Review for The Ambassador by Brian C. Baker

Political thrillers are one of my favorite types of stories, but they can often lean toward something too farfetched to be completely enjoyable. Either in the form of villainous officials that make you wonder how they were ever elected. Or plots that a well-placed phone, picture, or communication can dismantle. Because of this, I appreciate gems of the genre like The Ambassador. Yes, there are those poisonous politicians, but the machine they operate within feels plausible enough that the tension and plots they hatch ramp up the suspense with each turn. And money as a motivation for numerous human rights violations permeates our history books enough that finding it in fiction is all too real.

I’m not sure where I actually heard the line, but it’s stuck with me: ‘good men are unpredictable.’ And the protagonist, Jackson Ford, is decidedly a good man despite the fact the novel opens with him being impeached as governor for taking bribes. Written mostly in first person from Ford’s perspective, he’s a man not without his demons. He has quite a few actually. But they make him feel like an actual person with both strengths and flaws. Every character felt like this honestly, with what feels like enormous amounts of effort made by the author to build complex people with actual motivations.

The interactions between characters and dialogue were very well done, but the prose is where the novel shines. Descriptive and visual, it was easy to form a picture of my mind the world in which this story inhabits as I read. From the way the light shines through the glass case in the governor’s mansion to the action sequences later in the novel, that fleshing out of each scene pays off tremendously but never feels overdone. What could easily be chaos is instead paced fast but kept tight, even in the midst of a firefight.

The Ambassador is a must-read for any fans of political or military thrillers.

You can buy The Ambassador on Amazon or visit the author’s website here.