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Overview
It's 10 years after the Gulf War and Speaker of the House Dewey Goldberg has been sworn in as President of the United States following the accidental deaths of his predecessors. But he soon discovers that Israeli Prime Minister Elihu Barzel may be backing a fundamentalist opponent. Concerned, he dispatches his journalist-friend Charlie Walker to investigate. What Walker discovers is a plan code-named "The Project"—a plan so compelling that it not only jeopardizes the president's chances for reelection, but also the delicate balance of world power.
In a riveting novel of international intrigue and suspense, written by the widely acclaimed author of Hang Time, The Bookmakers, and Inherit the Mob, America's first Jewish president and the Israeli prime minister fight for political domination. 320 pp. Print ads. National print publicity. 20,000 print.
Synopsis
It's 10 years after the Gulf War and Speaker of the House Dewey Goldberg has been sworn in as President of the United States following the accidental deaths of his predecessors. But he soon discovers that Israeli Prime Minister Elihu Barzel may be backing a fundamentalist opponent. Concerned, he dispatches his journalist-friend Charlie Walker to investigate. What Walker discovers is a plan code-named "The Project"—a plan so compelling that it not only jeopardizes the president's chances for reelection, but also the delicate balance of world power.
Publishers Weekly
Even though it deals with such heavy-weight issues as the threat of nuclear war in the Middle East and Israel's meddling in an American election, this new thriller by Chafets (Inherit the Mob) has a cozy, downhome (hamische, as they say in Yiddish) quality, a welcome rarity in the current marketplace of blood and techno-thunder. There's also a healthy dash of sly insider's humor (Chafetz, now a columnist for the Jerusalem Report, worked as a press officer for Prime Minister Menachem Begin). It's 2000, and Dewey Goldberg, America's first Jewish president, sits uneasily in the White Househaving been elevated from Speaker of the House to chief executive 11 months earlier in the wake of a boating accident that killed both the president and the veep. Goldberg seems to have a good chance at winning a full term, until word leaks out that the enigmatic Israeli prime minister, Elihu Barzel, is pressuring American Jews to support the Republican candidate, right-wing Southern populist Earl Childes. Goldberg asks his old college friend Charlie Walker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, to find out why. Walker digs up some frightening facts about Barzel's past and his involvement in a shadowy military operation called The Project, which has something to do with the Armageddon being predicted for the year 2001 by Reverend Bobby Silas, a powerful American Christian militant. The plot's weighty bones don't stop Chafetz from animating a large and extremely colorful cast of minor characters, or from spreading his tart comments on politics and religion like horseradish on gefilte fish. (Apr.)