Customer Reviews

Jericho's Fall (Vintage)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(22)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

I have enjoyed Carter's three previous thrillers featuring black lawyers & academics and richly drawn characters in a broad landscape. He should have stayed with a winning formula and an environment he knows but instead turned to the world of spies and financial fraud to write what he described as a "short, straightforward page turner". Would that it were!
The book opens with protagonist Beck DeForde driving to the deathbed of former CIA Director Jericho Ainsley, who had ruined his career fifteen years earlier as a result of a scandalous love affair with her at Princeton when she was a sophomore and he was a married professor. Carter attempts to establish an atmosphere of suspense with suspicious vans and helicopters hovering around Jericho's home, bodies of slaughtered animals left outside the door, the death of Ainsley's longtime caretaker under mysterious circumstances, and a multitude of visitors appearing at the door with motives unknown. Over this all hover Ainsley's two crone-like daughters (one of whom is a former interrogator for the CIA who is now an Episcopal nun) exuding a general atmosphere of hostility towards one and all. Ainsley claims to have secrets that powerful forces are prepared to kill to hide or steal, and he tries to enlist Beck to help him, although he can't quite get around to telling her what he wants her to do. There is also the strong belief by many of the characters that Ainsley is mentally ill and is making up the secrets he purports to have. As a set-up to a suspense story, this sounds fine, but after 93 pages and nine chapters I found myself screaming internally, "Okay, okay, so get on with it!" The pace is plodding.
When he does get on with it, the plot is thin, not very credible, and ultimately unsatisfying. The actions of many of the characters, including Beck, seem inadequately motivated, which makes them less interesting than in Carter's earlier books.
A good example of the lack of credibility occurs early in the book. Beck remembers an incident fifteen years earlier when three CIA security men invaded Jericho's home, apparently while he & Beck were making love, and dragged her off to be interrogated for an hour and a half, refusing to allow her to get dressed and asking her questions like the name of her fifth-grade Spanish teacher. I simply cannot believe this kind of thing would happen to current (or past) lovers of the former Director of the CIA (despite the fantasies of novelists and moviemakers), certainly not without SERIOUS provocation, and, if it had, said former director of the CIA would have assured that serious consequences would have followed. Beck also recalls unexpected visits from the CIA office of security for years after her relationship with Ainsley had stopped, including "once, they surprised her during lunch on a Caribbean cruise. Another time they showed up at a pub in Edinburgh". As a former federal employee, I am extremely skeptical that even CIA security officers have travel policies liberal enough to permit this kind of boondoggle without substantial justification.
Carter can write good thrillers. I hope in his next book he will return to his roots and write what he does well. Until then I would recommend you try one of his earlier works or find another diversion for your summer reading.

I have not read Mr. Carter's earlier books so I don't know how this one compares, but if this book is any indication, I'm going to read the other ones. It caught my attention enough to keep me reading at the expense of the chores I had on my "to do" list. And I was so wrapped up reading the final pages in late evening under the porch light that I just about screamed when my neighbor walked up my sidewalk out of the darkness to say hello.

The main character, Beck DeForde, learns her former lover Jericho Ainsley, a retired spy (and Former Everything due to his importance to the CIA and espionage community), is dying and wants to see her. Their affair has been over for 15 years but she sends her young daughter to stay with her mother and goes to his secluded mountain home to say goodbye. Her motivation is part love and part guilt; she believes Jericho threw away his career for her when she was a 19 year-old college sophomore. Jericho's daughters, Pamela and Audrey, both older than Beck, are also with him.

From the time Beck arrives at the home where she lived with Jericho, neither she nor the reader knows what to believe. The daughters tell Beck his brain cancer has made him crazy but Jericho tells Beck she is in danger because "they" are coming for him. Other visitors to the home tell her Jericho has threatened to reveal secrets upon his death and either encourage her to leave or want her to help them get this information. Jericho is either speaking in riddles or is as crazy as his daughters say he is.

In between the events going on in the present, Beck thinks back on her long-ago relationship with Jericho and the effect it has had on her life as well as on his.

The characters are interesting. Much of the time, the three women are thrown together. Pamela deeply resents Beck (and always has) and the older sister "Saint Audrey" (now an Episcopal nun) tries to make peace. Jericho was a lousy mostly absent father and probably not a very good person for a naive young woman to have fallen in love with. In the present time, he is manipulative and paranoid and not helpful to Beck or his daughters in facing the danger he insists is coming. Beck can't trust what she hears from Jericho, his daughters, and most of the other people she meets. Eventually Beck comes to the point where she decides to learn the secret to protect herself and Jericho.

