The Narcissist, The Femme Fatale, And a Girl Named Jacinda

During the Cold War in 1961, a narcissistic future American president, Ruler Surpass, and an ambitious New Zealand politician, Conor Behan, are taped in a sex trap by a beautiful femme fatale, KGB agent, Natalia Volkova. They become KGB “agents” subject to kompromat (blackmail). Natalia has a daughter, Nina (renamed Jacinda in New Zealand), by Conor, but does not tell him.

Four years later, Natalia, dying of lung cancer, returns to New Zealand with Jacinda. Conor reluctantly agrees to adopt her after Natalia dies. Natalia uses kompromat to stop Conor from putting her friend, Victoria University professor Dr Stump, on trial for spying. Meanwhile, in the United States, Ruler fathers a son, Rory, with Conor’s girlfriend, later his wife, Moira. Ruler also fathers a daughter, Ana, with his wife, Bulgarian model Bisera Petrova, who becomes vice-president.

The NZ Security Intelligence Service carries out a series of killings to obtain a diary of an incriminating phone conversation between Conor and Ruler about being entrapped by Natalia. A journalist dies beneath Wellington’s cable car; a diplomat drowns in a duck pond; a secretary takes an overdose of margaritas; an SIS agent smokes a poison-laced cigarette. Dr Stump is acquitted of spying for the Russians; a paedophile judge is blackmailed, and Ruler dies in a (vine) bungee jump planned by Moira to prevent him from kidnapping their son back to America. Bisera becomes the United Status's first woman president. Conor loses an election and is saved from suicide by Moira.

She becomes leader and wins the next election to become New Zealand’s first woman prime minister. Throughout these personal tribulations, New Zealand emerges as a beacon of light in the face of nuclear weapons. The children of Conor, Moira and Ruler become leaders of New Zealand, the United States and Russia. At a summit at No 15 Ngaio Road, the official residence of the New Zealand prime minister, twenty-eight years later, they toast a glass of Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc to “no nuclear weapons and world peace.”

This book intertwines the tortuous personal relationships between megalomaniacal politicians and their conniving wives against the equally circuitous Cold War arm wrestle between the U.S. and Soviet over the proliferation of nuclear weapons with firmly anti-nuclear New Zealand unwittingly caught in the middle. A novel baby boomers and Wellingtonians, in particular, will relate to but, also a nice history lesson about great power politics around the time Gen-X generation was born.