April 30, 2012
President Franklin Roosevelt recruits 21-year-old John F. Kennedy to be his personal spy in this imaginative, well-researched mix of fact and fiction. In February 1939, FDR meets secretly with a sickly Jack, whom one of his Harvard professors has commended as “an independent thinker,” at New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel. FDR wants Jack, who’s about to travel through Europe to research his senior thesis, to stop a courier bringing German money to America, part of Hitler’s plan to defeat FDR in the 1940 election. FDR can trust few people, certainly not J. Edgar Hoover, the ambitious FBI chief, who may be bugging the Oval Office, nor Joseph P. Kennedy, his unreliable ambassador to Britain. Mathews (The Alibi Club) provides an intriguing look at pre-WWII politics, both in the U.S. and Europe, as well as a meticulous character study of the future president, who, overshadowed by his more promising older brother, is eager to prove his own worth. Agent: Raphael Sagalyn, the Sagalyn Literary Agency.
July 15, 2012
FDR recruits a young Jack Kennedy to do some sleuthing in Europe on the eve of World War II. It's early 1939. Jack is 21, overshadowed by older brother Joe and racked by an undiagnosed disease, but Roosevelt sees past all that because he intuits that Jack is a nonconformist and risk-taker. The president has decided to run for a third term. What concerns him is a German network steering money to Democratic clubhouses in hopes of electing an isolationist. Jack must find out how it operates; as son of the ambassador to London, he will have all the access he needs. The premise is different enough from Philip Roth's The Plot Against America to be workable, and Mathews has carefully researched the period, but her portrait of Jack comes up short. She captures the charming ladies' man, the romantic hero indifferent to death, but there's little sign of his questing intelligence; Jack's initial reason for traveling is to research his Harvard senior thesis (eventually his first book, Why England Slept). His fellow travelers on the trans-Atlantic crossing include Diana Playfair, an English femme fatale and Fascist sympathizer, and the White Spider, a psychopathic killer working for Gestapo chief Heydrich. We've already seen the Spider knife to death his first two victims, a sign that melodramatic cheap thrills will trump geopolitical intrigue. Jack will fall big time for Diana as they crisscross Europe. They will make furious love, but can she be trusted, especially after Heydrich snaps her up? Jack sends Morse code messages to FDR. He'll be in plenty of tight spots, though there's usually backup, and he gets to use his Luger. What hurts Jack most is his discovery that his dad is one of the network's secret donors; their confrontation gets physical. A bold concept, poorly executed by this veteran thriller writer (Blown, 2005, etc.).
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February 1, 2012
President Roosevelt wants to send someone to Europe to figure out what Hitler really intends and to prevent German funds meant to ensure Roosevelt's loss in the 1940 election from reaching America. His choice? John F. Kennedy, the son of America's ambassador to Britain, who's traveling the Continent to collect data for his senior thesis. Rumor has it that this is a fun, fast-paced, sexy thriller, and as Mathews was an intelligence analyst for the CIA in the 1990s, the atmosphere should be authentic.
Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
May 1, 2012
A striking photograph of a rail-thin 22-year-old Jack Kennedy, clowning on a street in Nuremburg, Germany, was the catalyst for former CIA intelligence analyst and mystery writer Mathews' vivid and sexy historical thriller. In spite of his poor health and the gathering storm of war in 1939, Harvard student Jack is determined to go to London, where his father is ambassador to England, to work on his senior thesis. On the eve of his departure, he is shocked to find himself meeting clandestinely with FDR, who believes Jack will be a perfect spy. Locked in a vicious battle with the unsavory J. Edgar Hoover, FDR suspects that the Nazis are involved in a plot to keep him from serving a third term. From London to Rome, Berlin, Paris, Prague, and the French Alps, brainy, romantic, and intrepid Jack is shadowed by a serial killer, steered by Resistance operatives, and inflamed by an enigmatic beauty as his high-wire investigation imperils his family loyalty and his life. Jack is beguiling, and Mathews' strobe-light, fact-infused drama of covert pre-WWII operations is riveting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)
Starred review from May 15, 2012
Mathews (writing as Stephanie Barron) is continuing her successful Jane Austen mystery series, but this is an author who likes to stretch. In her latest thriller (after The Alibi Club), her protagonist is a young John "Jack" Kennedy, tasked by Franklin Roosevelt with trying to figure out how the Germans are funneling money into American elections. The goal of the Germans is to keep America on its isolationist path and uninvolved (in an active sense) with what is going on in Europe. Jack, who equally battles his mysterious illness and his powerful father, is seen by most as a somewhat unpromising scion of the Kennedy family; however, FDR sees a bright young man willing to take risks, and those are qualities he can put to use. VERDICT Though this reviewer was skeptical about how well a fictional Kennedy would work, she should have trusted Mathews. Young Jack Kennedy makes for a flawed but appealing protagonist, and the espionage plot is complex and thrilling in equal parts. For fans of Stella Rimington and Olen Steinhauer. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/12.]--Jane Jorgenson, Madison P.L., WI
Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.