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Review by Bob Ruggiero
"Journalism is a murder-and-create business," opines Arthur Bowman, a respected veteran newspaperman in David Ignatius's searing new thriller, A Firing Offense. "And the murderous ones are also the creative ones."
Eric Truell hasn't murdered anyone, but he is creative in getting his story. The rising star and foreign correspondent for the large daily New York Mirror thinks he's stumbled onto the scoop of a lifetime when some quick thinking and a glib tongue land him in a French restaurant under siege during a hostage crisis. There, he nabs interviews with both the terrorists and their captives before the standoff ends peacefully. But when a flamboyant rogue CIA agent proffers classified information and angles to even larger, headline-grabbing stories, Truell takes the bait . . . again and again.
But with each progressive story "tip," the reporter's relationship with the agency thickens to the point until it's Truell himself conducting espionage when ostensibly investigating a secret trade war among the U.S., France, and China. While playing secret agent, this reporter becomes the story he's covering, a situation that not only threatens to end his newspaper career, but also his life.
Journalists have always had a symbiotic relationship with their "anonymous" sources, who can offer a tantalizing bit of information in exchange for a published story that will either advance their agenda or destroy an enemy. This is the fuel which runs the investigative reporting machine. And as an editor at The Washington Post (a paper that knows a thing or two about crusading reporters), Ignatius is quite familiar with the newsgathering axiom that demands you get the story first and fastest‹or risk having the competition beat you out.
Ignatius's keen eye for the journalistic ethics and newsroom detail could fill a fine textbook, but it's his considerable skill as a fiction writer which makes the characters in A Firing Offense utterly believable and their several subsequent plotlines engrossing. Truell may have guilty second thoughts about exposing the mental illness of an aspiring presidential candidate -- which, not surprisingly, torpedoes his chances and rips apart his family -- but he knows that often a journalist and a sensitive human being have incompatible goals. Ignatius makes his protagonist's career choices (and his execution of them) distasteful, enticing, and righteous all at the same time.
One hopes this won't be the last "news thriller" from the perceptive and talented author with a sizable amount of printer's ink running through his veins. With this novel, David Ignatius has filed some hot copy.
Bob Ruggiero is a freelance journalist in Houston, Texas.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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