Machiavelli's Desert "sophisticated and ambitious"

Apr 8, 2010 – BC BookWorld

By Alan Twigg

Canadian Prime Minister Nicholas Plato has a few problems. Canada has been found guilty of crimes against humanity. The body of a Canadian National Research Council scientist has been found floating in the Ottawa River. A suicide bomber has killed hundreds of people in a Las Vegas nightclub. And there's a CANDU reactor that is going to meltdown and destroy life on the tiny Pacific island country of Arnivan. That's just some of the CSIS-related intrigue that befuddle the characters of Lawrence Uhlin's political thriller Machiavelli's Desert (Libros Libertad $22.95). It's a gripping tale in which Uhlin takes time to quote Mordecai Richler: "...truth is Canada is a cloud-cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world." Ouch. The global plot resembles an Ian Slater disaster novel, hopscotching hither and yon–to Washington, D.C., Houston, Grand Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands and... Kamloops–and that's a good thing. Canada's sovereignty is put to the test while Uhlin cleverly integrates advances in nanotechnology and chemistry (derived from the discovery of buckminsterfullerene in 1985). This is a sophisticated and ambitious debut.

Here are portions of the publisher's promotional description: "In the British Columbia Interior we meet a man owing a debt to the federal prison system that is to be redeemed by, of all things, a vasectomy. In Ottawa Canadian Security Intelligence Service Officer Mari Volser searches for a motive to explain a Canadian scientist's mysterious death on the eve of revealing to a recently elected and naively idealistic Member of Parliament important instances of the government's neglect and complicity. In Houston a detective police sergeant investigates the disappearance of a brilliant, quirky microbiologist. A forty-foot sloop named the Mariposa is spotted by a contract psychologist in Grand Cayman Island's Pig Sty Harbour and days later is seen again by the man at a marina in the Sunshine Coast - thousands of kilometers distant. The Prime Minister of Canada goes to Tortola where the reader listens to a conversation between a ramshackle Caribbean beach bar owner and the country's leader as they swap stories of moral metaphor and rhythm and blues history. Through the clamor and chaos of Canada's turmoil a political hero emerges and another dies... Machiavelli's Desert is a book that looks closely at a political system designed primarily to achieve power for power's sake at the expense of moral integrity and the well-being of the common people."

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