The Machiavelli Covenant by Allan Folsom

Suzie Eisfelder

I’m not sure where I bought this book. I suspect it might have been for a plane journey judging by the receipt I found inside. I also suspect I didn’t finish it at the time, reading it this time there were a couple of little things that seemed familiar. Did I find it not very engaging the first time? Possibly. I did struggle this time and planned on giving up when I’d had enough…until today when I needed to rest my body and took my book with me. I probably only had a hundred or so pages to go when I lay down and it was in that time frame I realised why I had kept reading.

This seems like a fairly typical conspiracy book. I’ve read many of them and this ticks the numbers quite nicely. It moves us through each strand of the uncovering of the conspiracy and brings everything to a close…and then leaves us hanging. Any good conspiracy book should do this.

One of the things in this book that I ignored most of the time, except for those times when I went back to check something out was the time stamp. Each little segment was time stamped. Not each paragraph, but each time the scenery or movement changed. It made it easier to match up what was happening in each strand. And it was good to be able to see how much time a group of people had before their next action point. In the case I’m looking at it was fourteen minutes.

I did feel that some of the females weren’t entirely well written. One section about Demi’s hair talked about it being short so all it needed was a ‘wash and fluff’. The only time I’ve been able to ‘wash and fluff’ my short hair is when it was growing back after being shaved off. I entered the World’s Greatest Shave one year. My lack of hair looked great and felt better, but for three or four weeks washing and fluffing was all that I needed to do. After that I had to start brushing it as well. Tell me if I’m wrong and you’re able to just wash and fluff your short hair.

Having said that it is very heavily written for and about men. There are only a handful of women in this book. Demi seems to be one sided, only ever wanting to find her family member. We see very little of the other females, and nothing much about their personalities or skills. The men seem to have great skills and pick up any other needed skills as they go.

What I did enjoy was the President escaping his team. The book goes through it more carefully, but essentially he escaped through the air conditioning ducts. And then with a couple of nicely timed moments he got out of the hotel and completely escaped the Secret Service. This was a great example of a character having prior knowledge from previous experience.

Somewhere in the last hundred or so pages I realised why I should be reading this book. I have a book in mind which sort of involves conspiracies. Folsom’s book made me wonder if I’ve been thinking about my book the wrong way. Maybe I should be thinking much bigger than I am, maybe the group I’m creating could be bigger or more encompassing. It’s going to take some thinking time to figure out if what I’ve learned from this book will suit my book.

No affiliate link for you today, you’ve been well behaved, but Booktopia doesn’t have this book for sale.


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