Jericho's Fall (Vintage Contemporaries) [Paperback]

I have enjoyed Carter's three previous thrillers featuring black lawyers & academics and richly drawn characters in a broad landscape. He should have stayed with a winning formula and an environment he knows but instead turned to the world of spies and financial fraud to write what he described as a "short, straightforward page turner". Would that it were!
The book opens with protagonist Beck DeForde driving to the deathbed of former CIA Director Jericho Ainsley, who had ruined his career fifteen years earlier as a result of a scandalous love affair with her at Princeton when she was a sophomore and he was a married professor. Carter attempts to establish an atmosphere of suspense with suspicious vans and helicopters hovering around Jericho's home, bodies of slaughtered animals left outside the door, the death of Ainsley's longtime caretaker under mysterious circumstances, and a multitude of visitors appearing at the door with motives unknown. Over this all hover Ainsley's two crone-like daughters (one of whom is a former interrogator for the CIA who is now an Episcopal nun) exuding a general atmosphere of hostility towards one and all. Ainsley claims to have secrets that powerful forces are prepared to kill to hide or steal, and he tries to enlist Beck to help him, although he can't quite get around to telling her what he wants her to do. There is also the strong belief by many of the characters that Ainsley is mentally ill and is making up the secrets he purports to have. As a set-up to a suspense story, this sounds fine, but after 93 pages and nine chapters I found myself screaming internally, "Okay, okay, so get on with it!" The pace is plodding.
When he does get on with it, the plot is thin, not very credible, and ultimately unsatisfying. The actions of many of the characters, including Beck, seem inadequately motivated, which makes them less interesting than in Carter's earlier books.
A good example of the lack of credibility occurs early in the book. Beck remembers an incident fifteen years earlier when three CIA security men invaded Jericho's home, apparently while he & Beck were making love, and dragged her off to be interrogated for an hour and a half, refusing to allow her to get dressed and asking her questions like the name of her fifth-grade Spanish teacher. I simply cannot believe this kind of thing would happen to current (or past) lovers of the former Director of the CIA (despite the fantasies of novelists and moviemakers), certainly not without SERIOUS provocation, and, if it had, said former director of the CIA would have assured that serious consequences would have followed. Beck also recalls unexpected visits from the CIA office of security for years after her relationship with Ainsley had stopped, including "once, they surprised her during lunch on a Caribbean cruise. Another time they showed up at a pub in Edinburgh". As a former federal employee, I am extremely skeptical that even CIA security officers have travel policies liberal enough to permit this kind of boondoggle without substantial justification.
Carter can write good thrillers. I hope in his next book he will return to his roots and write what he does well. Until then I would recommend you try one of his earlier works or find another diversion for your summer reading.

I have not read Mr. Carter's earlier books so I don't know how this one compares, but if this book is any indication, I'm going to read the other ones. It caught my attention enough to keep me reading at the expense of the chores I had on my "to do" list. And I was so wrapped up reading the final pages in late evening under the porch light that I just about screamed when my neighbor walked up my sidewalk out of the darkness to say hello.

The main character, Beck DeForde, learns her former lover Jericho Ainsley, a retired spy (and Former Everything due to his importance to the CIA and espionage community), is dying and wants to see her. Their affair has been over for 15 years but she sends her young daughter to stay with her mother and goes to his secluded mountain home to say goodbye. Her motivation is part love and part guilt; she believes Jericho threw away his career for her when she was a 19 year-old college sophomore. Jericho's daughters, Pamela and Audrey, both older than Beck, are also with him.

From the time Beck arrives at the home where she lived with Jericho, neither she nor the reader knows what to believe. The daughters tell Beck his brain cancer has made him crazy but Jericho tells Beck she is in danger because "they" are coming for him. Other visitors to the home tell her Jericho has threatened to reveal secrets upon his death and either encourage her to leave or want her to help them get this information. Jericho is either speaking in riddles or is as crazy as his daughters say he is.

In between the events going on in the present, Beck thinks back on her long-ago relationship with Jericho and the effect it has had on her life as well as on his.

The characters are interesting. Much of the time, the three women are thrown together. Pamela deeply resents Beck (and always has) and the older sister "Saint Audrey" (now an Episcopal nun) tries to make peace. Jericho was a lousy mostly absent father and probably not a very good person for a naive young woman to have fallen in love with. In the present time, he is manipulative and paranoid and not helpful to Beck or his daughters in facing the danger he insists is coming. Beck can't trust what she hears from Jericho, his daughters, and most of the other people she meets. Eventually Beck comes to the point where she decides to learn the secret to protect herself and Jericho.

The reader is left for most of the book to guess what is going on because so many of the characters have reason to lie. I changed my mind every chapter as to what I thought was going to happen and who was involved. My only criticism is that the ending is too abrupt. There is action and danger and suspense and then....boom! It's over. I had to read the last chapter a couple times to make sure I hadn't missed something. I wanted to know that Beck would be all right, emotionally, physically and financially. I wanted to know she wouldn't feel guilty any more. I'm not sure if this means there will be a sequel or if the author wanted to leave the reader hanging just a little bit.

I really enjoyed this book and could not put it down (except when I had to explain to my neighbor why I got so freaked out). I liked that it wasn't easy to figure out what was happening.

It is very hard for me to believe Stephen Carter actually wrote this book. I never finished it, to be honest. It did not engage me in any way, unlike his previous books, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Do not waste your time on this. Let's hope Mr. Carter will return to his previous form.