Ace reporter John Cotton is a fly on the wall -- seeing all, hearing all, and keeping out of sight. But the game changes when he finds his best friend's corpse sprawled on the marble floor of the central rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Suddenly Cotton knows too much about a scandal centered around a senatorial candidate, a million-dollar scam, and a murder. And he hears the pursuing footsteps of powerful people who have something to hide ... and a willingness to kill to keep their secrets hidden.
Location figures powerfully in Hillerman's newest novel, but it isn't the Southwest of his Navajo mysteries (Sacred Clowns, etc.), nor is this a Joe Leaphorn story. In April 1975, Moon Mathias, managing editor of a small-town Colorado newspaper, begins a redemptive journey that takes him first to Manila and then across the South China Sea to Cambodia, just as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge begin their reign of terror. Moon's brother Ricky, owner of a helicopter transportation service based in Cambodia, has recently died in a jungle crash.
Recourse to the Bell's is still needed, however, to get him through a day's filming-one made all the more arduous by the pompous posturings of the show's star, and the constant outraged interruptions of the ancient author whose detective novels are being adapted. Indeed, there is plenty of friction about, but when a particularly unpromising actress is killed,
Brian Leonard, a Monty Python of secret agents, meets James Churchill, a young officer, at an English army base where preparations are under way for Operation Apollo. To complicate matters, Churchill has gone round-the-bend for a parole from the mental ward. Thrown amongst these loose cannons is a widowed beauty who practices "conspicuous polyandry," an unfocused psychiatrist, an unbelieving chaplain, and a charming alcoholic. "Amis delights in combining espionage, violence, love and religious skepticism. Such disparate elements, like dishpans and fire rings, challenge his juggler's dexterity. Who wins? The reader!"
The Alteration is the title of a 1976 alternate history novel by Kingsley Amis, set in a parallel universe in which the Reformation did not take place. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1977. The year is 1976 and we are alive in an all-Catholic world. The Reformation never took place because Martin Luther made a deal with Rome and became Pope Martin I. The "alteration" proposed to Hubert Anvil, brilliant 10-year-old boy soprano, is that most feared by all males. Pope John XXIV wishes Hubert to preserve the purity of his voice to glorify the Church on a permanent basis; Hubert wishes to share his talent but he has some disquieting thoughts about Pope John's proposal.
