A political thriller, published 1982, about potential treason in the U.S. cabinet.

Maybe one person has noticed that I haven't posted a review in a while.  That's because I've been reading this 350 page book for a week and a half.

There are several reasons I didn't enjoy quot;Love and Treason".  One is its replacement of the word "penis" by the word "sex", something like "She felt his sex against him."  Euphamisms  for sexual organs, that's a pet peeve of mine.

But that didn't happen until halfway through the novel.  I've thought about it for about a day, having finished it Thursday, and I realized what made me drag my feet reading it.  I don't think the author cares about his characters.  From what I could glean, he doesn't even like them.

"Love and Treason" takes third person narration with limited perspective, but its focal character changes erratically and often, sometimes from chapter to chapter, sometimes from paragraph to paragraph.  It indulges in narration of peripheral political or social issues for pages at a time, as well as conversations between characters that serve a clearly expository purpose with little tension..

At least twice, a character was introduced, the perspective shifted to his, he interacted with the main characters for a few chapters, and then he was murdered gruesomely.  The same hitmen appeared whenever this happened, but somehow I didn't get any sense of excitement or even horror from their description.  Mostly I got a feeling of "Oh well, here we go again," and an urge to go make a sandwich or take a nap.

I can recall very few thrills from my experience with this book, except for a couple times when I thought someone would reveal him/herself to be a good person and not a dick, but that never really happened.  Everyone was pretty much a dick, for the entire book.  Some of them died and some of them didn't.

I would not recommend this book to anyone I know.  Maybe to someone who doesnt enjoy reading that much because he/she thinks it's silly.  This is a serious book, for serious people who believe the world to be a serious place that everyone should take seriously all the time.

I'm sorry to be so negative, I know it's a downer, but this book was a downer, and not even in a melancholy or nihilistic way.  It was simply boring and clumsy, and I want to read a more interesting book and stop thinking about this one.