The Room and the Chair

September 21, 2009
Ejecting from a plummeting jet high over the Potomac River is only one of fighter pilot Mary Goodwin's problems in this elaborately plotted war on terror page-turner from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist Adams (Harbor
). A sense that something more than a simple malfunction downed her plane dogs Mary, but self-doubts springing from a dark past discourage her from digging any further and she soon ships out to Afghanistan. Stanley Belson, night editor of the Washington Spectator
, has a similar hunch about the crash and he pushes his newsroom protégé to investigate. Operating in the shadows near the center is Will Holmes, the chair of a secret intelligence program. As the many subplots connect and evolve, something approaching a romance between Will and Mary sprouts in Afghanistan; Mary is hounded by tragic events; and Will's operation spins out of control. Though Adams's lean prose comes off as affected and her characters feel hollow, the dovetailing of Adams's cynical assessment of newsroom ethics and political maneuvering places this nicely among macroview novels of contemporary political intrigue.

November 15, 2009
Sparky but overcrowded successor to the memorable Harbor (2004) can't decide if it's primarily a Washington novel or an espionage-oriented work refracting America's global reach.

Capt. Mary Goodwin's F-16 is patrolling the skies over D.C. when a malfunction forces her to eject, landing in a tree. The 32-year-old pilot has been used as a guinea pig in a secret Pentagon project to prevent suicide attacks. Her crash was directed from the ground, but the project's overseer, Will Holmes, green-lighted it too soon. Interest in the crash is slight at the Washington Spectator (read Post), whose top brass are preoccupied with getting beaten to the scoop on another story by the paper's arch rival. But veteran night editor Stanley Belson smells a good story and has protge Vera Hastings investigate. Mary and Vera are strong, unconventional women with fascinating pasts—their ferreting would make a fine novel in itself. But there is more, much more. The Spectator newsroom hums with politicking and scuttlebutt, while in the background looms star editor/author Don Grady (stand-in for Bob Woodward), symbol of insider arrogance in a novel that affirms humility as the ultimate virtue. Oddly, considering that Adams is a former Post reporter, the newspaper material—particularly the excessive amount of it devoted to Grady and his wife, alcoholic columnist Mabel Cannon—is less alive than the chapters that take place overseas. Two sections set in Iran show Hoseyn, a defecting nuclear scientist and one of Holmes' assets, faking his suicide and getting whisked away to Dubai. In another long passage, a bombing run executed by Mary and her devoted wingman in Afghanistan results in civilian deaths. Throughout these portions, the action is riveting, the angles it's viewed from are different, and ironies salt the narrative; only the burned-out Holmes is a clich of espionage fiction.

Adams remains an enormously stimulating writer; greater artistic discipline could put her over the top.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 1, 2009
In her second novel (after "Harbor"), Adams, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the "Washington Post", jumps back and forth between a newsroom in Washington, DC, and the secretive world of covert military operations in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The result is a novel of war and news making in contemporary America that reads like a literary jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing, as if there were more going on in the author's mind that she is conveying to the reader. Of the many characters in this ambitious work, the one that stands out is a tough female fighter pilot whose story begins and ends the novel. VERDICT Too ambiguous and with too many loose ends to work as suspense, this well-researched literary novel offers an unflinching look at the dangerous world we live in.Leslie Patterson, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence, RI

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2010
The Room is a Washington, D.C., newsroom, an arena Adams, a Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter formerly at the Washington Post, knows well. Adams follows her acclaimed first novel, Harbor (2004), with an intense tale of grim post-9/11 politics and infinite war. In prose clipped, eliding, yet darkly poetic, Adams sets in motion a two-pronged story of covert action and power. Mary, a fighter pilot with a devastating family history, cannot understand why her Viper crashes into the Potomac, but a Special Ops director, dubbed the Chair, knows all about it, and he isnt finished toying with her life. Stanley, the papers night editor, wonders why the story of the crash receives minimal play, so he puts the rookie, Vera, an African American former ballerina, on the case, while alpha analyst Don rests on his legendary Watergate laurels, hubristically indifferent to the profound unhappiness of his columnist wife. An Iranian nuclear scientist, child prostitutes, cruel ironies in Afghanistan, the collapse of serious journalism, the wretched secret crimes of an immoral shadow governmentAdams fits it all into this masterfully constructed, diabolical cluster-bomb of a novel. A searing tale of lies within lies, not without flashes of humor and beauty, that roars to a halt in a haunted room with a sweat-oiled chair. Read with care.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)