Gideon's Torch - Softcover

Charles Colson, of course, was a special counsel for President Nixon, and served a stretch in a federal prison for his part in the Watergate cover-up. Nowadays, he's deeply involved in prison ministries. Gideon's Torch is his and coauthor Vaughn's first novel, a political tale steeped in the details of the White House, the Justice Department, and the K Street maneuverings of those seeking power. As Republican president J. Whitney Lowell takes office, a woman walks into a North Dakota abortion clinic and kills a doctor. Watching the polls, Lowell decides to crack down on every antiabortion group nationwide, whether violent or peaceful, and a civil liberties debate quickly erupts. Before Lowell's tactics can produce a killer, another group steals a National Institute of Health training video containing shots of a brutal third-trimester abortion and manages to uplink the video to the evening news. And before these terrorists can be apprehended, another group stages an Oklahoma City^-style bombing on the first of the sinister-seeming Regeneration Centers, which will use fetuses in AIDS research. They botch their escape and are killed, leaving government prosecutors no case except against an alleged accessory, a Maryland preacher named Daniel Seaton. Seaton's courtroom testimony and death in prison are linked to the tribulations of St. Paul and give the novel a certain mournful elegance. Colson and Vaughn present every warring faction fairly; the portraits of the president and attorney general are particularly sensitive, and the suicide of Lowell's chief adviser is quite movingly done. John Mort