Now a Netflix Film This intricate fast-paced story whose many scenes and details fit
together like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle is Didion's incisive and chilling look at a
modern world where things are not working as they should and where the oblique and official
language is as sinister as the events it is covering up. The narrator introduces Elena McMahon
estranged from a life of celebrity fundraisers and from her powerful West Coast husband Wynn
Janklow whom she has left taking Catherine her daughter to become a reporter for The
Washington Post. Suddenly walking off the 1984 campaign she finds herself boarding a plane for
Florida to see her father Dick McMahon. She becomes embroiled in her Dick's business though
"she had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what he was doing." It is
from this moment that she is caught up in something much larger than she could have imagined
something that includes Ambassador-at-Large Treat Austin Morrison and Alexander Brokaw the
ambassador to an unnamed Caribbean island. Into this startling vision of conspiracies arms
dealing and assassinations Didion makes connections among Dallas Iran-Contra and Castro
and points up how "spectral companies with high-concept names tended to interlock." As this
book builds to its terrifying finish we see the underpinnings of a dark historical underbelly.
This is our system the one "trying to create a context for democracy and getting [its] hands a
little dirty in the process."
