Review: A Thriller with a Great Hook and Some Rough Edges
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 20, 2013
Fred Schafer's "An Almighty Conspiracy" took me somewhat by surprise.  Having read "Traveling with Maria" I was expecting another collection of expertly told traveling anecdotes and I grabbed this one without a detailed look at the description.  It turns out that "An Almighty Conspiracy" is not an anecdotal work at all, but instead a detective/spy thriller that would leave Dan Brown short of breath.Despite my initial disorientation, I found the book drew me in rather quickly.  I was taken by the character Mike, a gifted detective with a dubious past who overcomes dead ends in his cases by taking a time out from life to "listen" to the world.  The descriptions of Mike entering his transcendent state where he meticulously deconstructs all the elements of a quandary and then reassembles them into something with a few new potential leads have a resonance that go beyond the rest of the contents of the book.  As I read them, I found myself becoming reflective on the topics of personal meditation and growth and was appreciative that those lines of thinking had been brought to my attention.The novel is told with very short chapters that jump about among a series of seemingly unrelated characters.  Although you aren't necessarily immediately aware of who the "hero" is, the book retains your attention mainly due to the brevity of each chapter and Schafer's easy writing style.  Schafer uses a lot of conversational humor in the exchanges between his characters.  Most of the time these exchanges work very well, but towards the end of the book I started to get a sense that maybe the characters were playing off one another with a little bit too effortlessly.  A person can only expect to get the exact response they were hoping for from a provocative statement so many times before an outside observer begins to wonder if the mark was in on the trick.  In this case, the repetition leads to a kind of "in text" recognition that yes, Schafer wrote both the characters involved.  Still, for the greater part of the novel it works.My main conflict with the story comes at about the 70% mark where Tony and Mike finally meet each other.  The novel feels as though it's just about to take off, but then it veers off and the most entertaining characters become a little overshadowed.  I think the work would have benefited from a little more hard-nosed content editor who was willing to speak up when there was too much of a diversion from the main narrative thread.  Still, the novel is very entertaining as it is, and it has been said that you should be judicial in your snipping because you don't want to snip away the good parts (if that hasn't been said yet, consider it now said).All in all, "Almighty Conspiracy" is a entertaining little thriller/mystery that is told with no shortage of skill. This is a great selection for a three to four hour airplane ride if you feel the need for something to distract you from the fact that you're five miles above the Earth with nothing holding you up but air.