General Morris Wingate is running for his party’ presidential nomination against the incumbent president. To the public at large he is a hero who used his security officers from the company he owns to rescue hostages in Afghanistan. What they don’t know is that when Wingate ran the agency for intelligence data coordination, he formed a black ops organization and assigned the men to kill those he declared as enemy combatants of the United States.

To dissolve his personal unit, Morris sent his men into a trap in North Vietnam where they all died except for Carl Rice who escaped. Carl was once the lover of Wingate’s daughter Vanessa Kohler. When she found about the unit she tried to expose her father as a traitor, but he instead had her committed to a mental institution and now nobody takes her seriously especially since she works on the tabloid Exposed. Carl surfaces after fifteen years on the run; he and Vanessa team up in the hopes of exposing retired General Wingate to the American people.

Phillip Margolin has written an exciting political thriller that captures and keeps the audience’s attention even when fans knows almost from the start that Wingate is evil but cleverly eliminates anyone who knew about his clandestine activities.. The audience will keep reading just to find out given the lack of no paper trail or other evidence how Wingate can be convicted in a legal court room or in the court of public opinion. LOST LAKE is a chilling work because the premise feels so plausible.

Harriet Klausner