My daughter brought me an interesting book while I was in the hospital: Steve Berry's The Jefferson Key. If you enjoyed The DaVinci Code, in spite of its outlandish conspirascy theory, and the just below the surface anger at the Catholic Church for its toleration of pederasts, then you might enjoy The Jefferson Key. The hero is Cotton Malone, an agent of a supersecret intelligence task force that reports to the White House. I don't want to spoil it for you, but it invvolves a longstanding business established under a hitherto unknown letter of marque issued by the First Congress. A couple of years back after the hijacking of that ship off the coast of Somalia, one of my frequent co-authors was approached about writing a history of the letters of marque and reprisal provision of the Constitution.
We never actually wrote the paper, but during preliminary research, I learned a lot about this subject, and there was much in Berry's novel that showed he knew a lo about the subject. If you fihnd the oddities of American history and action thrillers exciting, you may well enjoy it.
In a similar vein is Berry's The Lincoln Myth, in which a group of coonspirators headed by a renegade Mormon U.S. Senator from Utah attemptto prove that Lincoln knew the Confederacy had the right to secede in the hopes of winning a dissolution movement in the modern U.S. In spite of the fact that the bad guy is really bad, and psychotic, it is clear that Berry's sympathies lie with a decentralized government. Great fn to read.
thanks, Clayton. You ruined my weekend!!!
ReplyDeleteI was in McDonalds having some lunch on the way home Saturday and reading your blog on my phone. I saw this and thought:
1) Claytone Cramer
And
2) Pirates
Seemed like a pretty strong reason to check it out so I downloaded the sample, then a few minutes later the whole book. an hour later my wife was calling wanting to kinow where I was.
I finished about 70% of it before I went to sleep Saturday night.
On one level, it is a horrible book and reminds me why I seldom read this genre of technothriller. The author is usually techno illiterate and expects his reader to be even more so.
On another level, once I started reading it as a fantasy where you could have valet motorcycle parking, billionaires who travel without bodyguards and machine guns that you can tie to a chair and have them still aimed 30 shots later it was pretty good.
All the foofaraw abuot the decoder, when instructions on how to make one are on the internet were a bit much too.
I am now 82% of the way in and figure I will finish tonight. Very hard to put down. So well worth the money and thank you for a great recommendation.
John Henry