The Secular Monastery

by John D. Steinbruner

There’s been an apparent terrorist attack on a government laboratory that has been conducting controversial experiments using the smallpox virus. Professor David Turner is surreptitiously tasked by a wary president to investigate the incident independent of a formal commission appointed for the purpose. The assignment makes him an emissary to a powerful watchdog organization that provides indispensable assets but also subjects him to their scrutiny.Seeking to assure his independence, David enlists an American student with Iranian parentage to help him weigh evidence that Iran was responsible for the attack. He also develops an increasingly consequential relationship with an aide to the President assigned to monitor his project. As he struggles with his assignment under the pressure of politically ominous and potentially violent threat, he taps the deeper currents of global politics and personal relationships. Not able to disentangle his own fate from the outcome of the investigation, he encounters the ambiguities and dangers but also the liberating qualities of truth.

284 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 2011

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

You know it's creepy when people in think tanks have to write novels to express what they REALLY think

could be 3 to a 7 depending on what you think
and uh, the wonderfully creepy cover art

/////

The Secular Monastery
createspace 2011

There’s been an apparent terrorist attack on a government laboratory that has been conducting controversial experiments using the smallpox virus.

Professor David Turner is surreptitiously tasked by a wary president to investigate the incident independent of a formal commission appointed for the purpose.

The assignment makes him an emissary to a powerful watchdog organization that provides indispensable assets but also subjects him to their scrutiny.

Seeking to assure his independence, David enlists an American student with Iranian parentage to help him weigh evidence that Iran was responsible for the attack. He also develops an increasingly consequential relationship with an aide to the President assigned to monitor his project.

As he struggles with his assignment under the pressure of politically ominous and potentially violent threat, he taps the deeper currents of global politics and personal relationships.

Not able to disentangle his own fate from the outcome of the investigation, he encounters the ambiguities and dangers but also the liberating qualities of truth.

/////

At least it's not the story of Robert Kennedy who doesn't know what Nixon and Dr. Alton Oschner is doing with a secret biological laboratory program with botched polio vaccine coverup, and side programs for making cancer causing SV-40 viruses with Mary Sherman with a linear particle accelerator

oh wait that's the second novel

/////

The wild Amazone

Great scholars say what they really mean in fiction
10/10

Professor Steinbruner brings all his knowledge here...
Great scholars say what they really mean in fiction. A must read for a student of security policy.

inna

/////