Jericho's Fall

Written by Stephen L. Carter

Narrated by Kirsten Potter

Stephen L. Carter’s brilliant debut, The Emperor of Ocean Park, spent eleven week son the New York Times best-seller list. Now, in Jericho’s Fall, Carter turns his formidable talents to the shadowy world of spies, official secrecy, and financial fraud in a thriller that rivets the reader’s attention until the very last page.

In an imposing house in the Colorado Rockies, Jericho Ainsley, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and a Wall Street titan, lies dying. He summons to his beside Beck DeForde, the younger woman for whom he threw away his career years ago, miring them both in scandal. Beck believes she is visiting to say farewell. Instead, she is drawn into a battle over an explosive secret that foreign governments and powerful corporations alike want to wrest from Jericho before he dies.

An intricate and timely thriller that plumbs the emotional depths of a failed love affair and a family torn apart by mistrust, Jericho’s Fall takes us on a fast-moving journey through the secretive world of intelligence operations and the meltdown of the financial markets. And it creates, in Beck DeForde, an unforgettable heroine for our turbulent age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 14, 2009
• ISBN: 9780307577443

Stephen L. Carter

Stephen L. Carter is the bestselling author of several novels—including The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White—and over half a dozen works of non-fiction. Formerly a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, he is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University, where he has taught for more than thirty years. He and his wife live in Connecticut.

[bookmarque · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Don’t you hate it when good writers do dumb things and their editors let them? I don’t mean the whole book which was a departure for Carter at the time. No. I mean the prologue. On the whole prologues are pointless, a sign of poor story-telling ability and chock full of cheap, reader manipulation. This one was especially unneccessary since the novel’s opening chapter takes place in the exact same time, the exact same location and with the same person. In other words, it picks up precisely where the prologue left off. Why?? OMG.

But I let it go. It’s been a while since I read one of Carter’s novels and so some of the names I should have recognized went by me (like Tish), but some I recognized and I appreciate the vast, tangentially interconnected world he’s built. I’m still waiting for a book about Mona from Palace Council though.

Anyway, Carter says in an author’s note that he just wanted to write a page-turner and he has, but gone are subtleties of character, plot and pacing. It goes from scene to scene, much like the movie version of this would and toward the end Beck says that she’s lost the plot and by then I had, too. There are a dizzying array of characters and connections, something I’m normally very good and comfortable with, but this was a bit too much. Everyone is suspect, everyone could be in on the plot to take down Jericho before he can do damage. Or is there a plot? Has Jericho’s mental instability finally resulted in a full-blown paranoid delusion? Beck doesn’t know, but sticks with him despite many warnings to leave. She gets to be a bit Mary-Sue-ish in the end and I never got to understand why she captured so much of Jericho’s mind, attention and affection. You just have to accept that it is true.

And, as usual, I couldn’t help but pick out some ordinance blunders. Beck decides to practice with a pistol she found in the house. Years ago she received instruction on a similar Glock, but since she can’t shoot in the house, she practices grip and stance. What? She’s never heard of dry firing? Ugh. Then later she suffers a sore hand from the recoil. A Glock 19 doesn’t kick much no matter the load and even less when you have decent grip technique. Finally, a sniper was using a tripod in the woods to take down multiple moving targets. Not bloody likely. Too static, too bulky, too difficult to maneuver quickly. He’d use a bipod like everyone else.

[sleahey_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Beck's former lover, a former high power CIA administrator, is on his deathbed, so she travels cross country to say good-bye. But of course, all is not as it seems, and there are intrigues within secrets within longstanding feuds. The reader knows there are surprises in store, if not the particulars, and the suspense mounts right up until the end.

[kylenapoli · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

For the first three-quarters, this is a master class in developing a sense of dread, but the climax and conclusion don't pay off the suspense. From the start, the hero, Beck, is characterized as a person on the sidelines of life. Yet, she is -so- much a cipher that I was left with no sense of what makes her special, why she was irresistible to Jericho Ainsley, why she became the major actor in his endgame. In short, the book should be optioned and filmed as an action thriller, so the viewer can enjoy the excellent cat-and-mouse without asking too many questions. (Carter does get points for creating the most kick-ass librarian character ever.)

[kraaivrouw · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I really like Stephen Carter's other novels which manage to be both interesting thrillers and intelligent observation of politics and of the African American upper classes. Carter is smart and writes well and I look forward to his books even though I don't always agree with his politics.

This one, however, was utterly disappointing. I suspect that Carter wanted to write something fast and easy and this book is certainly that - and that's the problem. There are many many thrillers out there and many many people writing them. This one doesn't distinguish itself from any of the others out there and, in fact, isn't really quite as good as many of them. It feels contrived and reads like that novel you bought at the airport to read on the plane. There's nothing inherently wrong with that kind of novel, but Carter can do a whole lot more so this just flat out disappoints.

[beckyjg · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As Jericho's Fall opens Rebecca DeForde is navigating the treacherous, wintry roads that lead to the remote compound of her former lover--the "Former Everything" as he is often known, sometimes affectionately, sometimes not--Jericho Ainsley. The former Director of Central Intelligence, Secretary of Defense, White House National Security Advisor--well, the Former Everything--is dying, and despite their having shared only 18 months together, 15 years earlier, Beck is rushing to his side.

Ainsley having many, many years earlier sharpened his paranoia (as so many in the intelligence business do) to a fine art, Rebecca is not surprised to find that Stone Heights, "Jericho's pretentious name for his mountain redoubt," is even more of a fortress than it was when she last saw it. She quickly slips back into habits learned at his feet, when she was a 19 year old undergraduate and he the professor who gave up everything to have her, looking for spooks lurking in all the shadows, suspicious headlights in the rearview mirror, and potential hidden meaning in every conversation she has. It doesn't help that her cell phone keeps ringing, despite there being no service in the mountains, sometimes broadcasting a high-pitched tone when she answers it, sometimes a phantom voicemail from her daughter. Hey, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean everybody's not out to get you, right?

And she's not wrong.

Jericho is dying, and although he's been out of the business for a very long time, he's got something, it seems, that everyone wants. Secrets, are what he has, the stock in trade of agents and spies and bad guys the world over. The secrets are in his mind, of course (the brilliant mind which may or may not have been slipping since even before Rebecca met him, she's told by his oldest friend--or betrayor?--Phil Agadakos) but surely Jericho would have some physical evidence squirreled away somewhere. Wouldn't he?

Rebecca must sift through the elusive clues that Jericho drops in their conversations, references about their past that are just slightly off and may be intended to lead her to the evidence...and may just be the product of the cancer that has metastasized to Jericho's brain. She has to figure out first what the secrets he's holding are about--matters of national security? shenanigans in the financial world he joined after he left academia?--and then find the evidence without leading the bad guys to it.

Paranoia and perfidy abound in this delicious espionage thriller. Stephen L. Carter has taken a completely different tack from his previous novels, which were elegant but slow-moving, and crafted a fast-paced, seriously violent--but still elegant--thriller. One character after another is first a friend, then a potential judas, then a friend again, then, in some cases, dead--the head spins trying to keep up with it all. And in the end all we learn is that there are bad guys and then there are bad guys, and that sometimes it's a victory when it's just the bad guys--no italics--who win.