Customer Reviews

Almost Home: A Novel

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

As a State Department intelligence officer, Jordan Weiss' job has taken her to dangerous locations all around the world. However, one place she's refused to return to is England and the memories of Cambridge a decade earlier. When her dear friend Sarah, in the final stages of Lou Gehrig's disease, needs her in London, she decides to go be by her side. She requests and receives a transfer to London so she can be with her friend in her time of need, unaware that this new assignment may be one of the most dangerous yet.

Soon after her arrival an old friend, Chris, contacts her. He has some lingering doubts about what happened in Cambridge ten years previously, resulting in the death of Jordan's boyfriend, Jared. Chris convinces Jordan to return to Cambridge where they soon have more questions than answers as they quickly discover Jared's death wasn't the drowning accident they'd been led to believe.

Suspense and intrigue abound as Jordan searches for answers in Pam Jenoff's third novel (after The Kommandant's Girl and The Diplomat's Wife). The novel is full of twists and turns as Jordan comes closer to the truth. Jenoff deftly combines Jordan's story of 10 years ago with the present day in such a way that it will keep the reader glued to the pages as the mystery unravels. I am off to pluck her other two books off my TBR pile; I think I have discovered a new auto-buy author. Highly recommended.

The imagery is stunning and the basic plot is gripping and this is why she earns an extra star above 2, but other than that I had a hard time believing this book. The main character Jordan is supposed to be a very good secret agent, but this identity is not very believable as some of the people in the book who do not have her training are better at what she does than she is! Other things that bothered me in the book were the way some minor plot lines were started and then abandoned halfway though. We are also left with a lot of unanswered questions about how the ending even came about. This makes it a little confusing at times to understand how things have happened. One such time we become confused at how major plot lines get twisted was the way her college boyfriend was buried. He was interred without his relatives even identifying his body or having anything to do with the funeral arrangements. (And *mini spoiler*! this is a major deal, and half of the plot rests on this!) It seemed like the author tried to put in a lot of Red Herrings to keep the reader guessing but never managed to tie them up in the end, and in some cased even failed do justice to major plot lines.

Pam Jenoff's "Almost Home" is an uncannily captivating thriller of the return after ten years by Jordan Weiss, a highly intelligent, attractive, and successful American diplomat, to her traumatic graduate days at Cambridge University in England.

In a world of lies that she does not know are lies, she is duped from the beginning in an increasingly harrowing tale of espionage and deception that brings into question everything she has believed about present and past relationships.

For all her experience as a senior U.S. official in State Department postings around the world, she retains a naïveté that many colleagues and friends are ready to exploit. Upon hearing that her former schoolmate and best friend Sarah has a terminal disease, she requests a London posting to be near her to help.

Only Sarah's condition could have brought Jordan back to the ultimate sadness that had marred her Cambridge days. Jordan had loved being coxswain of the university boating crew. She had also loved Jared Short, a doctoral student, who was the crew leader. She had shared his bed, hoping eventually to share a future life. That was not to be, for one night, after celebrating, Jared had inexplicably drowned in the river.

Jordan's dual attention is directed to her day job at the embassy as a top investigator of organized crime and money laundering in the U.K., while simultaneously trying to find out the details surrounding Jared's drowning. Was there a connection? In alternating flashbacks and current episodes, author Pam Jenoff tells a suspenseful, sensual, engrossing, and challenging story. Not for the prudish. Hold on for the ride, you are definitely going to be surprised.

Book details state that our heroine is a Secret State Department intelligence officer. Yet, there was very little to tie this book to that description. Jordan (the book's hero) is found to be traveling around a lot, but her link to the past in England of a death involved with a rowing accident is the thread running thru the book and failed to hold my interest. As she spends a lot of time trying to find the murderer, the book seemed to just go off in tangents that failed to hold my interest. "Almost Home"'s title did not seem to match the contents of the book. I really wanted to like this book - the title and cover drew my interest, but unfortunately it failed to hold my attention. I honestly had a hard time finishing this book, but I kept reading in the hopes that maybe something would change and she would detail more of her intelligence dealings.

This pre-release is fraught with typos, errors, (ie: she puts the diamond ring in her purse, but shortly thereafter pulls it out of her jacket pocket, among the most glaring of them). This book desperately needs fine tooth comb editing by both the author and the publisher. The story is confusing with far too many plot lines that are left unclear, dangling or totally unanswered. The heroine is thoroughly obnoxious and air-headed, worrying more about heaving her guts up or rudely running away from important encounters. Rather than representing the USA with dignity, credibility and class as a diplomat Jordan ends up acting like a silly, boy crazy teenager. Her narrow focus upon sexual and romantic issues dominate this silly "romance-suspense". I cannot fathom any diplomatic corps offering this person a job, moreover one that requires she carry a weapon. There is very little back story, and even more gaps in filling out the characters apart from the narcissistic focus upon the neurotic heroine of this yarn.

The plot could have been developed into something worth reading if the book had been executed with depth and skill. Regrettably, the end result is adolescent, banal cotton candy lacking any substance. I can't remember a single point of interest from this book.

