Book Review: Fake Truth by Lee Goldberg (Ian Ludlow #3)

Stars: 2 out of 5

Pros: Laughs, fast paced second half

Cons: Slow start, needless sex scenes, politics too prevalent.

The Bottom Line:

Slow start to thriller

Must look past sex, politics

Disappointing book

The Truth is I Wish More of This Book Were Fake

I’ve been a fan of Lee Goldberg’s books for years, eagerly seeing where each new book would take us.  Unfortunately, sometimes an author misses the mark, and for me, that’s what happened with Fake Truth.

This is the third book in his Ian Ludlow thrillers, and if you have missed this series – don’t start here.  I’m not saying that just because I didn’t enjoy it, but also because the book contains spoilers for the previous book in the series.  Trust me, you’ll definitely want to read them in order.

The series focuses on Ian Ludlow, a best-selling thriller author who finds that his fiction becomes fact all too often.  He’s become an off the books CIA agent who finds himself getting in over his head (after all, he’s a writer, not a spy) as he gets caught up in plots with global consequences.

However, as this book opens, Ian is stuck.  Despite his most recent exploits, he can’t come up with anything worthy of his next book.  So when his CIA partner, Margo French, throws a newspaper at him, he picks a couple of articles at random and they begin to investigate as if Ian’s writer’s imagination was right and there is a connection between them.  The scary thing is, they might have stumbled upon something that way, with tentacles that spread from Russia to the US-Mexico border with the news media in between.  But what exactly have they found?

Part of my problem with this book is the pacing.  While it is told in multiple points of view, cluing us in early as to who the key players are, it still felt like it took the story a while to really get started.  We know what all the pieces are, but they don’t really start moving for a while.  Once that happens, the story definitely picks up and leads us to an exciting climax.

While these books work as thrillers, they are also loving spoofs of the spy genre itself.  I love that humor, and it keeps me reading.  Some of the characters are a little thin as a result, but that fits into the tone of the book.  However, part of that includes more detail than I need about Ian’s sex life.  The book would have been stronger without those scenes because it would have made the pacing better.

But that doesn’t get to my biggest issue with the book.  Lee Goldberg doesn’t hide his liberal biases at all.  Oh, the name may have been changed (very very slightly in some cases), but it is very obvious who he is targeting in this book.  It is easy to picture his glee as he picks on his favorite target.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t make for good reading, and turned me off as a conservative.  Even if he had kept the plot the same, a better job of hiding the identities of those involved would have gone a long way toward making this book more enjoyable for me.

And yes, I fully realize this is a personal issue.  However, I read fiction to escape the news and our current political environment.  If I want to be lectured about my political views, I will go on social media.  I also realize it could be that my reaction to the politics of the book may have made the early part of the book feel like it was slower than it truly was, too.

Heck, all of my issues with the book are personal.  To me, this was a weak book, but if what I am describing sounds entertaining to you, you’ll be glad you picked up this book.

It’s a shame because I did enjoy the first two books in the series.  Yes, they still included more sex than I enjoy reading about, but there was enough else to recommend them.

I’m hoping that, now that Fake Truth is out of his system, Lee Goldberg will go back to plotting entertaining fiction over political lectures.