This is the third novel by Elizabeth Drysdale, an award-winning author of young adult fiction and the daughter of a Foreign Service officer and Air Force veteran, Clay Allen. She accompanied her father on tours across Asia. Her first novel, Curse of the Forgotten (2020), was a Swoony Award finalist. She resides in a small town in northern Utah with her husband and three sons. Murder in the Pacific: A Jake Maguire FBI Mystery Fritz Galt, independently published, 2022, $14.99/paperback, e-book available, 188 pages. Special Agent Jake Maguire has taken a break from his work as an FBI agent to go on a honeymoon in Hawai‘i with his new bride, sexy journalist Amber Jones Maguire. But when Jake goes out for a morning run, he stumbles across a crime scene: A U.S. Marine from the nearby military base has been murdered while out surfing. Jake and Amber are soon pulled away from their vacation and into the murder investigation. They begin to learn about island surf culture as they work to uncover a murderous white supremacist group within the military. Murder in the Pacific is the fourth installment in a series. Foreign Service spouse Fritz Galt, who co-founded Tales from a Small Planet (talesmag.com) in 1999, has also written a series of thrillers featuring protagonist Mick Pierce. Galt and his wife, Foreign Service Officer Jennifer Zimdahl Galt, have been posted in Belgrade, Taipei, Mumbai, Beijing, Shanghai, Brussels, Guangzhou, Honolulu, and Ulaanbaatar, where his wife served as U.S. ambassador to Mongolia. They currently live in Washington, D.C., where Galt is hard at work on his next book. Finding Kony Robert E. Gribbin, independently published, 2022, $15.99/paperback, e-book available, 267 pages. Set in Uganda in the early years of the 21st century, the novel Finding Kony traces the quest of Paul Simmons, a Black man from Alabama with a degree in journalism, to find Joseph Kony. Kony was the real-life leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (which terrorized Ugandans, murdering civilians and abducting children) from 1987 until his disappearance in the 1990s somewhere along (Fiction section continued from page 32) The Last Gentleman: Thomas Hughes and the End of the American Century Bruce L.R. Smith, Brookings Institution Press, 2022, $34.99/ paperback, e-book available, 390 pages. Thomas Hughes was the assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research in 1965 when he correctly predicted that if the Vietnam War escalated, the consensus around U.S. foreign policy goals would collapse. Hughes’ bold memo was written for his friend Hubert Humphrey, who had just been elected vice president. Hughes would retire from the State Department in 1970 and go on to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In this biography Bruce L.R. Smith tells the story of Hughes’ life and career, offering a behind-the-scenes account of major events such as the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, and the CIA’s failed Operation Mongoose targeting the Castro regime. The book is valuable for its depiction not just of Washington’s well-known public figures but for its detailed descriptions of the typically invisible diplomats, like Hughes, who were doing the real work of the day. Bruce L.R. Smith is a senior staff member in the Brookings Center for Public Policy Education. He has served in the White House Office of Science and Technology and at the Department of State. A retired professor of political science at Columbia University, he is the author or editor of many books on American foreign and science policy. A review of The Last Gentleman by John Starrels appeared in the April 2023 issue of The Foreign Service Journal. THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2023 41
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