The Confirmation

Powers is best known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA. A fiction debut by such a writer raises keen expectationsDand they aren't disappointed. His first novel is a sterling piece of work: polished, clear, with a plot that offers genuine surprises and a journalist in a leading role who is not just the most convincing fictional New York Times reporter ever created, but possibly the only convincing one. Frank Cabot, a career CIA man, has been nominated to head the organization. Opposition to him centers on some questionable judgments in his past and what may prove to be an insurmountable blunder: Did he know of the existence of an army sergeant, a Vietnam MIA, held in a Russian prison, who might have been rescued but was instead left to die? Did Cabot suggest his death might be convenient? The irony is that much of this is ferreted out by young Brad Cameron, a CIA novice who's courting Cabot's niece, and who is helped by a wonderfully conceived elderly backroom agency veteran who is a Holocaust survivor. George Tater of the Times is also in on the hunt, which becomes embroiled in both Washington and international politics involving Israel and KGB survivors in contemporary Russia. Real-life characters like jailed CIA spy Aldrich Ames and former President Carter are convincingly incorporated into the action, which winds up in a cliff-hanger Senate hearing. One of Powers's great virtues as a novelist, apart from his subtle and far-reaching knowledge of how government agencies work, is the moral ambiguity he brings to his characters. Each of them is sympathetic but flawed, lending the drama an unusual edge. Government thrillers don't come much better than this. (June) FYI: Powers is also a cofounder of Vermont's Steerforth Press.