A Conspiracy of Tall Men [Paperback] [Apr 10, 2014] Noah Hawley - Softcover

Noah Hawley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1444779850 ISBN 13: 9781444779851

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014

Synopsis

Conspiracy of Tall Men

About this title

Review:

Noah Hawley quickly sucks us into his loopy, frightening first thriller by creating a perfect world of present-tense paranoia. "Here among the tabouli salads and unprocessed soy drinks the three conspiracy theorists meet each week to discuss developments in the interconnected network of plots driving the world toward a new order," he writes about the lunches that his hero--Linus Owens, a 35-year-old professor of conspiracy theory at Modesto College in San Rafael, California--has with his two friends. "Edward and Roy, despite Roy's innocuous job at Radio Shack and Edward's mostly shut-in status, are cutting-edge anarchists, publishers of anarchic newsletters, organizers of the new virtual revolution. Linus, in contrast, feels sheltered in the fat nest of academia. Sometimes he doubts his phone is even bugged...." But when Claudia, the perfectly normal wife he has somehow managed to acquire, is apparently killed in a plane crash on her way to Brazil (Owens thought she was in Chicago visiting her mother), he has to leave that fat nest and move out into what passes for the real world. It's a place where CIA agents lie about being FBI agents, where his wife's advertising business has sinister connections, and where nothing--or everything--is what he and his crazy companions think it is. --Dick Adler

From the Back Cover:

"Hidden in the cloak of a conspiracy thriller is a genre-buster of a book, a cunning, artistic, page-turning satire of our tenuous grasping at truth and free will."
--Po Bronson, author of The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest

When Linus gets back to his hotel he is ambushed by representatives from the airline. Since identifying Claudia, he has avoided interviews with the press, slipped out of the comforting crush of therapists, and declined invitations to join a survivors' group. I have survived nothing, he tells them. I am a walking dead man. This type of comment, surrounding the specter of mass extinction, spooks even the most leechlike, and in this way Linus has managed to cut through the crowds. He is driven back to the Marriott by Agent Perry, just out of the academy, still puffed up by the ideals of truth and justice like a caricature of Eliot Ness.

        "Are you familiar with J. Edgar Hoover?" Linus asks him.
        "Sir?"
        "Liked to wear women's dresses. Kept files on the sex lives of the politically famous. He had Polaroids of Lyndon Johnson sodomizing a farm animal."
        Perry looks over at Linus and considers making him ride the rest of the way in the trunk. . . .
        "Word is you're a communist, sir," Perry says.
        "Is anyone still a communist? Is that what it says in my file, a communist?"
        "I haven't seen your file, sir."
        "Neither have I, but I hope it says something better than communist. We're talking about millions of dollars of taxpayers' money spent on domestic

intelligence, all so some guy in a bad tie with no neck can write the word communist on a man's file without any substantial elaboration."
        "I wouldn't know, sir. Last time I checked I had a neck."
        "Very good, Perry. Very good. You get the FBI wit of the day award."
        Perry is thinking that if he took the spare tire out of the trunk there would definitely be room for one passenger inside. . . .
        

--From A Conspiracy of Tall Men

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1444779850
• ISBN 13: 9781444779851
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368