This is a long book but Cleveland is a word artist and I was kept engaged throughout. It is a powerful story, one that will stay with me.
Many thanks to Greenleaf Book Group and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Gods of Deception by David Adams Cleveland I found this a very difficult book to rate. There is much I thoroughly enjoyed and other parts that just dragged on and on and on. Btw I just looked online and it is a real doorstopper at 928 pages. The novel is a historical fictional account of the before, during and afterwards of the Alger Hiss case of the early 1950’s. This case divided many Americans. On the Left, there were those who could not believe a handsome, Harvard educated lawyer, with an elegant wife could possibly have been a spy. The case took place during the Red Fear sweeping America with the rise of the Soviet Union, the loss of China and the beginnings of the HUAC McCarthy Hearings. The non-fiction part of the book is well told. I did think the fictional introduction of another Harvard educated lawyer- Judge Edward Demock, one year younger than Hiss who represents him in his perjury trial is a very good idea. Dimock too has a highly educated wife, a talented pianist and lover of the arts in general. They live in a house near Woodstock NY with its glorious Italian Renaissance ceiling wooden. The house with its ceiling but perhaps more importantly its bedrooms frozen in time for each of the family children now 50 years later serves to bring up their tormented memories of life growing up with these two elitist parents. Now in 2002, one year after 9/11, Dimock aged 95 his memoirs in draft form, enlists his grandson, George Altmann, a brilliant Princeton astrophysicist to edit and review the memoir. So far, so good. But then Mr. Cleveland needs to go back in time to add Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. whom he clerked for just out of Harvard to add in my opinion far over the top justification for his good and bad decision making in the Hiss defense and the raising of his children. At the same time, his own children and grandchildren take up many pages due to their dislike of their father/grandfather in his dominance of their lives. They do seem to have love for their dead mother- Annie even though she seems to only have loved them if they learned to play the piano at a concert level. The last character to add to this mix is Wendy, a world class mountain climbing person with an MFA from Yale in Art. She is the love interest and the one with spirit to pull George out of his arrested childhood. Fortunately, she has dead parents to at least eliminate pushing the page total over 1000. Sometimes ,it does get difficult to remember which of the Dimock’s are his children and which are grandchildren and who doesn’t know who their father was, who slept with what rock stars and how after twenty years away are willing to come back to the Dimock House for one last chance to torment their father/ grandfather. While all this is going on the puzzle of Hiss is being pieced together. I found the basic historical telling of the Whittaker Chamber, Alger Hiss saga very interesting. The addition of the Judge and his astrophysicist grandson and sinewy but creative love interest an interesting way to move the story along. But the back sad stories of the rest of the family was just to0 much. Take that part out and at 400 pages a very good read.

Let's get the elephant in the room out of this way. This is a long book! Which is why it took me a long time to even start. It has all the ingredients that make reading a treat for me but the times have changed my reading habits and I have DNFed as many books as I've completed. But a return to work and a second look at the reviews made it irresistible. I decided to read it as if it were a serialized Dickensian tome and was so glad I did. Others have outlined the plot. I want to suggest that, depending on your familiarity with the time and setting, the historical and political issues, a look at Wikipedia would be valuable - see Cambridge Five.

Cleveland has written a wide ranging tale in his usual style. It's a good story. At times there's tension, at times the author is a bit verbose. But the writing is always excellent. This is probably best for serious readers.

I really appreciate the free ARC for review!!

Just take it a page at a time.
That was my counsel to myself as I kept soldiering through David Alan Cleveland's mammoth "Gods of Deception”, in which a near-centenarian judge records his memories of the Alger Hiss trial and the unsettling revelations that came out of it about Soviet penetration of U.S. intelligence. Particularly disconcerting, for instance, is the contention that if the spy apparatus that Hiss allegedly was a part of hadn’t tipped off the Soviets that their military codes had been broken, the Soviets might not have changed their codes and the United States might have been forewarned enough of a military buildup at the 38th parallel that the Korean War might have been prevented.
Indicative enough, just that, of the ambition of a book whose reach extends even to the cosmos, with how the character assisting the judge with his memoir is an astrophysicist with notions of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. But even just on terra firma, the book’s scope is evident, with the astrophysicist’s female partner being a mountain-climber who has scaled the likes of Everest – something I felt at times I’d attempted in taking on so gargantuan a novel. Still, for all its intimidating length – it’s 1,000 pages – it’s fascinating enough in spots that had I not been so just-plain exhausted by book’s end, I might have been inclined to check out the two nonfiction books about the Hiss trial that are made much of in the book, Whittaker Chambers’ "Witness" and Allen Weinstein's "Perjury."
There’s also much to be appreciated in the book's evocation of a time when many on the left were naively embracing Mother Russia before the full horrors of the Stalin era had come to be known. And the parts about the judge's family, for all their to me excessiveness, are also not without interest, particularly with the further personal context they supply to the time of the McCarthy hearings and the Red Scare. A part about the judge's firstborn being killed in Korea is especially poignant, given what the judge comes to know about those Soviet cables.
A magisterial achievement, in short, Cleveland's book, delivered in lyrical if occasionally overwrought prose which together with the book's excessive length make it a challenge to take on even for somebody who really, really likes to read.