August Thomas’s Liar’s Candle is the story of diplomatic intern Penny Kessler's fight for survival after the bombing of the American Embassy in Ankara, Turkey. Penny wakes up at a hospital the day after a devastating bomb has killed hundreds of people at the embassy’s Independence Day party. She is one of the few survivors and could hold key information to determine the truth behind the attack. Questions of responsibility and international relations are quickly put on the shoulders of this young woman.
Unfortunately, what starts with great promise is burdened with characters who lack the development and depth to create reader buy-in. There are also problems with the dialogue, which at times is trite and cliché.
Overall, a great premise and very good description of setting could not make up for the several faults.
Thank you to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster, and the author for the advanced copy to review.

Great debut work! Looking forward to more from this author.

Pity the poor intern. Penny Kessler is far from home, working with no pay for the summer at the US Embassy in Ankara, translating newspapers from Turkish to English. She wakes up in the Ulus Devlet (Ankara’s state) hospital after an explosion at the Embassy Fourth of July party. 256 are dead; many others injured; her is-he-or-isn’t-he-not-quite-boyfriend, Zach, is missing. Everyone thinks she knows something about the bombing plot – the Turkish government, the US State Department, the CIA, even the lone good guy. While still groggy, several hours after the explosion - Penny is summarily released against her and her doctor’s wishes to the safe-keeping of the Turkish president’s protege, to be treated by the president’s private physician.
And off we go with another take on a familiar trope - the naïve protagonist everyone is either attempting to torture or kill, and she has no information of value with which to bargain her way to a better position, and zero training in espionage tactics. Where Liar’s Candle distinguishes itself from other debut spy/thriller novels is in the believability of its protagonist, the authenticity of the relationship between Penny and her escape-partner and its setting – Turkey. Penny’s back story gives her language skills credibility and they are key to her continued survival. Her partner’s character lacks those language skills (a most difficult fact Ms. Thomas asks the reader to accept – and it raised both my eyebrows and required me to suspend disbelief without further analysis) and so is dependent on Penny in any local interactions. He does bring other practical skills to the table. According to the publisher’s author bio, Thomas traveled and studied in Turkey as the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and earned a Master’s degrees from an Istanbul university. Readers benefit from her familiarity with the language, food, landscape and geography throughout the novel as she builds those local details seamlessly into her suspense yarn. Liar’s Candle also avoids the exoticism and Othering that American writers sometimes engage in when they set their novels in the Middle East.

The suspense is maintained throughout and doesn’t let up until close to the end – when the story shifts from an escape story to observing how the implications play out back in the states for the powerful. It’s not Homeland and certainly not reminiscent of John leCarre. Nonetheless, Liar’s Candle is a rarity – a debut spy-ish, thriller novel that demonstrates superb command of the difficulty of communicating roughly contemporaneous stories over a 36-hour period, introduces a plethora of characters without making the reader feels as if he/she needs to chart them out on paper to understand who is who – and is true enough with respect to the relationship between CIA and State for the average civilian thriller reader to accept its premise. Are the bad guys a little too purely bad with nary a redeeming quality in sight? Absolutely. That’s the price of a debut, but it’s a small one.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an advance e-copy to me for review.