Washington Post columnist David Ignatius is one of the most highly regarded writers in the capital, an influential journalist and acclaimed novelist with a keen eye for the subtleties of power and politics. In The Sun King , Ignatius has written a love story for our time, a spellbinding portrait of the collision of ambition and sexual desire.          Sandy Galvin is a billionaire with a rare talent for taking risks and making people happy. Galvin arrives in a Washington suffering under a cloud of righteous misery and   proceeds to turn the place upside down. He buys the city's most powerful newspaper, The Washington Sun and Tribune, and wields it like a sword, but in his path stands his old Harvard flame, Candace Ridgway, a beautiful and icy journalist known to her colleagues as the Mistress of Fact. Their fateful encounter, tangled in the mysteries of their past, is narrated by David Cantor, an acid-tongued reporter and Jerry Springer devotee who is drawn inexorably into the Sun King's orbit and is transformed by this unpredictable man.            In this wise and poignant novel, love is the final frontier for a generation of baby boomers at midlife--still young enough to reach for their dreams but old enough to glimpse the prospect of loss. The Sun King can light up a room, but can he melt the worldly bonds that constrain the Mistress of Fact? In The Sun King , David Ignatius proves with perceptive wit and haunting power that the phrase "Washington love story" isn't an oxymoron. Having thrilled readers with four action-packed novels (including A Firing Offense), Ignatius now does a neat backflip and thrills his readers with a love story. Publishing mogul Sandy Galvin, a.k.a. the Sun King, arrives in Washington, DC, one day with plans to revive a dying newspaper. He hires David Cantor, a cynical lifestyle writer with a profound appreciation for fluff journalism, and Candace Ridgway, a former flame and scrupulous foreign affairs writer also known as The Mistress of Fact. Shortly, both men are deeply involved with the Mistress, and the threesome spend the rest of the book sparring about love and journalistic ethics. The emotional integrity at the heart of this novel is searingly honest and makes for a wise and satisfying work. For all public libraries. -ABarbara Conaty, Library of Congress Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. A splendid, star-crossed Gatsby update that roasts on the same skewer Washington's power elite and the journalists they so easily seduce. Imagine Ted Turner buying the Washington Post just so he could woo Sally Quinn. Departing from his spy-thriller beat (A Firing Offense, 1997, etc.), Post columnist Ignatius offers a wickedly cynical insider account of irresistibly charming billionaire Carl Sandburg (``Sandy'') Galvin's purchase of the stodgy, respected Washington Sun and Tribune (a dead ringer for the Post, despite Ignatius's denial of this and many other factual congruencies), whose Pulitzer-winning foreign editor, Candace Ridgway, loved and left him back at Harvard. Now in her 40s, the blond and beautiful Ridgway, one of Georgetowns old money elite, maintains a platonic friendship with David Cantor, editor of the society magazine Reveal who developed an unrequited infatuation for her back when they were putting out the Crimson together. After flattering Galvin in Reveal, Cantor uses his friendship with Ridgway to help him pry the Sun away from its stuffy family owners. Galvin apparently sweeps Ridgway off her feet, naming her editor of the paper, and hires Cantor, the snide, sarcastic narrator of this cautionary tale, with instructions to make the newspaper more funwhich, for Galvin, means sweepstakes, warm-and-fuzzy animal features, and front-page crusades for unsung victims. The entrepreneur also establishes an anarchic cable news studio and, in the form of an inner-city youth scholarship fund, throws enough money around to get good press with the mayor and at the White House. When other papers and political agencies start poking into Galvin's shadowy past, Ridgway, by now passionately entangled with Galvin, secretly assigns Cantor and two Sun reporters to get the story first. The resulting truth says less about the promises of Gatsby-manqus than the twisted logic of aging Boomers, for whom success has come to mean never getting what they want. Fitzgerald's boozy gloom brightened with social satire, bittersweet romance, and a comic send-up of all that newspapers hold dear, from a man who's been there. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. "In this entertaining new novel, David Ignatius takes on the Nick     Carraway role to tell the tale of the Gatsbyish Carl Sandburg Galvin, who, like a brilliant comet, momentarily dazzles the world of the Washington establishment."                                 --Dominick Dunne "This wonderfully written book tells an engrossing and surprising tale of power in Washington. The Sun King--Sandy Galvi