Book review: People's Prince of Darkness

CHARMING, energetic and once universally loved for his brilliance in front of a TV camera, Adam Lang is a former British prime minister whose world is falling apart. Terrorist bombs are going off in London and he is holed up in a Martha's Vineyard mansion with his brainy wife Ruth and a bevy of secretaries and secret service men, fearing he is about to indicted for war crimes.

You could hardly makes this stuff up, but Robert Harris claims he has. Probably the least believable thing in his new thriller The Ghost is its disclaimer - "any resemblance to persons living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental". Whether it is Adam Lang/Tony Blair or Ruth/Cherie you won't get the image of real life doppelgangers out of your head anywhere in this novel, even when the narrator finds himself "staring into the surprisingly deep and shadowy valley of [Ruth's] cleavage."

I was asked last Wednesday to review Robert Harris's new thriller The Ghost, read the book overnight and delivered the copy at midday Thursday. Luckily Harris's publishers used a big font and large line spaces.

Read the rest at: People's prince of darkness