: The Inner Sanctum
Author: Stephen Frey
What a bewildering mess! Take three ordinary thrillers, one legal, one financial, and one political and throw them in a blender. What comes out is this book. Be sure you don’t rearrange the pages as you take them out of the blender, just use them in the order you find them. It will make as much sense as this concoction. Okay, it may not be quite that bad, but it’s certainly not good. First, we are introduced to about 50 different characters over the course of 50 pages. Then, when you’ve completely lost track of who the first twenty or so were, we go back to them. Of course each scene is like two to four pages long, so it’s not like there’s much to work with. You literally don’t have much of a clue what’s happening until two-thirds of the way through the book. By that time the conspiracy is starting to take shape, but by then you don’t really care. You’re sick of all these people. The plot’s about a giant conspiracy involving Senators, corporations, financial institution, and the little people who uncover the secret and are marked for death. Basically the book needs to be cut in half, simplify the plot considerably, and make the scenes longer and more interesting. Frey’s usually better than this; this feels like he was trying to be ambitious and create an epic or something and instead we’ve got a fairly ordinary conspiracy that takes way, way too long to unravel. Skip it.
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