WaPo succinctly details everything that’s wrong with the new novel “Jack’s Widow,” by Eve Pollard:

• “The first sign of trouble in this novel about Jackie Kennedy arrives early, soon after the president’s assassination, when the widow reflects on his ‘three and three-quarter years’ in the White House. In fact, John Kennedy was president for 2 3/4 years — Jan. 20, 1961, to Nov. 22, 1963…”
• “When Eve Pollard, an English journalist, has milked all the melodrama she can out of 40-year-old gossip, she launches a new story line that features Jackie as a Nancy Drew-style secret agent.”
• “We are privy to preposterous scenes in which Lyndon Johnson and CIA officials scheme to marry Jackie off to [Aristotle] Onassis so that, with her connivance, and without his knowledge, they can use his island, Skorpios, as a base for electronic eavesdropping on the Russians.”
• “I won’t linger on Pollard’s uncertain grasp of history (in her hands Kennedy’s famous ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ exhortation becomes ‘Think not…’”
• “Still, the nadir, sex-wise, comes after Jackie gives a dinner party in her New York apartment. A surly waiter hides in the stairwell, sneaks in during the night and rapes her — repeatedly and in unpleasant ways the author is pleased to detail. With this ugly and entirely gratuitous scene, ‘Jack’s Widow’ moves from being merely ludicrous to being beneath contempt.”

Best review of the year.