Mon 11 Nov 2019
Archived Review: RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON – The Lasko Tangent.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[4] Comments
RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON – The Lasko Tangent. Christopher Paget #1. W. W. Norton, hardcover, 1979. Ballantine, paperbark, 1980.
Yes, it sounds like a spy thriller, the paperback reprint is packaged as a spy thriller, but what this book precisely is not is — aw, you guessed it. It’s not a spy thriller.
What it really is is a novel about the dirty business of laundering money. That is to say, it’s a detective story, and told in today’s most au courant Washington (DC) style.
Lasko is the President’s favorite industrialist, but his background has more shade than Forest Lawn — not that anyone has ever proved anything. The President, who is unnamed, but — well, let’s just say that only the names have been changed.
Christopher Kenyon Paget is a lawyer for the Prosecution Bureau of the United States Economic Crime Commission. (And I’ll wager you didn’t even know there was one.) He’s young, idealistic, very much a crusader for what he believes in. A chance tip about some possible stock manipulation takes him to Boston, where he watches in horror as his witness, who works for Lasko, is run down by a hit-and-run driver. Higher things are cooking.
This is a cynical novel, Patterson’s first, and you don’t have to dig very far to discover it. According to inside the front cover, the author worked for the special prosecutor in the Watergate uncover-up, and his is the voice of authenticity. Paget continually has to fight pressure from higherups, without ever knowing who or where the enemy is. an he has a narrow escape or two before he does.
On the other hand, none of this “real Washington” stuff is really new, and it’s all wrapped up in the end more tightly than real life ever seems to be.
The Christopher Paget series —
1. The Lasko Tangent (1979). [Winner of Edgar award for Best First Novel, 1980.]
2. Degree of Guilt (1992)
3. Eyes of a Child (1994)
4. Conviction (2005)
November 11th, 2019 at 12:27 pm
I haven’t read this particular title but I’m very pleased to see the name Richard North Patterson cited. One book I have read from him, impressed the heck out of me. I admit that many readers make a similar complaint as what you just discovered about ‘Lasko’; namely that there’s a quality of “too neat” and “too convenient” about Patterson’s plots. Nevertheless, I thought ‘Escape the Night’ was marvelous.
November 11th, 2019 at 12:56 pm
As for me, this is the only novel by Patterson I’ve ever read. His books are the kind I just never seem to get around to reading.
But if I’d known that he’d written other books about Paget (some 13 years later), I might have wanted to know if he was still as idealistic later on as I thought he was in this first one.
November 11th, 2019 at 8:36 pm
I’m off and on about these political thrillers, but it sounds as if I missed a good one.
November 11th, 2019 at 10:15 pm
‘Escape the Night’ (if memory serves) is about a young man raised by a CIA family; and so he when troubling issues arise he is never quite sure whether his perceptions/feelings are correct, or whether his family’s version of the facts is what’s accurate. Not new territory, but it points the way to ‘Bourne’. I kept it on my shelf a long while.