American Sextet Published Book Reviews See complete details about American Sextet including immediate purchase options. A political sex scandal of massive proportions!

Grand Rapids Press

Morality Play and Mystery

Suggestion: File the name Warren Adler wherever you store the names of authors whose books you must purchase.

Last year, Adler introduced (Washington D.C.) police homicide detective Fiona FitzGerald to readers of American Quartet. That widely praised book frequently was cited as one of the most exciting suspense novels of the year.

Fiona now returns in American Sextet, another compelling story. Fiona and her partner, Cates, are routinely assigned a jumper - but the case is to be anything but routine.

They find a young and formerly very attractive woman wearing an expensive evening gown, lying at the foot of Duke Ellington Bridge. Obviously a suicide over "man" troubles, the male cops say of the victim.

Through the author's clever use of flashback, we learn of a guileless, naïve country girl for whom sex was as natural an act as breathing. She is brought to the nation's capital by a scheming, ambitious news reporter who uses her body to trap politicians in sexually compromising situations.

So, forget that no woman could be naïve enough to not suspect her boyfriend's motives in such a situation. The novel's action moves along too quickly to ponder such minor details.

Despite opposition from her boss, Fiona preserves her investigation until the book's totally unexpected, yet satisfying, conclusion.

American Sextet is successful on several levels. It's a seemingly accurate portrayal of life on a big-city police force, a satisfying mystery, a morality play in which ambition takes a heavy toll. Actually, it's a book you won't be able to put down.

News Tribune and Herald (Duluth, MN)
by Paul S. Brissett

Suspense story keeps you flipping pages all night

The trouble with literary realism is that it's so messy, inconclusive and unsatisfying, even when executed by the most talented and disciplined writers. In the hands of less gifted authors, it can be downright unpleasant to read.

Fiona FitzGerald, Washington, D.C., police detective, woman, and adulteress, is a terribly realistic character. She's not much different from most of us: distracted from work by personal problems, indecisive, inconsistent, and at times irrationally fixated.

She's just ordinary folk - and as the main character in a book, as boring as the next-door neighbor.

Fortunately, Warren Adler has set her in a better-than-average suspense plot and structured his book in a way that can keep you flipping pages well past your usual lights-out.

FitzGerald and her partner (drawn with all the solid, definite strokes of a watercolor) check out a bridge-jumper, a pretty young woman in a white evening gown. FitzGerald's intuition tells her the victim killed herself over a man, something the detective relates to intently because her affair with a married bureaucrat is becoming troublesome.

Then we meet Jason Martin, a burned-out reporter for the Washington Post, who happens upon a stunning but simple young woman in the coalfields who will do anything - anything - for him.

He decides to have her bed six prominent people and report to him their sexual kinks and post-coital conversational indiscretions. Then he'll write a story that will finally overload the American capacity for sexual scandal, which he thinks is ruining journalism.

Yes, the young woman under the bridge is Martin's stooge, Dorothy.

There's a little confusion and an occasional jolt in Adler's arrangement of chapters, first one in which the police chase down Dorothy's story, then one, set weeks or months earlier, in which Martin advances his outrageous scheme. But in all, it makes for an exceptional level of tension.

That much pulling power is no more than is needed, though, to get us through all the passages about FitzGerald's drearily ordinary angst.

Los Angeles Times
by Nick B. Williams

Bloody Sunday

This once-great investigative reporter, past his prime and on the skids, has this marvelous idea, conceived (ha, ha) one night while in the hay - he'll turn this gorgeous chippie loose on Washington's elite and tape-record what happens for a series of very graphic exposes. Senators, ambassadors, a chief of staff, a Supreme Court justice, all grist for his mill - that's what goes on in American Sextet by Warren Adler. I've begun to wonder how writers like Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe and even Victor Hugo and Tolstoy and Chas. Dickens ever got their stuff published without including scenes of explicit sex. Don't mistake me - Adler's a dandy plot-weaver, a real tale-teller, and if this is your sort of dish, this makes for an enlightening evening as you slaver on.

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