But unlike the Titanic, the Lusitania’s sinking was not a tragic accident. One of the greatest mishaps of its era, the sinking of the Lusitania resulted in the loss of 1,198 lives, among them society figures like Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt and Broadway impresarios such as Charles Frohman, both of whom have walk-ons in Izzo’s narrative. Did the British government, in the guise of a young first lord of the Admiralty named Winston Churchill, cleverly conspire in the successful 1915 torpedoing of the luxury liner Lusitania by a German U-boat as a pretext for inveigling America into the First World War? The subtitle of the book is A novel of the Lusitania, inspired by true events and that fact establishes the novel’s credibility as a political thriller attempting to answer of one of the 20th century’s biggest geopolitical mysteries. It’s a heady literary confection, but Izzo pulls it off handily. In her new book Seven Days in May, novelist Kim Izzo has crafted something of a literary hybrid - equal parts romantic melodrama, high-minded political thriller and the kind of thinly-veiled high-society roman-à-clef that used to mint millions for the late Vanity Fair scribe Dominick Dunne.

Seven days in may a novel kim izzo