I Am Woman, See Me Soar

Don’t you just hate it when you chance upon some morsel of information, a juicy bit that you know will be useful in the future, but then can’t remember where to find it when you finally need it? That happened to me a few months back, after I stumbled upon a mention on one or another blogs about how Michael Dobbs, the author of the 1989 political thriller House of Cards (which subsequently inspired a delightfully devilish TV series starring Ian Richardson), was at work on another story of modern political intrigue, after penning four popular historical novels featuring Winston Churchill (the most recent of which was Churchill’s Triumph, 2005).

Following the Rap Sheet blog’s launch in May, I tried to find that Dobbs notice again, only to come up dry. Zip. Zilch. Zero. But suddenly Amazon UK has a listing for the book, which is called First Lady (not to be confused with Michael Malone’s 2001 crime novel of the same name). As the Amazon write-up explains:

Michael Dobbs returns to the subject that made him a household name--the high drama and machinations of the political world. This is House of Cards for the 21st century, an insider’s view of the dynamics of power by a writer who has had a privileged seat at the court of government for many years. This time the king maker is a woman, Virginia Edge, mid-thirties, attractive, self-sufficient, ambitious. Knowledge is power and she gleans it from the Other Half Club, a lunching group for Opposition parliamentary wives, and the gay network at Westminster. This is the story of her transformation from dutiful political wife to masterful manipulator of the entire political process at Westminster. She is a woman who is driven by the failings of men and the greed of others to take over their system and undermine it, to repay them in kind. In this battle, she has two great allies--the intuition and determination of a wronged wife, and the blind ineptitude of Westminster men. But, as Ginny discovers, there is a high price to pay for reaching to the very top ...

Dobbs, who was a Conservative Party honcho in Britain during the terms of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, writes political drama with an authority unavailable to outsiders and dabblers in the field. House of Cards and the other two installments of his Francis Urquart series (To Play the King and The Final Cut), as well as a trilogy of tales (including The Buddha of Brewer Street and Whispers of Betrayal) that he wrote about a has-been Member of Parliament, Thomas Goodfellowe, were books thick with Machiavellian intrigue and insider knowledge, but didn’t sacrifice character development and dimensions for plot. Can First Lady--due out from Headline in Britain on October 23--measure up to those standards? I couldn’t possibly comment. Yet.