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Summary
Summary
From the New York Times bestselling author of Any Place I Hang My Hat, Compromising Positions, and Shining Through comes a wonderful new novel about a woman ousted from the CIA who, years later, finds herself back in the game.
Author Notes
Susan Isaacs was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 7, 1943. She graduated from Queens College and began her literary career as an administrative assistant at Seventeen magazine. Freelance writing and writing political speeches for Long Island politicians filled her spare time while she was home raising her children in the 1970s. Her first novel, Compromising Positions, was published in 1978 and adapted into a movie of the same title that starred Susan Sarandon and Raul Julia. Her other novels include Almost Paradise, Magic Hour, After All These Years, and Lily White. She wrote and co-produced the movie Hello Again which starred Shelley Long, Gabriel Byrne, and Judith Ivey. Her novel, Shining Through, was adapted into a movie starring Michael Douglas, Melanie Griffith and Liam Neeson.
She covered the 2000 presidential campaign for Newsday. She also reviewed books for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Newsday. She has won numerous awards including the Writers for Writers Award, the Marymount Manhattan Writing Center Award, and the John Steinbeck Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Isaacs's 11th novel has fewer sparks flying than nets dragging, but most fans won't mind a bit, given the amount of outside-the-bedroom adventure. Despite reinventing herself as the author of the novel Spy Guys and the creator of the resultant TV show, Katie Schottland remains wounded by her still-unexplained firing from the CIA, where she wrote intelligence briefs as the Cold War ended, 13 years earlier. When she gets a distress call from an old co-worker, Lisa Golding, who subsequently disappears, Katie plunges back into the notes she smuggled out of the office. She seeks help from an old flame and another ex-agent (now a log-cabin recluse) who helps her trace three of Lisa's former charges at the CIA, East German asylum seekers transported to America and given new names. When two of them turn up dead within weeks of each other, Katie decides to give chase to locate the third before the woman becomes the next casualty. And she still hopes she'll coerce her ex-employer to give up the truth about her termination. The operations stuff is well-done throughout. Katie's relationship with her sweet vet husband adds little, but TV show-based scenes are diverting, and her fixation on her last job is sharply funny and true-to-life. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
By turns sassy and serious, Isaacs's best-selling novels (including Any Place I Hang My Hat, 2004) offer variations on a theme: What's a nice Jewish girl doing in a predicament like this? In the opening pages of her latest offering, former CIA analyst Katie Schottland receives a call from Lisa Golding, an old colleague who desperately needs her help. Katie, who was inexplicably fired from the agency some 15 years before, has since turned her experiences to profit, penning a successful cable-TV show based on her novel, Spy Games. But she remains clueless about the circumstances surrounding her termination. Lisa, it seems, knows all the devastating details and offers to offer them up in exchange for Katie's assistance. But can Katie, now ensconced in upper Manhattan, with a nice (if somewhat milquetoasty) husband and a 10-year-old son, leave behind her safe, comfortable life long enough to learn the truth? Past Perfect has cliched prose and a plot that pushes the limits of believability (skeptical readers may wonder how the scattered Katie ever got a CIA post in the first place). But Isaacs, veteran novelist and screenwriter with a sterling track record, can be counted on to ring cash registers, and if this isn't her best effort, it does offer a cast of reasonably engaging characters headed by Katie, a woman determined--once and for all--to make peace with her past. --Allison Block Copyright 2006 Booklist
Kirkus Review
A faltering comic spy caper from Isaacs (Any Place I Hang My Hat, 2004, etc.). Soon-to-be-40 Katie Schottland has a pretty terrific life in her native New York: a great apartment in a pre-war building, a devoted husband in Adam, a vet at the Bronx Zoo, and ten-year-old Nicky, a pudgy kid with a heart of gold. To top it off, she has an enviable job as the sole writer for Spy Guys, a not too awful cable show based on her only novel. But when she gets a mysterious call from ex-colleague Lisa Golding, something about national security and the fate of the nation, all that contentment evaporates. Fifteen years ago, Katie and Lisa worked at the CIA, Katie turning out reports on the crumbling Soviet Bloc. She loved everything about her job until she was unceremoniously fired, escorted from the building by guards and blackballed from finding another job. Lisa's call offers the ultimate bait--the classified information explaining why Katie was ditched. But when Lisa disappears, Katie becomes involved in a CIA conspiracy more complicated than anything she could have come up with for the cable show: Three East German officials were brought to the U.S. courtesy of the CIA just before the collapse of their government. Set up in businesses and given new identities, they benefited from quite a lot of starter money. Why such special treatment? And why are they being murdered? Katie begins traveling the country in search of answers, having a bit more adventure than she bargained for. Isaacs' thriller is complicated enough to keep you guessing until the end, but the book's momentum is halted by the slightly neurotic narrator, who enjoys the occasional tangent right at the climax of suspense. A misstep for the usually entertaining author. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
