Trust me

The blurb on the dustjacket reads like this is a pulse-pounding action tale but it's really closer to a historical novel set in the late 1960s, with a framing story we return to in alternating chapters. At one point or another I've felt annoyed with each one of the main characters, but by the time everything is through the author manages to generate enough sympathy for the viewpoints of each one, I think. The big secret that is at the center of the story isn't to me so much a letdown as an unfortunate episode brought about by the obsessions of each of the characters at the center of it. The narrator of the story is just beginning to understand how it all really happened and what led to all the subsequent years of anxiety about it.

I used to go to school not far from the North Shore setting of the earliest events in the story, a decade after the time in question, but can only dimly see the outlines of those places in my own experience. Likewise with the Cambridge scenes just afterwards. The most vivid bits of scene-setting however were the ones from the present day, which is part of the reason I kind of liked them. Maybe a real James Bond fan would have had more of a good time with the scenes revolving around the three friends' self-assigned "missions" instead.

I'll admit to being a little confused about the allusions to the Boca Raton incident in the first part of the book. It's all made up, right?