***mild spoilers ahead***
Seriously, this book took me a month and a half to read. I know I read slowly, but I read at least 2 other books while reading this one b/c it just couldn't keep my interest.

The character is downright unbelievable from about 3 pgs in when she up and storms into her boss's office and demands to be transferred to London so she can take care of a dear friend she's barely seen since college 10 yrs before. There are some halfway decent twists at the end, but the whole book felt contrived... not well-conceived - contrived, as in forced.

For a top-of-the-top agent, Jordan Weiss is a complete idiot. She doesn't do much throughout the book except pine after her long-dead boyfriend, have flashbacks to the glorious college days at Cambridge, and have sex becuase she's just too "emotional" (her word, not mine). She manages to get herself drugged and has to have the whole plot spoon fed to her at the end of the book, saying not much more than, "I don't understand." Terrible, pathetic, and utterly a waste of my time. (Yes, that's a fragment, see what bad reading does to my ability to think coherently?)

The reason to read ALMOST HOME is the well rendered physical and cultural descriptions of contemporary Cambridge and London. I learned a lot about the traditions of the colleges of Cambridge as well as the sport of rowing and the information is skillfully woven into the plotlines of the novel. Everyday life in London is also excellently depicted and I enjoyed the connections the narrator makes between actually seeing famous British landmarks and her experiences reading about and seeing them portrayed on film as a child. Author Pamela Jenoff also does a good job in making Jordan, her American narrator/heroine sympathetic and believable. Unfortunately neither of the two suspense plotlines Jordan becomes involved with rise much above a mediocre level. The first mystery is what or who caused the death of Jordan's college boyfriend some ten years before. The second involves Jordan's career with the State Department. The details surrounding these intrigues are not presented in a compelling manner and quickly become tedious to read. I have not read anything else by Pamela Jenoff but from this novel I can see she is a competent writer whose gifts seem to be more in character development and creating a specific setting than writing fast paced thrillers.

She HAD to get to London but had no explanation for her boss. He granted her permission, and she left that very evening.

Jordan arrived in London ready to take a cab to see her very ill friend, but her co-worker met her at the airport....oh no, they do have an assignment for her. An assignment in London wasn't the real reason she wanted to return to London, and when she does arrive, all the familiar landmarks she remembered when she was at Cambridge, make her heart twist and bring tears to her eyes as she remembers the reason that made her leave right after graduation. Seeing Chris, a former college classmate, and then seeing him disappear from a dinner party, also didn't help with the memories.

When Chris finally does appear, he tells Jordan something that she can't ignore, and she must return to Cambridge University to find answers. The journey back to her college days is emotionally painful, particularly since she wanted so desperately to never have to re-live an experience that changed her entire life and up to now had almost been put out of her conscious thoughts.

Meanwhile as Jordan is dealing with this information from Chris, her assignment and this situation seem to have some connection...people go missing, papers disappear, someone is following her, betrayal among friends and lovers, people are dying in "accidents" and more information comes to the surface along with a direct order to stop the investigation of a company who they know has something to hide.

The story unravels, the mystery is solved, Jordan's pain doesn't disappear but she finally does have some hope about what caused all this in the first place.

To me the book was not as good as her other two books...it really didn't get interesting until page 200 or so...it didn't seem tied together until toward the end. The ending was suspenseful and a surprise, though.

I will give it a 4/5 only because it did get come together toward the end of the book.

Jordan Weiss, an intelligence officer for the State Department, finds out her dear friend Sarah has Lou Gehrig's disease. Sarah lives in England, a country that holds bad memories for Jordan, a place she's gone out of her way to stay away from, but she love Sarah and requests a transfer, which goes through a little too easily, but Jordan doesn't notice, she's too busy thinking about her friend.

In London she's contacted by an old college friend who tells her he thinks the death of the man she loved when they were in Cambridge together may not have been an accidental drowning like everybody believed back then. Jordan doesn't want to believe him, but evidence keeps piling up to the contrary and the more she looks into it, the more somebody tries to stop her.

Pan Jenoff has written a thriller that is hard to put down. If this is the start of a series I think it is going to have a long life. Jordan Weiss is a character I cared about and one I'll come back to as often as Ms. Jenoff allows. There is tension a plenty here, suspense too and a delicious twist in the tale that I didn't see coming.

Pam Jenoff's experience as a diplomat is clearly present in the novel as Jordan deals with bureaucracy and cloak-and-dagger tactics. There are some points in the novel where Jordan appears to be out of her element and a novice diplomat, but given the recent debacle in Liberia and the death of a colleague; her flight to London to be with her sick friend; and all that is uncovered about the death of Jared, her mistakes and bad judgment should be expected. The pressures she feels and the memories that haunt her are too much for any one person to deal with a high-stress position with government. Jordan is a complex character dealing with new grief, renewed old grief, and a demanding job in a city she once abandoned. Overall, Almost Home: A Novel is a fast-paced, highly emotional, well-written novel.