Touchstone

November 26, 2007
Set shortly before Britain’s disastrous General Strike of 1926, this stand-alone thriller from bestseller King (Keeping Watch
) offers impeccable scholarship and the author’s usual intelligent prose, but a surfeit of period detail and some weighty themes—the gulf between rich and poor, the insidious nature of both terrorism and the efforts to curb it—overpower the thin plot and stock characters. When Harris Stuyvesant, an investigator for the U.S. Justice Department, arrives in London to look for the mastermind behind a series of terrorist bombings on American soil, he tells Aldous Carstairs, a sinister government official, that his prime suspect is Labour Party leader Richard Bunsen. Carstairs suggests Stuyvesant should talk to Bennett Grey, whose brush with death during WWI has heightened his sense of perception to the point that he’s a kind of human lie detector (he’s the “touchstone” of the title), and to Lady Laura Hurleigh, Bunsen’s lover and a passionate advocate of his brand of socialism. The threat of violence at a secret summit meeting held at the Hurleigh family’s country house about preventing the strike provides some mild suspense.

Starred review from January 15, 2008
With this new stand-alone, King once again departs from escapades of her series detectives Mary Russell ("The Game") and Kate Martinelli ("The Art of Detection") and returns to the exploration of postwar adjustment that was the focus of "Keeping Watch." Using the growth of the labor movement during the 1920s as a backdrop, she creates a community of characters whose motives and behaviors stem from their World War I experiences. At the center of the action is Cornwall resident Bennett Grey, a man with an uncanny ability to sense turmoil and deception within other individuals. Acquired after he sustained battle injuries, Grey's gift makes him an invaluable tool for F.B.I. agent Harris Stuyvesant, who is bent on tracking down the suspected British source of sophisticated incendiary devices used in more than one violent union confrontation on American soil, but it causes Grey both physical and mental distress. Realistic psychological drama, strong research, and impeccable writing style make this a tale not to be missed. Highly recommended.Nancy McNicol, Hamden P.L., CT

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Starred review from November 15, 2007
In England in 1926, New Yorker Harris Stuyvesant is tracking the bomber who blew up his sweetheart and permanently injured his brother. A sinister operative leads him to Bennett Grey, whose injuries in World War I make him terrifyingly sensitive to every movement and gesture and who has hidden himself in Cornwall. These three, Greys former lover Lady Laura Hurleigh, and his sister, Sarah, form the points of an intricate star drawn around the old families and the coming general strike, the legacy of the war, and the desperation of poverty and class struggle. King works her mastery not only in a vivid and sometimes terrifying psychological study but also through gorgeous evocation of the English landscape, detaileddescription of the dynamics in a country house inhabited by the same family for half a millennium, and perceptive analysis of the intricate complexities of politics, power and gender, and social justice. Cinematic in the intensity of its shifting points of view and boasting characters so charismatic that we can hear not only their voices but also the sound of their breathing, Kings latest combines a compelling plot with a richly, even lushly, imagined time and place.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)