Fiction review: The Spire

FICTION
During a meeting in Paris between President John F. Kennedy and French President Charles de Gaulle, the imperious Frenchman rid the room of photographers with the flick of a finger.

"Don't you wish you could dismiss photographers like that?" a reporter asked JFK.

"You must remember," he replied, "I was not recalled to office as my country's savior."

The protagonist of Richard North Patterson's latest suspense novel, Mark Darrow, finds himself in a situation analogous to de Gaulle's, though on a lesser scale.

Darrow is 38, a recent widower; his wife, Lee, a television reporter, was killed in a car crash on the campaign trail while pregnant with their first child. But although his personal life has turned tragic, his professional life has not -- he's a high-powered Boston trial lawyer.

But 20 years ago, he was simply a high school football star in tiny Wayne, Ohio, the son of an alcoholic father and a schizophrenic mother, and bound for nowhere. That was until Lionel Farr, a philosophy professor at nearby Caldwell College, stepped in as a mentor and saw to it that Darrow received a full ride to the small, private school.

Darrow's college years were successful on the gridiron and in the classroom until murder intervened when he was a senior. A talented black student, Angela Hall, was found strangled near the Spire, a bell tower on campus. And Darrow's best friend, Steve Tillman, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole.

Now, a financial scandal has erupted at Caldwell (the school's president, Clark Durbin, is suspected of embezzlement), and Farr, now the school's provost, has traveled to Boston to persuade Darrow to take the presidency and save the college from certain decline and possible demise.

At loose ends after Lee's death, Darrow accepts. But once back in Wayne, he cannot help picking at the scabs of the past and gradually becomes convinced that Tillman was wrongly convicted. Meanwhile, he finds himself in an affair of sorts with Taylor Farr, Lionel Farr's beautiful but troubled 28-year-old daughter, and slowly realizes that his unofficial investigation into the Hall case is putting his own life in danger.

Patterson is the author of 16 previous novels that run the gamut from straight suspense to political intrigue to global issues. But whatever his topic, he never fails to spin a good yarn, create memorable characters and deliver it all in prose that often rises above the serviceable -- and "The Spire" is no exception.

The plot's a page turner with multiple twists and a well-earned conclusion at once shocking and inevitable. Darrow is a well-drawn protagonist, Lionel and Taylor Farr are particularly memorable, and even the minor characters ring of reality in a small, Midwestern college town.

And then there's the writing:

"Darrow thought of Steve's fate, then Durbin's; in each case, their guilt in some way served to insulate Caldwell from further damage. It had been hard to imagine his friend a murderer; now, if one believed the available evidence, Durbin was a thief. It was another humbling example, Darrow supposed, of the mysteries of character -- how little you understood the people you thought you knew unless, by chance, you happened on some unguarded window in their lives."

With intellect and insight, Patterson has written another literate thriller, one that combines a gripping story peopled with plausible characters and a meditation on honor and the debts we owe the people from our past

Contact Jay Strafford at (804) 649-6698 or .