Books by Klavan, Andrew

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