The reader is left for most of the book to guess what is going on because so many of the characters have reason to lie. I changed my mind every chapter as to what I thought was going to happen and who was involved. My only criticism is that the ending is too abrupt. There is action and danger and suspense and then....boom! It's over. I had to read the last chapter a couple times to make sure I hadn't missed something. I wanted to know that Beck would be all right, emotionally, physically and financially. I wanted to know she wouldn't feel guilty any more. I'm not sure if this means there will be a sequel or if the author wanted to leave the reader hanging just a little bit.

I really enjoyed this book and could not put it down (except when I had to explain to my neighbor why I got so freaked out). I liked that it wasn't easy to figure out what was happening.

It is very hard for me to believe Stephen Carter actually wrote this book. I never finished it, to be honest. It did not engage me in any way, unlike his previous books, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Do not waste your time on this. Let's hope Mr. Carter will return to his previous form.

Jericho's Fall by Stephen L. Carter is an interesting mystery thriller set in the mountains of Colorado. Jericho Ainsley is the "Former Everything" (Director of the CIA, Secretary of Defense, etc.), and he also had stints working for the private equity firm Scondell Bloom and Notting and as a professor at Princeton. It was while he was at Princeton that he fell into scandal with Rebecca "Beck" DeForde, a nineteen year old student from one of his classes that would drive them both to seclusion in the mountains of Colorado at his fortress/mansion called Stone Heights. Beck leaves him after eighteen months. Fast forward fifteen years, and Jericho is dying. As it appears that he is near the end, he summons Beck to come and see him. While Beck makes the return trip to Stone Heights seeking some form of closure, she gets caught up in a tangled web of secrets that Jericho has threatened to reveal on his way out into the next life. As the story moves along the number of interested parties in Jericho's scheme grows and grows until the story reaches a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion. While the story crossed over into contrived and convoluted along the way, I was willing to accept it if the payoff at the end was worth it. Instead, I felt kind of empty and let down when I finished the last page.

The core characters were somewhat problematic too. In addition to Beck and Jericho, there are Jericho's two daughters Audrey (the former CIA interrogator turned Episcopal nun) and Pamela (the movie producer). Pamela treats Beck with outward contempt as the target of her anger against Jericho. Pamela is a few years older than Beck, and she blames Beck for splitting up Jericho and her mother. However, Pamela shows erratic behavior toward the end of the novel that never gets a good explanation from Carter. I'm still scratching my head a little on what the reader is supposed to take away from this twist. Audrey, on the other hand, just isn't developed enough. The two things that stand out about her were that she became a nun after reaching the breaking point of remorse about how her interrogation tactics were used and that she fingered the cross that she wore when she got nervous. Finally, we have Beck. While I like a strong, smart heroine (or hero) in a story, Beck's actions seem too far above and beyond what one would expect her to be able to do.

In the end though, the book comes up short because of the degree to which the reader has to suspend reality. Yes, this is a work of fiction, but a story like this needs a minimal degree of believability to work. I found it to be further disappointing that the author seems to confirm this in his notes at the end of the book. The book is a quick read, though, so you won't be making a huge investment if you're still curious.

Overall: C-

I can't remember the last time I read such a pointless story with such a ridiculous premise. Rebecca de Forde is the divorced, thirtysomething mother of a nine year old girl who learns that a former lover is dying. Jericho Ainsley is in his 60's and resting in his home in the Colorado Rockies when Beck is summoned to his bedside. Beck and Jericho had been lovers 15 years earlier when Jericho threw his career away and left his wife for Beck, then an 18-year-old college student. He bought Stone Heights, his home in the mountains, and he and Beck escaped from a judgmental world there. The relationship was not fated to last, though, fizzling after just 18 months.

Naturally, Jericho's two daughters, Audrey and Pamela, don't think highly of Beck, and when she returns to Stone Heights to visit Jericho for the last time, Pamela is especially snide to her. Audrey is an Episcopal nun and works hard at playing peacemaker. Beck spends very little time with Jericho, chasing off after oblique clues he gives her when he could simply have told her what he was up to. The whole time everyone was working themselves into a lather over Jericho's secrets, I kept thinking, "Who cares?" Why would anyone tie herself in knots over some man's secrets when that man occupies a bed in the same house? And why, when he refused to give clear answers, did Beck stick around to dig up the story instead of getting back to her own life? Beck's annoyingly recriminating mother needed a good, hard slap, but she did have a point. Why had Beck run off without her daughter and put her job in jeopardy to spend a couple of days in Colorado for an ex-lover? Her presence and the danger she puts herself in are absolutely pointless, and those couple of days felt like a month.

