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WHEN was the last time that you thought that an archivist was alluring? Naturally, we don’t pay much attention to people who spend their lives poring over documents, cataloguing them, studying them, pondering over their veracity, and helping others find information in what are literally pages of history. Those who grapple with the intricacies of the Dewey Decimal System are not dewy-eyed; they see the world, though through their books.
Meltzer weaves a story in which the ring is never disbanded, and becomes an invisible circle of trust that provides vital information to every president, its secrets passed on from each president to his successor. Around this kernel he builds a story of Beecher White, a young archivist, who works on the documents of significant importance to the US government, and as such is no stranger to keeping secrets. Among the secrets White nurses in his heart is his crush on Clementine Kaye, who reappears in his life after their childhood, setting the heart aflutter. Unsurprisingly, he wants to help her quest to find her father, naturally, he also seeks to impress her and thus takes her down to a secret vault, deep in the National Archives building, where the president of the United States comes from time to time to see and read sensitive historical documents. The two accidentally stumble across a two-century-old dictionary, and who would it belong to but George Washington, the founder of the Culper Ring. The past and the present seem to violently collide when the guard who helped them dies, and the Beecher and Clementine find themselves being chased through the streets of Washington DC. Clementine's long-lost father is an assassin who targeted the president, and is now interned in a mental institution, but then, is the president also hiding an explosive secret the key to which may also be in the very same institution? Beecher uncovers some information in the dictionary, freshly written in secret ink, which seems to confirm that the Culper Ring still exists, but he can't make sense of the numbers that are uncovered. He is aided and abetted by two of his colleagues, one of whom may be an agent provocateur. Along the way, he starts wondering which one of the two has been compromised. A meeting with the president leaves him more confused than ever. There is also now this possibility of not one, but two Culper Rings, both competing with each other, some life-threatening solutions and killings`85a thriller master is at work. Realistic settings, interesting characters, and a twist in the tail make this book difficult to put down. No wonder, it has been topping bestseller lists worldwide.
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However, when one of them
becomes the protagonist in Brad Meltzer's hands, he becomes very
interesting, indeed. Meltzer meticulously researches his novels and thus
takes the reader on a journey, where the boundaries of fiction and fact
merge. We now know for a fact that US presidents have a tradition of
writing a letter to their successor. In fact, thanks to Meltzer, we even
have a copy of the letter that George W. Bush wrote to President
Clinton. It is also a fact that President George Washington had a number
of spies, called the Culper Ring, during the American Revolutionary War.
They conveyed vital information, using invisible ink, had code names,
secret identities, etc.