A Thriller Rooted in Complex Family Tree

Pick your metaphor. Susan Isaacs’ eighth novel is a thriller with a civics lesson attached. A modest tract house that has sprouted a giant front porch of Victorian jigsaw work, festooned with patriotic bunting. Two books in one--well, at least a book and a half.

In the opening chapter, Isaacs (“Compromising Positions,” “Lily White”) speaks directly to her readers. She introduces her hero, Charlie Blair, an FBI agent from a Wyoming ranching family, and her heroine, Lauren Miller, a reporter for a Jewish newspaper in New York. Both are bound for Jackson Hole to investigate the bombing of a Jewish-owned video store by a shadowy racist group.

Isaacs tells us in so many words that Charlie and Lauren are indeed hero and heroine. She tells us how smart, decent, courageous and attractive they are, and leaves us no doubt that despite their differences in background, love will blossom. Then she tells us a secret: Unbeknownst to either of them, they are distant cousins.

Their mutual great-great-grandmother, Dora Schottland, arrived in New York on a Polish ship in 1899. Unmarried but pregnant at 15, she settled for a loveless union with a fellow passenger, Herschel Blaustein. “America was too much for them,” Isaacs says--they never escaped their Lower East Side tenement. But their children, Jake and Ruthie, began the process of assimilation.

Jake, a gangster’s apprentice on the outs with his boss, fled west in 1917 and was caught cheating some cattlemen in a poker game on a train. He jumped off in a blizzard and landed in Wyoming. Rescued by a Shoshone female blacksmith, he changed his name to Blair, married her and produced the first of a line of square-jawed cowboys only dimly aware of their Jewish (and Native American) ancestry.

Ruthie’s was a more traditional story. Poverty--she went to work in a button factory at 13--and, later, a deadbeat husband frustrated her dream of higher education, but she passed it on. By the time her line produced Lauren’s mother, an intellectual tradition was in place.

Isaacs’ point is that the Millers and the Blairs, though not always admirable, wove themselves as tightly as anyone else into the American fabric--the red, white and blue. Charlie’s grandfather fought in the Battle of Midway; Lauren’s was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

The trouble is that it takes 170 pages or so to make this point. That’s not enough to give us a full portrait of both families--we see each ancestor at the moment of courtship, often after a “cute meet,” then again, diminished, through the eyes of his or her children--but it’s enough to make us mighty impatient to get back to that bombing in Jackson Hole.

Only then does the real story, the thriller, get underway. It’s almost worth the wait, because Isaacs has done her research on hate groups, the techniques of investigative reporting and FBI undercover probes. Her fictional white-supremacist organization, Wrath, is rendered persuasively--particularly its leader, Vern Ostergard, an avuncular Bible-spouter whose skill at putting a favorable spin on anti-Semitism masks the lethal intentions of some of his followers.

Still, a suspicion of overkill lingers. “This is war,” Lauren and Charlie agree after she has blown his cover and they have had to join forces--an unwitting echo of Ostergard’s prophecies of a racial Armageddon. But it seems an awfully unequal war. Most of the members of Wrath are such losers that Isaacs fails to convince us they are a danger to the republic rather than just a nuisance, despite all the references to Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City and the Holocaust.

In the end, as if she still hasn’t made herself clear, Isaacs has Lauren publish an article in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, comparing the “optimism” of her and Charlie’s forebears with the hate groups’ “recycled nightmares of destruction and vengeance.” She concludes: “Vernon Ostergard and his ilk . . . are not Americans.” So there. It almost makes us feel sorry for the poor devils--hardly what Isaacs could have had in mind.