The Inner Sanctum [Paperback]

It is a political story about how an investment group, a crooked senator, military people and others manipulate to get defense contracts so that certain people can make a lot of money. We have seen a lot of this lately ourselves. I am sure there are a few details that someone who is more familiar with the procedures involved in acquiring defense contracts could disagree with, but as a novice myself, and as this is just a book of fiction, I found it to be fascinating.

David Mitchell, a young man who came up from a poor background, has been working at a job that he hopes will fulfill his dreams of becoming rich, even if he has to do a few things that aren't exactly kosher in the legal department. As he isn't a crook by nature, he is having doubts about his job. He has been manipulated by the people he is working for into using poor judgement in his actions and now it may be too late to get out.

Jessie Hayes' boss, in the IRS, dies suddenly of a mysterious heart attack, and she receives a delayed memo from him about a case he was working on-very secretive. She finds the file where he said he had hidden it and is almost killed in the process.

There is murder, mystery and thrills to the end of the book. I wasn't disappointed.

Unlike other Frey books, this one slogs along at a very slow pace with incredibly boring characters. The whole thing revolves around a conspiracy to get a new Navy bomber built. The company vying for the contract is owned by a group of Washington politicians, some military bigwigs, and a bunch of investment brokers. The group meets in secret in a secured room (why the inner sanctum of course!) to discuss the progress of the project and to decide what to do with things or people that might jeopardize the project.

The main character, Jesse, is a woman whose boss was killed when he suspected that there was a conspiracy going on to rig the upcoming senatorial election. Jesse receives a posthumous email from her boss that tells her where she can find a folder with evidence about the conspiracy. Through some magic or some whim of the author, we are led to believe that the system can fire off the email without leaving an audit trail of where it went to just because it left the company and was later delivered from an external address back to the company. Doesn't the author know that most systems would have a copy of all incoming emails so it would be fairly simple to compare the outgoing message to all incomings to figure out the recipient.

Some problems I have with the book. First we have a methodic hit man who becomes a bumbling dolt when he has to go after Jesse. Secondly, we are expected to like one of the main characters, David. David is a stock trader who has very "dirty hands" and is highly involved in insider trading, performing [illegal] corporate transactions, possible money laundering, and hiding records of financial transactions. We are expected to like him. Thirdly, another main character, Todd, has been late in paying back the mob for his gambling debts. They seem to go way to easy on him.

If you read this book, try not to judge Frey on it. Just about everything else I read by Frey merits 4-5 stars.