Clarion Review ★★★★★
The Secret Empress
Frank R. Heller
iUniverse (Mar 8, 2019)
Hardcover $26.99 (232pp)
978-1-5320-6832-4
The Secret Empress is a fantastic thriller that’s traditional in style, featuring a square-jawed hero, ruthless villains, and a royal in distress.
In Frank R. Heller’s exciting thriller The Secret Empress, the focus is international espionage that’s rooted in ancient Chinese history and modern drug trafficking.
Joe Wilder is a former world champion bodybuilder turned corporate mogul. He runs a massive health and fitness company in Los Angeles. Wilder is also a former CIA asset who quit government service after he failed to save a young bystander during a terror attack in Paris. Years later,
Wilder is brought back into the world of espionage thanks to Michael Fitzpatrick, the CIA’s man in Beijing, and a Guangzhou-based CEO, Wendy Shu Xian.
Wendy, in addition to being a wealthy businesswoman, is the daughter of Puyi, the last Qing emperor of China. In her dying days, Wendy leaves Charley, her daughter and the last member of the Qing line, in Wilder’s care. It’s up to Wilder to keep Charley safe from the White Wolf tong, a small army of Chinese drug dealers obsessed with expanding their wealth and influence in Asia.
This political potboiler gets right down to its action, with a death in the opening pages and all of the main characters introduced with minimal fanfare thereafter. Deeds, not descriptions, drive its momentum, and there are a lot of such deeds.
Wilder and Charley are perfect foils for each other, and their relationship is both best buddy and odd couple in nature. Wilder is rugged but haunted; Charley is young and innocent, and does not comprehend her noble lineage or potential power. Fitzpatrick functions as a milquetoast bureaucrat who provides a few moments of levity, while other supporting characters, including Wilder’s ultra-organized secretary, play small but important roles in the story.
Standout villains in the White Wolf tong and the Bai Lang army are serious and efficient gangsters—a dark reflection of the legitimate businessman and American patriot Wilder. However, their motivations for capturing Charley are unclear, even though Wendy tells Wilder early on in the novel that they would love to kill to the last Qing royal. The White Wolf threaten Wilder and Charley’s escape at every turn, even if a happy ending is never in doubt.
The chapters are long, but they move with speed, and the book’s language is straightforward and clear. Historical errors (the first emperor of the Qing dynasty is misnamed, and the ethnic origins of the Qing are overlooked, for
example) and the glossing over of historical elements mar the work, though, compromising excitement around Charley’s claims to the Qing throne.
The Secret Empress is a fantastic thriller that’s traditional in style, featuring a square-jawed hero, ruthless villains, and a royal in distress.
BENJAMIN WELTON (July 23, 2019)
