Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 400 pages
- Published by: Harcourt
- Edition: 1st Edition July 14, 2008
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0151012237
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0151012237
-
Book Dimensions:
9 x 6.3 x 1 inches
- Weighs: 1.3 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
Edgar-winner Klavan (
True Crime) delivers a wickedly satiric thriller with political overtones. Jason Harrow was cynically immoral before he found God and became a conservative Midwestern family man. Now his former lover summons him back to
New York City with the news that his teenage daughter (one he never knew about) is in trouble, mixed up with terrorists who are plotting a major atrocity. To save his daughter and thousands of others, Jason must confront the buried fear that he's inherited his mother's insanity and can't control his own dark urges. As Jason's insecurity intensifies, so does the novel's nightmarish mood. Disgusted by the excesses of the liberal media, Jason discovers that he's not just paranoid, he really
is a persecuted outsider. The action builds to an explosive climax at the screening of a 3-D movie at a Manhattan theater.
(July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
Sustained by a deep religious faith, Jason Harrow has built a stable family and become a pillar of principle and patriotism in the Midwest. Then the phone rings, and his past is on the other end of the line. A lady with whom he once shared a life of violence and desire claims her daughter is missing—and Jason is the one man who can find her.
Returning to
New York City, Jason finds himself entangled in a murderous conspiracy only he can see and only he can stop—a plot that bizarrely links his private passions to the turmoil of a world at war. Hunted by terrorists and by the police, Jason has only hours to unravel an ex-lover’s lies and face the unbearable truth: In order to prevent a savage attack on his country, he’s going to have to risk his decency, his sanity, and his life.
Reader Reviews"And in an Empire of Lies, only a crazy man would speak the truth." --Brent Withers, to Jason Harrow. Although he has much to regret about his reckless youth, middle aged Jason Harrow has certainly turned his life around, finding joy and satisfaction in his marriage, family, religion and work. Indeed, he's feeling a bit self-satisfied, almost smug about things, until the day he receives a call from an ex-girlfriend, reviving his worst fears about a part of his life he bitterly regrets. Mere days after receiving that call, Harrow finds himself in the middle of a highly improbable situation, a nightmare scenario that challenges his ingenuity, intelligence, and his sanity. Weighing in on one of the author's earlier works, the riveting novel True Crime, Stephen King called Andrew Klavan "The most original American novelist of crime and suspense since Cornell Woolrich." Empire of Lies bears that statement out, as, evoking Woolrich, Klavan constructs a mind boggling maze of conspiracy and paranoia. Like the stunned protagonist of a Hitchcock thriller, Harrow is thrust onto a surrealistic stage to play a role in a production he never dreamed he'd ever be involved in---his world is turned upside down, to the point where he wonders, if he, like his deceased mother, is losing his mind. Klavan, whose blogs seem to indicate he sees the world much the same as his extremely conservative, headstrong, but likable protagonist, does an artful job of bringing the reader along, plunging both his audience and his hero into a world gone mad, while skillfully building towards an explosive and surprising crescendo.
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