Had I not suddenly come upon a page saying "Author's Note," I would not have realized the book was finally over, such was the number of loose ends out in the wind. I'm sure the author intended to weave a twisting, turning plot, but unfortunately, with the book's silly premise, it came across as a jumbled mess, circling around and around reasons I just didn't buy. Then, in the end, several questions went unanswered, like the truth of Pamela's accusations about Beck. Perhaps it was done intentionally to keep me thinking about the story, but the attempt failed miserably. Had I not felt obligated to review this book, I don't think I could have forced myself to read all the way through it.

I've read and enjoyed Stephen L. Carter's nonfiction, and The Emperor of Ocean Park was recommended to me by a friend, but this is the first novel of his I've read. I am disappointed. The plot moves along, if in a parts-missing, sudden-ending way; the basis of the plot should be inherently interesting; and the main character (Beck, Rebecca) is appealing if not exactly real. The writing is distractingly terrible. It almost seems to be a parody. The characters don't say; they grumble or rasp or nod crossly--or they say, almost smiling or with a roguish grin or with gentle doe-like eyes.

I like many styles of writing, from Robert Parker to Henry James; I don't object to a great deal of dialogue or adjectives, adverbs, and description. In this book, the leaden, artificial qualities of the dialogue and action continually slowed down my reading by making me sigh resignedly yet beautifully in the vast heavy stillness of my house.

I may be picky, and if you can overlook the problems I've described here, you may like it.

I could not wait to get my hands on the latest Carter novel. Man!!!...what a waste of time this was...nothing engaging about the characters...pacing was horrible..and some of the language..."Jer-Bear"...oh! ##@@! please. I thought, maybe this was an earlier attempt...something before "Emperor" or "Palace Council". I'll wait for the reviews before reading his next

This book could have been a lot better. The trouble is you wait till almost to the end of the book for something to happen. Rebecca (named Beck) is called to visit her dying ex-lover Jericho Ainsley who is dying. Jericho is an ex-CIA head who lives his entire life as if he is being constantly under surveillence.

As Beck is a great deal younger than Jericho, everyone was bothered by their relationship, especially Jericho's two daughters Pamela and Audrey. Right from the start Beck suspects that something is amiss a a helicopter seems to come and go overhead and Beck's cellphone get periodical wierd calls even though she is in a dead zone for phones.

Jericho keeps talking about people coming to kill him while Pamela and Audrey insist that he has lost his mental capacity and they are just delusions of a dying man.

The book focuses on the interplay among the three women as well as Dak an ex-agency man who keeps on visiting Jercho, the sheriff and his deputy, and the librarian. The interplay among the main participants is the majority of the book and many times I was tempted to put the book down and read something else as this interplay was extremely booring.

If you are looking for an intense thriller you will not find it here.

The Emperor of Ocean Park was a seminal first novel in my opinion. I failed to keep up with Mr. Carter's works and only recently realized that he'd published 3 more novels.

I read New England White, where he wrote with a feminine voice of Julia Carlyle, who first appeared in EOP. Still not as good as his first, but nevertheless an excellent novel.

But Jericho's Fall, while certainly readable falls short of his other works. I'm afraid that his attempt to capture the voice of a woman of 'the paler nation' (to quote New England White) just isn't believeable.

Also, the riddles created in this 4th novel never really make sense and I feel that the book fell a bit flat.

Rather than raising the mystery novel to the level of literary fiction, I feel that Mr. Carter has fallen back into the ranks of his bretheren novelists.

It's a shame because he's obviously a brilliant writer. I hope his next attempt returns to what he knows best: men.

Jericho's Fall
The pace is slow and there are a few loopholes that didn't quite meet the suspension of disbelief. Mr. Carter does a good job of fleshing out his characters, but their motives seem strained. Their behavior toward one another does not always seem realistic, as well. For instance, two sisters who see Rebecca DeFonde as the `other woman' who ruined their parent's marriage are actually cordial to her. The expected hostility is buried under the need to have all three women in the house in order for the shaky plot to have viability.

The basic theme of this story is the former head of the CIA is blackmailing his subordinates--to what purpose we are not privy--and is confined in his overly-fortified mountain retreat. Instead of warning off his family, who might be injured or killed, he encourages them to come and spend his final days with him. He is supposedly dying of a cancer that may or may not have spread to his brain, and is considered unbalanced.
Instead of just coming in and getting him, the powers that be are held at bay by a certain `code of ethics' that the man is dying, and this causes a hands off policy, despite the threat he holds of releasing state secrets [again, we know not why] to the world.

The book does have a moments of suspense and action, but not enough to offset the generally boring and unrealistic story.

This is not up to the standard expected from an award winning author.