The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington

by Brad Meltzer & Josh Mensch
358 pgs

As a writer, Brad Meltzer has his strengths and his weaknesses. I'll start with the latter: his dialogue. I've never been impressed with it. In fact, I was so put off by it in The Inner Circle, that I didn't read another one of his books for seven years. If The Escape Artist hadn't been about Harry Houdini, whom I find fascinating, I probably wouldn't have picked that one up either. Where Meltzer shines, however, is in his ability to dig up interesting, and usually obscure, mysteries and conspiracies from our country's past and build an entertaining plot out of them.

So, when I heard about his latest book, a non-fiction story about a conspiracy to assassinate George Washington, I was pretty confident I was going to like it. It had what I was looking for in a Meltzer book, but, since it was non-fiction, it likely wouldn't have much dialogue written by him. Win-win.

Meltzer tells the story of the conspiracy, which was put into motion during the early months of the Revolutionary War, to kill General Washington. It involved the Governor of New York, who was one of many loyalists to Great Britain living among the colonies at the time, a group of counterfeiters, and an iron mill forman who recruited loyalists to the cause.

My initial assumptions about the book proved true. It showcases what Meltzer is bast at, with little need for what he's weak at. His account of this little-known piece of history is fascinating, and it left me wondering why I'd never heard anything about it before.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

The Escape Artist

by Brad Meltzer
434 pgs

It’d been several years since I read a book by Brad Meltzer. I’m not 100% positive why I stopped reading them, but if my memory serves me, I had had enough of his eye-roll-inducing dialogue and decided to give up on him. So, I’m not sure what possessed me to picked up The Escape Artist to see what it was about. When I read the summary, and learned that Meltzer focused his “decoded” lens on Harry Houdini, I thought I’d give him another try.

The action begins right out of the gate, with a small plane going down somewhere over the Alaskan wilderness. One of its passengers, a young woman, has just enough time to write a small note and swallow it before dying in the crash.

The story then moves to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, where Army mortician Jim Zigarowski (Zig) prepares the bodies of U.S. military personnel for burial. He’s the best there is, the one called on for the most difficult jobs of reconstructing facial features and giving the family the opportunity to see their loved ones one last time. When he sees the names of the bodies that just arrived from Alaska, one of them hits too close to home: Nola Brown. Nola was a friend of his own daughter, who died tragically years ago. Zig has never gotten over her death and feels that by doing what he can to repair Nola’s body he will be honoring the memory of his daughter.

When Zig finds the brief note in the woman’s stomach, he discovers that the woman isn’t Nola Brown. He also realizes that the real Nola is still alive, and in terrible danger. It’s up to Zig to discover who wanted Nola dead, and why. Along the way he uncovers a top-secret organization, one whose origins tie back to Harry Houdini, and the suspected role he played as a spy for the U.S. and British governments before World War I.

Overall, I enjoyed The Escape Artist. The characters are solid and the story is entertaining. I even thought the dialogue was a marked improvement from the last of Meltzer’s books I read. Maybe I’ll have to put Meltzer back on my radar.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

The Inner Circle

The Inner Circle by Brad Meltzer

The second road-trip book was Brad Meltzer's latest, The Inner Circle. I've only read Meltzer's three most recent novels, so I'm not sure what his earlier ones are like, but from the three books I have read along with having watched several episodes of his show Decoded on the History Channel, I'd describe him as a conspiracy theorist with mainstream appeal.

Beecher White leads a fairly mundane life as an archivist employed at the National Archives in Washington D.C., watching over some of our country's government's most important documents. But his life takes a dramatic change in direction the day a childhood girlfriend shows up at the Archives searching for the identity of a father she's never known.

As they begin their search for the identity of Clemintine's father, Beecher decides to make the most of the situation and tries to impress Clementine by showing her the secret vault in the Archives that the President of the United States uses when he's reviewing top secret documents. While there, they discover a hidden book owned by George Washington which contains coded messages and a secret which some at the highest positions of power will do everything to keep hidden.

I like a story that has a good plot twist, and I like it when the protagonists and antagonists change rolls at the end of the book. But Meltzer didn't know when to quit when he wrote this one. He included so many plot twists that eventually the plot had no direction at all. And by continously trying to get me to change my mind about who the good guys and bad ones were, Meltzer got me to stop caring about all of them entirely.

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