Almost Home

'Almost Home' is a great 'don't bother me while I'm reading' story. Jordan Weiss, a State Dept Intelligence officer, is returning to England to see a friend who is dying from ALS. She has avoided England for ten years, when she was a graduate student at Cambridge and her lover, Jared Short, drowned. When she arrives she reports to the State Dept there and finds that they want her to check with Duncan Lauder, a student she had known then, about possible money laundering. He disappears and people deny even knowing him. She keeps on trying to find out what's going on, but is thwarted by people warning her off and threatening her. She discovers that Jared had been researching and planned to present at a conference a paper about a great deal of money that was stolen in WW2. (This is the money that that the State Dept is trying to track. It seems that the Albanian underworld now has it.) He had asked Duncan to look at the money trail. The presentation had been canceled, and she can't find a copy of the paper to see what it had shown. She finds that Jared was murdered, an attempt on her life kills someone else, Duncan's lover is murdered, and she is in danger again and nearly killed. The final denouement is a surprise and startling! I really enjoyed this book.

Jordan Weiss, an intelligence officer for the State Department, finds out her dear friend Sarah has Lou Gehrig's disease. Sarah lives in England, a country that holds bad memories for Jordan, a place she's gone out of her way to stay away from, but she love Sarah and requests a transfer, which goes through a little too easily, but Jordan doesn't notice, she's too busy thinking about her friend. In London she's contacted by an old college friend who tells her he thinks the death of the man she loved when they were in Cambridge together may not have been an accidental drowning like everybody believed back then. Jordan doesn't want to believe him, but evidence keeps piling up to the contrary and the more she looks into it, the more somebody tries to stop her. Pan Jenoff has written a thriller that is hard to put down. If this is the start of a series I think it is going to have a long life. Jordan Weiss is a character I cared about and one I'll come back to as often as Ms. Jenoff allows. There is tension a plenty here, suspense too and a delicious twist in the tale that I didn't see coming. Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne

Almost Home doesn't conveniently slot into any of the standard genres that its plot might suggest. The narrator of the story, Jordan Weiss, is a U.S. State Department Intelligence Officer; which might suggest a spy story. But then she's brought to London to face the painful memories of her boyfriend's death ten years ago. Okay, call it a mystery then? Even that's not quite accurate because there are elements connecting her lover's supposedly accidental death with her current assignment that involves money laundering by Albanian organized crime. So now we're in the area of international intrigue. But then there are personal relationships and complications that drive the plot forward without the obvious connections that one might expect. And framing it all is the sport of collegiate rowing, which adds a metaphorical dimension unlike your standard spy/mystery/suspense novel. In the hands of a less talented writer, this might all have been a hopeless mess, however Pam Jenoff crafts the entire story so well that you can't help but marvel at her abilities. The story is all told in the first person (a minor annoyance at times for me) by Jordan, who fled England shortly after the death of her love (Jared) and graduation from Cambridge. Haunted by the memories of her relationship and its abrupt end, she's pointedly avoided professional assignment to the U.K. until a request from a friend afflicted with ALS causes her to request a transfer. Almost immediately, another friend finds her and shares his suspicion that Jared's drowning death could not have been an accident. Balancing her professional assignment with her own quest for the truth, Jordan immediately finds herself tangled in a web of information and disinformation that quickly leads the reader to wonder if her past and present are more connected than she realizes. It seems that in researching his dissertation, Jared exposed secrets from Nazi Germany that even today people are willing to kill in order to protect them. But what truly was Jared's role in all of this? Was he complicit in the cover-up? Was he an unknowing victim, or someone trying to expose another element of Nazi evil? I confess, for a time, I fell into the trap of thinking that things were falling into place all too conveniently. I was pulled out of that smug little zone about half way through Almost Home and was dazzled with the way in which Ms. Jenoff brought everything together without resorting to cheap plot twists that can irritate the thinking reader.

Pam Jenoff's "Almost Home" is an uncannily captivating thriller of the return after ten years by Jordan Weiss, a highly intelligent, attractive, and successful American diplomat, to her traumatic graduate days at Cambridge University in England. In a world of lies that she does not know are lies, she is duped from the beginning in an increasingly harrowing tale of espionage and deception that brings into question everything she has believed about present and past relationships. For all her experience as a senior U.S. official in State Department postings around the world, she retains a naïveté that many colleagues and friends are ready to exploit. Upon hearing that her former schoolmate and best friend Sarah has a terminal disease, she requests a London posting to be near her to help. Only Sarah's condition could have brought Jordan back to the ultimate sadness that had marred her Cambridge days. Jordan had loved being coxswain of the university boating crew. She had also loved Jared Short, a doctoral student, who was the crew leader. She had shared his bed, hoping eventually to share a future life. That was not to be, for one night, after celebrating, Jared had inexplicably drowned in the river. Jordan's dual attention is directed to her day job at the embassy as a top investigator of organized crime and money laundering in the U.K., while simultaneously trying to find out the details surrounding Jared's drowning. Was there a connection? In alternating flashbacks and current episodes, author Pam Jenoff tells a suspenseful, sensual, engrossing, and challenging story. Not for the prudish. Hold on for the ride, you are definitely going to be surprised.