Sunday Salon: Susan Isaacs, Past Perfect

Scribner © 2007, 368 pages

Katie Schottland dabbles in espionage and show business. She writes the frothy TV show Spy Guys, which was adapted from her book of the same name. The show is cloak-and-dagger-light, but Katie brings some real-world experience to the series. For reasons she never understood, she was unceremoniously fired from her low-level job at the CIA 15 years earlier, escorted from the premises by a security detail. The injustice of it still pricks at her. When an acquaintance from the old days calls out of the blue asking for help on a matter of "national importance" and offering information about why she was fired, Katie's curiosity is piqued. But the revelation never comes. Her source disappears. And Katie does some real-life spy work to try to figure out what's going on, and what happened 15 years earlier.

Like the series her character writes, Susan Isaac's Past Perfect is espionage light. Katie Schottland is a likable character, and the book's premise appeals very much. It would in fact make for a good television series, of the Remington Steele variety, though there is no indication that the author intends to take her characters further. My only complaint is that the book, very readable much of the time, slows to a crawl too often, as when, for example, her characters are discussing the various intrigues that led to Katie's firing--a story that goes back to the German Stasi and the toppling of the Berlin Wall.

In short: I like Isaac's main character, love the novel's premise, but the pace of the book is just too slow.

Comments

[Clare D]

1.

Yes, does sound a very intriguing premise. Some things can eat at you for years if you can't understand why they happened. Really good idea.

[Maxine]

2.

I've read a few of her books and enjoyed them. Her first, about the cheating dentist (or have I misremembered?) was hilarious. I think it was made into a not such a good movie with Susan Sarandon. But the book was very funny, to me, not a fan generally of comedies.

[Debra Hamel]

3.

I was surprised when I went over to Amazon to see that she got some very low reviews on this one. Undeserved, I think. Certainly the book wasn't perfect, but there was a lot good about it. I don't always understand the minds of my fellow Amazon reviewers.