A SIMPLE CHOICE

A well-connected young CNN correspondent and a lawyer who clerked on the Supreme Court risk their lives looking into a secret government plot to fund a questionable cancer cure.

When esteemed U.S. Sen. Duke Garber dies in an apparent suicide, CNN reporter Palmer Knight—whose late grandfather was Garber’s mentor in Congress—suspects the Saudis of pushing him off a Maine cliff. Garber had targeted the Saudis' use of deepfake videos to justify ethnic cleansing. Then, after questioning Saudi officials, Knight himself is victimized by a doctored video. Meanwhile, the highly regarded lawyer Amity Jones, an Afghanistan veteran, gets herself in trouble while caring for her cancer-stricken mother in Ohio. Angry that her mother can't get the same miracle treatment that cured her next-door neighbor’s 9-year-old boy of cancer, Jones investigates the caregivers who still regularly visit the boy’s house, dragging in mysterious equipment. Following their van across state lines, she is abducted and later nearly killed before agreeing to keep quiet in exchange for getting her mother treated. At the heart of the mystery is the unlikely relationship between Garber, an entrenched Rhode Island Republican, and aged Sen. Gigi Fox, a populist Florida Democrat with a shadowy past. Pepper, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of the Jack Sharpe series, knows how to cast a chill with deep state politics. The secrets being kept are good ones. But this jumpy, overlong stand-alone too often gets in its own way, cutting from scene to scene to dizzying effect. Characters get lost in the shuffle, and plot elements are too neatly tied up.

A thriller with the right ingredients that needed better stirring.