Foundry #1577

  Foundry is Eliot Peper’s 11 th novel and I’ve read them all for a good reason. I’ve enjoyed his characters and the plots. While that’s true about this book too, this one is remarkably different. Eliot reports that he awoke from a dream with the beginning of a story, and he decided he would use those lines to write his next book.   The author wrote, “It wasn’t that she was holding a gun to my head. It was that I could see the safety was still on. She thought I was completely at her mercy, which was what put her at mine.” This is a spy story, two spies, Adrian and Caroline. The two of them are locked in a room together but there’s only one gun. It’s a story about how semiconductors are changing 21 st century geopolitics.   Rather than have an outline prepared for where he would start the book and where he would take the story, in a Stephen King sort of writing system (and I’m not really a fan of Stephen King), Eliot started at the beginning of a dream and let the story develop from there. It was as if this incredibly creative man allowed himself to unleash that creativity in a way he had never done before, which led him to this fantastic story. It’s obvious from his writing that the author fully enjoyed the writing process in a way he had not with his prior 10 books. This novel gets my highest recommendation. If you’ve not read Eliot Peper, it’s time to get to it.