newman is a healthy woman and high-powered attorney, so when she dies of a seizure on the floor of a courtroom, her best friend, Gwen Maulder of the FDA, suspects foul play. But Gwen, and her husband, as well as many others, find themselves in way over their heads when they uncover a sinister plot involving coffee, a Senator, and a major worldwide corporation.

In all, I didn't like Capitol Reflections. While the action was fast-paced and had me frantically turning pages (I admit I'm a bit of a sucker for action-adventure-mystery commercial fiction), I thought that a lot of the book was cliché, in a way. The characters are all stereotypes for the genre and don't have much three-dimensional-ness to them. The bad guys are all a part of a secret group called Tabula Rasa (Clean Slate in Latin--how predictable) a la the Da Vinci Code, and it doesn't take much guesswork to figure out straight from the beginning who Ops One is.

The writing is choppy and the plot dives off into different tangents--some characters are involved in the Asian sex slave trade, another used to be a German SS officer--and the ultimate demise of the bad guy was disappointing to say the least. There were parts of the book where I thought the author veered off into sexism, especially in the brief scenes with Henry Broome's wife. And some of the scientific jargon in the book made my head spin. In all, I'd only recommend this book to hard core fans of the genre, and even then only because you have nothing else to read. The book just doesn't live up to the hype it was given.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Another giveaway

This time, the publicist at WW Norton sent me two copies of The Glass of Time , by Michael Cox--so I'm giving away the second copy. Cox is the author of The Meaning of Night, and this book is the follow-up to that. Leave a comment here to enter to win it! The deadline is next Sunday, 10/5/08.

A giveaway winner, and another giveaway

The winner of the Girl in a Blue Dress contest is... Anna, of Diary of An Eccentric ! My new contest is for a copy of The Shape of Mercy , by Susan Meissner. According to Publisher's Weekly : Meissner's newest novel is potentially life-changing, the kind of inspirational fiction that prompts readers to call up old friends, lost loves or fallen-away family members to tell them that all is forgiven and that life is too short for holding grudges. Achingly romantic, the novel features the legacy of Mercy Hayworth—a young woman convicted during the Salem witch trials—whose words reach out from the past to forever transform the lives of two present-day women. These book lovers—Abigail Boyles, elderly, bitter and frail, and Lauren Lars Durough, wealthy, earnest and young—become unlikely friends, drawn together over the untimely death of Mercy, whose precious diary is all that remains of her too short life. And what a diary! Mercy's words not only beguile but help Abigail and Lars

Six Degrees of Barbara Pym's Novels

This year seems to be The Year of Barbara Pym; I know some of you out there are involved in some kind of a readalong in honor of the 100th year of her birth. I’ve read most of her canon, with only The Sweet Dove Died, Civil to Strangers, An Academic Question, and Crampton Hodnet left to go (sadly). Barbara Pym’s novels feature very similar casts of characters: spinsters, clergymen, retirees, clerks, and anthropologists, with which she had direct experience. So it stands to reason that there would be overlaps in characters between the novels. You can trace that though the publication history of her books and therefore see how Pym onionizes her stories and characters. She adds layers onto layers, adding more details as her books progress. Some Tame Gazelle (1950): Archdeacon Hoccleve makes his first appearance. Excellent Women (1952): Archdeacon Hoccleve gives a sermon that is almost incomprehensible to Mildred Lathbury; Everard Bone understands it, however, and laughs