New York novelist Katie Schottland is the TV scriptwriter of an espionage show based on her book, Spy Guys. She is also happily married to Adam, a pathologist at the Bronx Zoo, and is the mother of precocious ten-year-old Nicky. A high achiever and more than gainfully employed, Katie has nonetheless never gotten over the shame of being fired from her first job with the CIA. Fifteen years earlier, following her graduation from college, she worked for two years as a writer/analyst for the agency's Eastern European division when she was suddenly and unceremoniously removed from the premises without explanation. Katie's feelings surface anew when she receives a blast-from-the-past phone call from former colleague Lisa Golding, who begs for Katie's help, promises in exchange to tell her why she was removed, and then promptly disappears. From that point forward, Katie's life takes on the intrigue of her TV characters as she searches for Lisa and the answer to her own personal mystery. Filled with well-rounded characters and good humor, this novel, like Isaacs's previous works (e.g., Any Place I Hang My Hat), could be a best seller. Recommended for large fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/06.]-Sheila Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Oh God, I wish I had a weapon! Naturally, I don't. Of course, if life in any way resembled Spy Guys, the espionage TV show I write, I'd pull off the top of my pen and with one stab inflict a fatal wound, and save my life. Except no pen: just two pieces of chewed Dentyne Ice spearmint wrapped in a receipt for sunscreen and panty liners. When I began making notes on what I naively thought of as Katie's Big Adventure, I hadn't a clue that my life would be on the line. How could I? This would be my story, and every ending I'd ever written had been upbeat. But in the past few weeks I've learned that "happily ever after" is simply proof of my lifelong preference for fantasy over reality. Unfortunately, fantasy will not get me out of this mess. So what am I supposed to do now? First, calm down. Hard to do when I'm crouched behind a toolshed, up to my waist in insanely lush flora that's no doubt crawling with fauna. It's so dark. No moon, no stars: the earth could be the only celestial object in a black universe. And it's hot. Even at this late hour, there is no relief from the heat. My shirt is sweat-drenched and so sucked against my skin it's a yellow-and-white-striped epidermis. I cannot let myself dwell on the fact that my danger is doubled because I'm so out of my element. Me, Total Manhattan Sushi Woman, cowering behind a toolshed in fried pork rinds country with unspeakable creatures from the insect and worm worlds who think my sandaled feet are some new interstate. Adam, my husband, would probably be able to identify the nocturnal bird in a nearby tree that refuses to shut up, the one whose hoarse squawks sound like "Shit! Shit! Shit!" Adam is a vet. A veterinary pathologist at the Bronx Zoo, to be precise. Were something that feels like a rat's tail to brush his toes in the dark, he wouldn't want to shriek in horror and vomit simultaneously, like I do. He'd just say, Hmm, a Norway rat. Adam is close to fearless. I, of course, am not. If I concentrate on what's happening here in the blackness, the slide of something furry against my anklebone, the sponginess of the ground beneath the thin, soaked soles of my sandals, a sudden Bump! against my cheek, then something, whatever it is (bat? blood-swollen insect?) ricocheting off, I will literally go mad, and trust me, I know the difference between literally and figuratively. I'll howl like a lunatic until brought back to sanity by the terrible realization that I've given away my precise location to that nut job who is out there, maybe only a hundred feet away, stalking me. Feh! Something just landed on the inner part of my thigh. As I brush it off, its gross little feet try to grip me. Don't scream! Calm down. Taoist breathing method: Listen to your breathing. Easy. Don't force it. Just concentrate. Listen. All right: three reasonably calm breaths. What am I going to do? How am I going to survive? Will I ever see Adam again? And our son, Nicky? What used to be my real life back in New York seems as far away as some Blondie concert I went to when I was fifteen. All right, what the hell was I originally thinking I had to do here behind the toolshed? Oh, try to remember what I wrote in the journal I began a day or two after that first disturbing phone call. Maybe something I'd unthinkingly jotted down could help me now, or could at least allow me to delude myself that this episode will be yet another of my... and they lived happily ever after. Copyright (c) 2007 by Susan Isaacs From Past Perfect "You want to right a past wrong. Has it occurred to you that your going back to the past is a means of reconnecting with the Agency, of giving yourself an adventure? So your life can resemble one of your television shows?" Not bad. I wished I had the rocking chair, because I could have gone back and forth on that one for a while. I wasn't my mother's daughter for nothing. I just sat quietly though. Finally I said, "It's a thoughtful question. I wish I could give you a definitive 'Absolutely not!' I don't know. I don't think I want actual adventure. If I did, I would have applied to the clandestine service when I applied to the CIA. But if I had, I'm sure I couldn't have passed the psychological tests, because I don't have what it takes. I don't get thrills from danger, I just get frightened. Look, Mr. Harlow, I've never even been on a roller coaster." I was about to say the only way I'd ever get on one would be at gunpoint, but I decided to skip it. "Fair enough. And you can call me Jacques." "So where did you get the name?" "It was my father's." My buddy Jacques was not overly generous in the information department. "Are you called Katherine?" "Katie. Kate if you're the monosyllabic type. I want to clear something up though. It's not as if I spent the last fifteen years rubbing my hands together and plotting how to get justice from the Agency." I made a big deal about swallowing because I wasn't sure of the wisdom of telling all, or even telling some, to Jacques. On the other hand, there was no other hand. He was my last and therefore best hope. "A few weeks ago," I began, "I got a call from someone I had known at the Agency. Lisa Golding." I looked at him long enough until he said, "Never heard of her." He stood and walked around and leaned on the back of the chair which seemed, somehow, to know not to rock. "I'm assuming that's not the end of the story. Somehow this led you to want to speak to someone familiar with the situation in East Germany in '89." "Yes." I considered getting up too, but the back of my chair was low enough that if I rested my arms on it, I'd look like Quasimodo. So sitting there, I told him how Lisa had offered to tell me why I was fired in exchange for my help, and then gave him a three-word character sketch-amusing, talented, untruthful-and a description of her job. Since I wasn't about to tell him of my notes down in the basement, in the Crypt, I said: "I spent days trying to remember what I'd worked on with her. The only thing I could come up with that might still have meaning was..." I stopped for a moment, then said, "I'd feel better if you swore to me you weren't recording this." "Swear to you? It's a damn good thing you didn't apply to clandestine services. You take somebody at their word?" "Didn't you ever decide to trust someone?" I asked him. Copyright (c) 2007 by Susan Isaacs Excerpted from Past Perfect by Susan Isaacs All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
