Monday With Kaye: "The South Lawn Plot" by Ray O'Hanlon (Reviewed by Kaye George)

Kaye George is back with her first “Monday With Kaye” piece for July. This time it is on the thriller THE SOUTH LAWN PLOT by Ray O’Hanlon.  Make sure you scroll back through the recent weeks and check out all the segments as Kaye George has been making quite a few reading suggestions.

The South Lawn Plot by Ray O'Hanlon

I think you have to call this a thriller, technically. It doesn't quite move like one, but the cast, geography and tangled plot are complex—gigantic even. There's a lot to recommend here as we follow Nick Bailey, a London reporter, into a story that starts out murky and gets deeper and deeper into a real, pea-soup fog.

The interwoven plots involve an odd, religious order with roots in the 1600s. The present day priests of that order: a wealthy Taiwanese businessman with a grudge and a terminal illness, a famous photographer who has a much darker sideline occupation, a frustrated, Irish freedom fighter and the top political figure in the world. Their conspiracies snowball. Nothing will stop them except, perhaps, Nick, the intrepid and courageous reporter and a few British police officers who stand in the way. Some American counterparts come into play also as we skip from continent to continent and world-wide war looms if the diplomacy isn't handled exactly right.

From the beginning, with dangling suicidal priests, these disparate groups weave a tangled plot whose strands gradually twine together to create a rope of intrigue that may be too strong to be broken. Throw in MI5, MI6 and a few American agencies and you've got a potboiler. A very satisfying read.

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of Choke, for SuspenseMagazine