A Review of The K Street Affair by Mari Passananti


 (Rutland Square Press, Boston, MA, 2013; ISBN: 9780985894603) by Joey Madia
Mari Passananti’s The K Street Affair is a well-paced and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink action-adventure featuring a first-person perspective from lawyer-turned-amateur-agent Lena Mancuso. Use of the first person is unusual in the spy/terrorism genre, and it took a little while for me to adjust to it, but it does not deter from the overall success of the novel and in the end, provides some benefits to the way the tale unfolds.
The story begins with a terrorist bombing in Washington, DC and quickly escalates and broadens to involve a high-powered law firm, a multi-national corporation, several front organizations, and high-level politicians in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States, all vying for economic and global power. Add in the FBI and a sudden murder of someone very close to Lena and we are taken along on a fast-paced ride through the geo-political world of offshore accounts, high-tech spying, assassination-machinations, and U.S. diplomatic over-reliance on a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” mentality.
Passananti’s reluctant heroine does her best to stay centered and sane as the tension and intrigue mount. As she struggles to cope with tragedy and danger, she comments on the condition of her hair, the make of her borrowed boots, and the quality of food and drink. To the author’s credit, this somehow adds to, rather than detracts from, the realism of the novel.
In general, Passananti does an able job of crafting a suitably exaggerated but still plausible series of events, and she explains highly complex entities like offshore banks and front corporations with the light touch that comes from a thorough understanding of the research she undertook.
The K Street Affair is packed with surprising turns, plenty of tension, and some pointed (and for this reader, enjoyable) digs on real entities and people, with names of corporations and descriptions of some politicians just thinly veiled enough to keep the reader guessing as to whom she based them on.
Another aspect of the novel that I enjoyed was Passananti’s choice to not turn Lena into a martial-arts spymaster as she progressed through the story. Lena’s natural instincts and abilities, while challenged and sharpened, were not absurdly enhanced during the course of her experiences.
There is plenty of action—and some subtly scribed sex as well—that keeps things interesting, strategically breaking up the denser legal and high-finance sections.
Prior to 9/11 I was an avid reader of these types of novels—especially Tom Clancy’s—but on September 12, 2001, I took several shelves’ worth of them to the dumpster in back of my apartment. In the blink of an eye, the world these authors had described as fantasy suddenly became all too real.
Passananti’s novel—like many of the spy-genre films I’ve seen since that time—has just enough tongue-in-cheek sensibility to keep it fun amidst the larger and very real evil at work in the world.
As I read The K Street Affair I couldn’t help but feel like this was the first of a possible series of Lena Mancuso adventures, and I was not proven wrong, although the set-up for the next one was not what I thought it would be.
I look forward to a sequel.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“A Firsthand Account of Secret Societies”: A Review of 334‰ Lies: The Revelation of H. M. v. Stuhl.

   Translated by Samuel Chong (English trans. June 2021; originally published in German in 2000). ISBN: 9798513274353 In an age of Conspiracy Theory Mania—a mix of those who revel in it and those who completely reject it—there are few subjects that are as thorny and contentious as the idea that there are secret lodges or societies that set the course of geopolitics from the shadows, engineering puppet governments, wars, and catastrophes to subjugate humanity and main ultimate control. From the innocuous fraternal organizations like the Freemasons, to political and economic organizations like the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, and Club of Rome, the idea that a select few are making decisions for billions is one that is often met with anger and fierce recrimination. No matter the “evidence” put forth about odd places like Bohemian Grove and secret satchels with documents outlining the course of wars originating with the Bavarian Illuminati; no
Read more

“ETs Among Us”: A Review of Earth’s Galactic History: And Its Extraterrestrial Connection by Constance Victoria Briggs

   (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2024). ISBN: 978-1-948803-62-5 Over the past several years, through the publication and positive reviews of her Encyclopedia of Moon Mysteries and The Moon’s Galactic History , Constance Victoria Briggs has become a leading authority on the subject of visitations to Earth and the Moon by extraterrestrials. There are two reasons for her ascendancy into this well-deserved, hard-earned position. First, Briggs does exhaustive amounts of research, structuring her books like PhD dissertations (the structural design of MGH and EGH is similar). Second, she remains a hopeful but very staunch skeptic. She is primarily a reporter. She presents the facts and lets the reader do with them what they will, without gloss. In this way, she is like Dr. Michael Salla and Paul Blake Nelson. Although she traverses the same landscapes as the Ancient Alien crowd (one of whom, David Childress, is her publisher), Briggs is the Joe Friday of the bunch: “Just the facts.” In
Read more

“Jung in Larger Context”: A Review of Toni Wolff & C. G. Jung: A Collaboration, by Nan Savage Healy

 (Los Angeles: Tiberius Press, 2017). ISBN: 978-0-9981128-0-0 (paperback) In the interest of Disclosure, I served as the editor for this book. That said, and keeping in mind the relationship of editors like Maxwell Perkins with their writers (in his case, no less than Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and, somewhat synchronistically—to use Jung’s term—Thomas Wolfe), this should not preclude a fair review. Indeed, editors are reviewing books all the time. The difference is, they have the opportunity to provide different eyes to the author’s work before the fact, as opposed to reviewers, who do so after the fact (although I have done a number of pre-publication reviews that precipitated changes before publication). But enough of that. I agreed to the editing contract for the same reason that I am now reviewing Toni Wolff & C. G. Jung— Nan Savage Healy’s detailed and insightful exploration of Jung’s unsung and nearly obliterated collaborator shines a powerful light on Jung, whom I, like
Read more