In his narrative of the scandal that engulfed Great Britain's Houses of Parliament in the 1970s, Preston (The Dig) delivers an operatic account about hypocrisy, deceit, and betrayal at the heart of the government's establishment. The scandal centered on Jeremy Thorpe, a parliamentarian since 1959, who had been covering up a homosexual affair he had begun with Norman Scott in 1962. His relationship with Scott, an on-again, off-again riding instructor and model, took bizarre twists, involving fellow members of his party, lying, payoffs, embezzlement, and a murder plot. As leader of the Liberal Party, Thorpe was poised in 1974 to hold the balance of power in a coalition government headed by Edward Heath. Events climaxed in 1976 when Thorpe was tried for conspiracy to murder. Despite credible evidence to the contrary, Thorpe was acquitted through his attorney's discrediting the testimony of prosecution witnesses and the judge's extrajudicial interference favorable to the defense. Dominic Sandbrook's Seasons in the Sun provides an excellent context in which the events occurred. VERDICT This book, which is based on extensive interviews with principal players and reads like a thriller, is recommended for those with a penchant for 1970s British political culture.-Glen Edward Taul, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In 1979, Jeremy Thorpe, a popular member of Parliament, stood trial over claims that he hired an assassin to murder model Norman Scott, who claimed to be Thorpe's ex-lover. In this addictive true crime account of one of Britain's greatest political scandals, London-based novelist Preston (The Dig) chronicles Thorpe's early, secretive love life, at a time when sodomy was still illegal, and his exposure. Thorpe is portrayed as repressed and concerned with his public image and political career; he involved colleagues in schemes lasting years to silence Scott. Though Scott had a cache of Thorpe's incriminating letters as evidence, Thorpe always maintained that they were never lovers. Drawing from Scott's memoir and documents from Peter Bessell, a political colleague of Thorpe's with a checkered business past, Preston blends factual with farcical, recounting, for example, a horrifying incident with Thorpe's helicopter and a protester standing too close to the rotor blade-a huge clump of hair seen on the ground turned out to be a muddy wig blown off. The trial near the end is riveting, with Thorpe's lawyer demolishing Scott's and Bessell's credibility; Thorpe was acquitted. Preston caps off the dramatic account by discussing the widely held belief that the acquittal was an establishment cover-up, even though Thorpe never regained his career, and died in 2014. Though knee-deep in politics, scandal, and betrayal, the book also conveys the sobering, grim reality of lives destroyed by dirty politics and homophobic culture. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.