"Empire of Lies"
Andrew Klavan (Harcourt)
Jason Harrow, the hero of Andrew Klavan's new crime novel, used to be a sexual sadist, taking pleasure in causing pain to submissive New York City women. But then he found God, moved away from Gomorra, settled down in the wholesome Midwest and married a nice, normal woman.
Readers will find it difficult to like Jason Harrow, either the deviate he once was or the sanctimonious jerk he has become.
Harrow's past comes back to haunt him when a former girlfriend asks him to come back to New York to help her with her teenage daughter who, to Harrow's surprise, turns out to be his child. The girl is running with the wrong crowd and mixed up in something bad. Just what, her mother can't say.
The mother is shopworn, incompetent and emotionally damaged, at least in part because of her past relationship with Harrow. But Klavan portrays her as trash, offering no trace of understanding or sympathy.
As it happens, the daughter is in trouble because she has witnessed something related to a terrorist plot being hatched by some Middle Eastern college students and an outspokenly anti-American professor of Middle Eastern descent. As Harrow begins to learn about the plot, he decides there's no point in calling the FBI for help because they won't be interested - which makes you wonder what country the author has been living in since Sept. 11, 2001.
Any one of these problems might be enough to sink a novel but what finally does this one in are several long, tedious passages in which Harrow - serving as Klavan's surrogate - lectures the reader on politics and current affairs.
Crime novelists can be as political as the rest of us and it is sometimes possible to infer their politics from their stories. James Lee Burke, for example, is a populist with a deep-seated suspicion of power and wealth.
Klavan occupies the portion of the political spectrum commonly known as right-wing crackpot. Through Harrow he tells us, among other things, that the entire media is a left-wing conspiracy, that taxes steal from the rich to give to the poor, that America is in a holy war with Islam, that the truth about darned near everything in the United States is obscured by a blizzard of politically correct lies and that anyone who disagrees with him is deluded.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with building a novel around a character who holds such views. And there's nothing to prevent a writer who holds such views from writing an entertaining crime novel. Klavan, the author of eight previous novels, has proven that with several good ones including "Dynamite Road" and "True Crime."
But a crime novel stops being entertaining when the author uses it as a platform for political diatribes.
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