Touchstone [Hardcover]

Union men and Stanley Baldwin and an FBI agent at King Arthur's court - what an unlikely mix. And yet King weaves all this and more into a tapestry as vivid as any hanging in the Victoria and Albert. If you've read bits and pieces about the General Strike of 1926, you will fill in some gaps with Touchstone, but don't confuse this with a book about an historical event.

This is a book about people. The Duke's daughter with a bone-deep sense of duty, the archetypal English gentleman whose body bears the wounds of the Great War and whose soul remains at some eternal Agincourt, the half-caste hero of the trenches caught in the warp and woof of the British class system - each one is going to break your heart, but never quite in the way that you expect.

Fair warning: the book is a slow start.

Until you begin to care about the people - about page 175 for me - the multiple agendas of the personal and the political seem too grim for recreational reading. But, if you are one of King's faithful readers, you will keep turning pages until smitten with the beauty of the settings - nature and art - and lulled into cozy fascination by the words and actions of pretty people in an exquisite landscape, England at its most magical. And then you are hooked. The mists of Avalon part and you see the players' political commitments as inevitable manifestations of their love of family, love of country.

Here we find politics and art and a love story - two, no, three love stories - and a family saga and (eventually) a truly nail-biting thriller. But you have to put in the time to get to know these people and their England. Like the house party that lies at the center of the book, the plot moves at a stately pace, seemingly random events and apparent digressions finally emerging as parts of a seamless whole, nothing wasted, something for every interest. The complexity of the characters comes as a surprise, since they first appear to be stock figures in a familiar painting. But, as the theme of visual art leads us from the big tapestry to the tiny vignette, the individuality of Laura and Harris and Bennett and Sarah and Richard glows from the canvas of the book with a fierce delicacy.

With rich allusions to the works of powerful witnesses for social reform - from Emma Goldman to Emily Wilding Davison - King frames Laura Hurleigh's world-world view with acuity and compassion, using the central figure of the American (whom we misjudge as badly as does the oily bad guy) to shoe-horn her readers into a conflict that could take place only in England. America is too new and too raw for such a story, while other European nations lack the solid backbone of an entitled aristocracy wedded to responsibilities above and beyond their own pleasure.

This is a tale of England's green and pleasant land and those who will not rest from mental - or physical - strife until they have saved it.

This is not one of King's Russell or Martinelli mysteries; this is a stand-alone thriller set in England shortly after the end of the first World War and the two most important things you should know about it are l. that the last 90 pages are absolutely gripping, and 2. that before you get there, you're going to have to slog through 458 pages of meticulously detailed descriptions, digressions and setup.

Few writers write descriptive material more beautifully than Laurie King. But she does have a tendency to overdo it. And never moreso than in this book. Example: It takes our protagonist three and a half entirely uneventful pages just to walk from his bedroom to the drawing room. Another: As a conclusion begins ever so slowly to build, one of the principals sends the hero a message marked urgent; he dashes off to meet her in the chapel but before we learn why, we must pause for a detailed examination of a painting of a Madonna and Child on the chapel wall. Well, you say to yourself, that's surely because this painting is going to figure prominently in the denouement to come, right? Nope, it doesn't. But this digression and dozens like it do explain why this book runs some 200 pages longer than King's others. The plot itself doesn't need the extra space. And her settings and characters do not seem to come more alive on the page because of it.

I'm giving this one four stars because King is such a terrific writer, and because two of the six principal characters--Bennett and Laura--are exceptionally interesting and well drawn, and the ending's a doozy. Also I think she really pours heart and soul into these stand-alone books and I hope she'll do more of them. But please not at such length.

By April 1926 although several years have passed since the armistice ended the combat the United States and England are still recovering from the War to End all Wars. Three bombs went off in a relatively short time in the United States causing much damage and killing innocent people. Harris Stuyvesant is determined to catch the bomber, not because he is a Bureau of Investigation agent but because one of the devices turned his favorite brother into a vegetable. He tracks the evidence to up-and-coming charismatic leftist politician, Richard Bunsen.

Trying to get close to the man he plays five degrees starting with meeting Aldous Carstairs who sends him to a former patient of his Bennet Grey whose sister Sara is friendly with Lady Laura Hurleigh who is Richard's lover. Bennet was injured in the war and came through with certain abilities. He is a human lie detector and has a sense of what people are thinking and planning. He agrees to go with Harris to a Hurleigh weekend party. Tensions are high because the miner's are going on the strike and a general strike is planned to bring the government down. Lady Laura is planning a weekend where the two sides can talk away from the noise of the public and media but there is another agenda being played, one Harris intends to stop.

TOUCHSTONE is a thick juicy story that shows England between the two world wars and how the government feels about the unions. Harris is in England to bring vigilante justice to the bomber and ends up falling for Sarah. He comes to care for Bennet and tries to rescue him from Carstairs clutches. Carstairs wants to be the power in the shadows that steers England on a course that seems acceptable on the surface but is deviously deceptive. Laurie R King creates fascinating characters and places them in several subplots so that the reader understands what motivates them.

Harriet Klausner

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