<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last year, I read Thomas Mullen’s Blind Spots, a novel set in the near future with an intriguing premise. I enjoyed it, and looked forward to reading The Rumor Game. This book is set in the past — during the early days of World War II, in Boston. It’s the story of a young, Jewish woman journalist who’s keen to expose pro-Nazi Fifth Columnists in the city and an FBI agent who wants to help — but whose own family is linked to the isolationist and antisemitic Right. While the book is well-written and well-researched, and the characters are engaging enough, the plot lacks tension. Chekhov famously wrote “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn\u2019t going to go off.” This book has literally a crate-load of stolen military rifles which singularly fail to go off. There is a build-up to an event filled with menace but nothing much happens at that event. I felt that the ending of the book was a let-down on several levels, in part because I know this author is capable of doing better work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last year, I read Thomas Mullen’s Blind Spots, a novel set in the near future with an intriguing premise. I enjoyed it, and looked forward to reading The Rumor Game. This book is set in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3085,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3083"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3084,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3083\/revisions\/3084"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}