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If you are a fan of conspiracies, covert organizations, secret codes and pirates, not necessarily in that order, then Steve Berry's latest Cotton Malone thriller THE JEFFERSON KEY is your kind of book. Everyone whispers secrets; everyone uses or is being used by someone involved with secret government or non-governmental organizations. Assassination and murder are rampant, with anonymous agents expendable on almost every page. Murder by drowning in a cage, injection of fatal fish poison, car bomb, head crushing, stabbing and bullets through various body parts occur in almost every chapter, and the chapters are short. Pirates engage in deaths by torture, and some scenes are exceedingly gruesome. Remote controlled machine guns also appear, and for readers with good memories, this plot device was used a decade ago by David Balldaci in LAST MAN STANDING. In the first few pages there is an assassination attempt on the President, Danny Daniels. Very soon, someone is dangling out a window then trying to escape by running through hotel corridors, while a meeting of two men in Central Park ends with only one of them alive. All of this is related to a man named Quentin Hale, who is a modern day version of a pirate, although he prefers the term privateer, the head of an organization called The Commonwealth. This group functions like a nautical Mafia, with captains and a quartermaster and a crew. Hale is the one who needs to break the Jefferson cipher. The information in this code will lead to papers that affirm the Commonwealth's legitimacy. In brief, Hale's ancestors were given the ok to ply their trade by the founding fathers, since they functioned as a sort of navy and preyed on enemy ships. However, Andrew Jackson ripped these pages from the Congressional record and hid them behind an unbreakable cipher because he believed the Commonwealth had tried to assassinate him. This may have been true, as The Commonwealth does not like to be messed with, and in the past they have been responsible for most of the attempted Presidential assassinations, both unsuccessful and successful (think Lincoln et al). But in the present day, the government has stopped protecting them, because of some financial mischief they were a part of in Dubai, and they need to find those pages or be subject to arrest. In short order, however, a number of individuals and groups are racing around trying to decipher the code and find the papers before anyone else, for many reasons, not all of them very clear. The problem with this book is not so much the outlandishness of this hidden organization, but rather that all of the groups seem to be fighting with each other, lying to each other, killing each other's agents, and generally creating mayhem that is difficult to follow. These include some real and some fictional agencies: the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the NIA and an even more secret organization called the Magellan Billet. We are not given enough information or details to be able to know one organization or character from another. The last section of the book sprints up and down the eastern seaboard, from North Carolina to Nova Scotia, with simultaneous shoot-outs, murders and tortures being conducted. Malone must fly back and forth through turbulent weather to be a part of all that is happening and to save the day. Berry includes a brief chapter explaining which of the book's events are historically accurate and which are not. The tie-ins to historical facts make this book more fascinating than it has any right to be, considering its confusion of events and profusion of bad guys. Anne Corey is a writer, poet, teacher and botanical artist in New York's Hudson Valley.
Reviewed by Anne Corey, July 2011
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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