To The Lions by Holly Watt
No matter how far the hints lead, a journalist must pursue them.
The Post’s top reporter, Casey Benedict, has spied on countless politicians and power brokers and exposed their lies. Casey is constantly looking for the next big scoop through her network of contacts, putting herself in danger and at a great emotional cost in the process.
She starts looking into the apparent suicide of a wealthy young British man, whose death has devastated his fiancée and family, after being alerted by an overheard conversation at a posh London nightclub.
Casey’s tenacious search for the truth will lead her from the glamour of St. Tropez to the Libyan deserts and then to the absolute worst parts of the world.
To The Lions by Holly Watt
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To the Lions, Holly Watt’s debut novel is about Casey Benedict, a feisty, hard-nosed female journalist. Spies and journalists work in very similar fields. Both include gathering information, getting scoops, and using cunning tradecraft to achieve your goals. Putting women front and centre in narratives that have always been controlled by men—from James Bond to George Smiley to Jackson Lamb—is something unique that both Holly and Charlotte are doing.
At one level, this book is a thriller about two journalists searching for a shocking story, but at another, it’s a masterful examination of the corrosive, dark adrenaline that frequently drives the very rich and powerful, including business moguls, politicians, journalists, and soldiers, at the expense of their interpersonal relationships and humanity.
Which would you choose to be in a world where there are hunters and those who are being hunted, wolves and sheep, with a few sheepdogs guarding the flock? To the author’s credit, there isn’t a simple right or wrong response to that issue that is acceptable to society.
In this book, Watt integrates these ideas with the biographies of individuals like Marie Colvin, an American war correspondent who died in Syria and the subject of a recent documentary. Here are two female journalists who work for the London Post and use deception and social engineering to locate significant articles about global issues. Casey, the main character of the novel, overhears an American, very inebriatedly regaling his fellow high rollers with a story of plucking off a human with a sniper rifle for fun, from the adjoining table as she is undercover as a glittery playgirl, tracking down a tale.
Despite her disbelief, she presents the information to her editor and she and Miranda, another journalistic detective, decide to follow the story.
At first, they merely pound the sidewalk, hit the phones, and use the internet in England, but eventually, the trail takes them to the Libyan deserts and the refugee camps there. In the presence of Casey’s ex-boyfriend, a retired soldier who appears to have PTSD but it is never fully explained, the women travel to Northern Africa…
