Vivienne [Hardcover]

Richard Hoyt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 8, 2000

It is 1968, the end of Tet, the Chinese New Year. Vietcong have shocked the world by ambushing American units across South Vietnam. Back home, the fires of anti-war protest rage.

Jim Quint, a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, goes to cover a luncheon speech by the U.S. commander, General William C. Westmoreland. In the parking lot, Quint meets Vivienne, the beautiful young Vietnam wife of Colonol Del Lambert, scion of a wealthy Hawaii family and until recently Westmoreland's chief of intelligence in Vietnam. When Quint learns that Lambert thinks him a coward and a traitor for writing about draft card burners and war protestors, but he invites Quint to have dinner at his home high above Honolulu.

But this dinner leads to higher stakes than good investigative reporting or inside information on the Vietnam war. This dangerous, passionate triangle of soldier, his beautiful wife, and a war critic is a story of bondage, longing, love, and tragedy. Yet, through it all, hope.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hoyt abandons his Northwest private detective series (Whoo?; Bigfoot) to immerse himself in the tangled moral and sociopolitical issues of the Vietnam War. During the costly Vietcong Tet Offensive in 1968, the VC insurgents capture the ancient city of Hue and deal an embarrassing blow to the Marine guard at the American Embassy in Saigon. Ex-GI Jim Quint, a reporter for a Honolulu paper, is assigned to cover a speech by Gen. William Westmoreland intended as damage control. Accompanying Westmoreland is career intelligence officer Col. Del Lambert, golden boy scion of a wealthy Hawaiian family. Lambert seems to know a lot about Quint and insists on introducing the reporter to his beautiful Vietnamese wife, Vivienne. At dinner on his opulent estate in Vietnam, Lambert invites Quint to participate in a twisted game of brinkmanship, tantalizing the reporter with Vivienne's naked body. His true intentions are soon revealed: Lambert believes Vivienne knows the whereabouts of missing CBS film documenting a notorious but unproven VC massacre at the village of Lon Be. The army officer promises Quint that he will free Vivienne from their loveless marriage if Quint can get Vivienne to reveal the location of the missing film. Building sexual urgency and suspense every step of the way, Hoyt skillfully weaves a vivid tapestry around the day-to-day headlines of the crucial presidential election year of 1968. This hard-hitting drama should please fans of Hoyt's detective fiction, and could do especially well if marketed to readers of mainstream and military thrillers, as well as to the mystery fans who will recognize Hoyt's name. (Dec.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

On one hand, Hoyt's latest tells the tale of a very twisted triangle, something straight out of Tennessee Williams. On the other hand, it's an intelligent rumination on the Vietnam War. Jim Quint is a writer for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, an education and science reporter temporarily covering the war in Vietnam. At an official function, he meets Colonel Del Lambert, an intelligence officer, and Lambert's beautiful Vietnamese wife, Vivienne. At dinner one night, Lambert makes Quint an offer: if the reporter can convince Vivienne to give her husband a certain thing he wants, Quint can have her. The novel incorporates many real events: General Westmoreland's attempt to turn the disastrous Tet offensive into an America victory; the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Hoyt never quite convinces us that the erotic, borderline sadistic love triangle really belongs in the same novel with the Vietnam material, but both plot elements hold our interest on their own. Psycho-sexual thrillers are not to every reader's taste, but this is an engrossing and thought-provoking example of the subgenre. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Forge Books; 1st edition (December 8, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312876610
• ISBN-13: 978-0312876616
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,895,029 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Hoyt has a B.S. and M.S. in journalism from the University of Oregon and a PhD in American studies from the University of Hawaii. He was a fellow in national and international editing and reporting at the Washington Journalism Center. He served as a counterintelligence agent for the U.S. Army before becoming a reporter for both the morning and afternoon daily newspapers in Honolulu; he was also the Honolulu correspondent for Newsweek magazine. He later taught journalism and writing courses at the University of Maryland and at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon.
Richard is private by nature but loves to travel. He has lived and worked for periods in Negril, Jamaica; Bray, Ireland; Torquay, southern England; Amsterdam; Seville; Lagos, Portugal; Sao Paulo; San Ignacio, Belize; Tangier; Hong Kong; and on the islands of Negros, Mindanao, and Cebu in the Philippines. He rode trains across the Soviet Union and riverboats from the headwaters of the Amazon to the Atlantic.
This photograph of Richard was taken by Tessie Artes Hoyt

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vivienne by Richard Hoyt, November 23, 2000

By 

Avi Feuer (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vivienne (Hardcover)

Set in 1968, a newspaper reporter covering the Vietnam antiwar movement, falls in love with Vivienne, the beautiful Vietnamese wife of a US army intelligence officer. She has a secret so vital to her husband that he is willing to give her up to the reporter if she will only tell. The ensuing "Vivienne War," artfully woven into the back drop of the Vietnam War, mirrors and blends with the traumatic events of 1968: The Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the DNC riots in Chicago, LBJ, university riots with tear gas and clubbing police, George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, Richard Nixon etc. Vivienne is throbbing with emotion, suspense, excitement, blood, anguish, sex, and rioting in the streets. This is a brand new offering by Richard Hoyt, the prolific Pacific NW novelist famous for fast paced, exotic thrillers and page turning mysteries. Vivienne should appeal to Hoyt fans and readers of military fiction, but moreover to anyone who lived through 1968 or wished they had. If you think the election of 2000 was eventful, just go back to 1968.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Back to '68 in Time for 2008., March 9, 2008

By 

Bob Chorba "Bobbyc" (Milwaukee, Wisconsin United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Vivienne (Hardcover)

Again tough to rate. I choose 4 Stars when 3 1/2 stars may be more accurate. I just want to comment on the Dates used in the Book, because no one else has. In another book by Hoyt (The one co-written with the Congressman), there were complaints about the dates used. In "Vivienne", Munich obviously was not in 1939. WWII was already in effect in September of 1939. Also Dien Bien Phu fell in 1954, not 1956! How could any responsible writer (not to mention editors) make these obvious mistakes?

4.0 out of 5 stars A psychosexual thriller, pursued through history, July 23, 2004

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Vivienne (Paperback)

In a dramatic turnaround, novelist Richard Hoyt provides us with some (possibly real-life?) secrets of the Vietnam war in his latest book, the touching and thrilling VIVIENNE. It's obvious that, through metonymy, Vivienne, the aging serviceman's Vietnamese wife, is a stand-in for VietNam itself, mysterious, slightly brutal, earthy.

What secrets does Vivienne hide? She is lovely and sometimes outrageous, but often so quiet you suspect she's covering up a crime so awful even she is frightened of her own "reveal." It's a story of publicity and privacy, the firestorm of war and the extreme hush of the sex act, of two men who come close to respect as they grip themselves over the taut body of the woman who tempts them both . . . VIVIENNE, by Richard Hoyt. Add a star if you have visited VietNam or the Pacific Northwest.