As a huge fan of the TV show “Castle,” I’m fine
with lead characters being writers. Ditto for any number of Stephen King
books. What makes Ian Ludlow different (albeit slightly) is that he
doesn’t suddenly become a stud. Say what you will
about Castle, but he became more adept at handling situations the
longer the seasons went on, despite his constant man-child behavior.
Ludlow doesn’t. Granted, this is his first adventure, so who knows
what’s down the road for him.
Years before the opening scene of TRUE FICTION,
Ludlow and a few other writers were recruited to dream up scenarios that
terrorists might deploy to inflict huge amounts of damage to the US or
US assets. Ludlow’s brainstorm was a plane crashing
into buildings, not in a well-populated city like Houston or Denver or
Los Angeles but Waikiki, Hawaii. The definition of paradise. Ludlow
thought nothing of the experiment…until a plane is hijacked and crashes
into a hotel in Waikiki.
Immediately, Ludlow knows he’d likely be a target.
And when the other members of his secret writing group turn up dead, it
is confirmed. Margo, the grad student assigned to drive Ludlow around
Seattle on his book signing, quickly gets swept
up in the action and the pair must escape the attempts by the secret
agency who launched the attack.
Goldberg keeps the action moving along at quite a
pace as befitting a thriller. But he manages to inject some humanity
into Ludlow, who, more than once, wishes he was Clint Straker, the
uber-hero of his own novels. Those moments are rather
humorous, especially when Margo keeps reminding him of his
inadequacies. And the humor sprinkled throughout the book made me
chuckle more than once.
TRUE FICTION is a fun romp of a book that’ll keep you entertained from the first word to end.
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