Category Archives: Reading . . .

The Seventh Floor

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Third in former CIA analyst David McCloskey’s riveting series of espionage thrillers, The Seventh Floor will grab your attention and hang onto it until the last page. Not only is the story a hair-raising exploration of international misdeeds, its underlying theme is how loyalty to friends, family, and country is tested.

In the book’s opening pages, two of the CIA’s Russian sources are dead. One had a message vital for the CIA, which he was to convey to American CIA officer Sam Joseph. Now Sam’s gone missing. The story’s protagonist is Sam’s boss and mentor Artemis Aphrodite Procter. Hard-nosed, hard-drinking, and profane, she heads the CIA unit Moscow X, a covert action program targeting Putin and his cronies,

Her unusual name was carefully crafted: Artemis (huntress) Aphrodite (love) and Procter (so similar to Proctor, someone who oversees students). The best expression of her hunting and caring sides is the row of nine stars tattooed between her shoulder blades, each representing one of her agents whose murder she’s avenged. (At CIA headquarters, in real life, a star is carved into a memorial wall for each agency officer killed in the line of duty. There are 140 of these stars, and the officers’ names are listed in an accompanying book. The names of 34 of them remain secret.)

A new CIA Director, Finn Gosford and his new staff occupy the agency’s seventh floor. He and his number two, Deborah Sweet, know Artemis and her best mates—Mac, Theo, and Gus—from their earliest days of training. Artemis and her colleagues have pegged Finn and Debs as true second-raters, and Finn and Debs hate them for it. The agency’s chief mole-hunter, named Petra, suspects this cluster of disasters may not be coincidental, but Finn and Debs refuse to investigate.

After several months of brutal interrogation and psychological torture, Sam Joseph is swapped for a Russian agent. He comes home to a very different organization. Petra and Artemis have been fired. And, in one of the most unexpected career turnarounds imaginable, she now works at a Florida alligator-themed amusement park. McCloskey is equally deft at conjuring a toxic workplace atmosphere, a dank underground cell in Moscow, and Artemis’s unsavory alligator-related tasks.

Sam visits Artemis in Florida and tells her what no one else knows. There is indeed a mole in CIA, but Sam’s Russian contact was assassinated before he could give pass on the name. With meticulous attention to tradecraft, Sam and Artemis develop a plan to identify the traitor. Risky, yeah. Worse, too close to Artemis’s inner circle.

While this action-packed story carries you along on a tidal wave of suspense, McCloskey makes his characters’ actions and choices totally plausible. Like real people, they have flaws and heroism, they’re capable of demonstrating loyalty and hiding betrayal.

This is a really good one!

“A Visit to the Lucentini Museum of Curiosities”

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Now here’s a trip to a museum that didn’t turn out as expected! “A Visit to the Lucentini Museum of Curiosities” was published in the latest issue of the antholozine Soul Scream: Fear and Loathing, edited by Christopher Ryan. In it, you find out about a mysterious lower west side Manhattan museum that no one wants to talk about–and why.

Horror is not a genre I usually read, so I was surprised to find that some of the stories in this issue could certainly fit in the best crime publications, and the futuristic take of some other tales made them good candidates for the sci-fi category. My story, about a young couple’s ill-fated museum visit, leads off the collection, and I’m pleased to be included with authors who have such rich imaginations!

While most of the stories are definitely inspired by troubling aspects of our current political moment, some focus a little more broadly on the fundamental dilemmas of being human. Stressful times just make those dilemmas worse. To his great credit, Ryan included work from seasoned writers as well as talented high school students. What a thrill it must be for them to see their words in such an impressive collection! (I remember the shock when I sold my first short story. I cried.) Some collection highlights for me, out of many:

“School’s Out for Summer” by Wendy Maxon – a roller coaster operator relies on the technology to operate his coaster, but when it fails, what will he do about all those people hanging upside down? This story reminded me of people who use GPS to get to jobs they’ve held for years . . .

“Anguish Art Showcase” by Rebecca Cuthbert – expresses everything I hate about reality television, taken to its extreme.

“Jim Crow: 2028” by Steven Van Patten – although the story has a lot of “message,” the author was so skilled at building tension, I had to take a couple of breaks when reading it!

“Final Advice” by Charles Barouch – though times are desperate and uncertain, there’s still room for a hero.

Each story or poem is followed by a short commentary from Soul Scream staff along with a few questions to the author about the work’s origins and development. This was fun company to be in!

Order it here from Amazon!

Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts

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Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts, a wonderful book by my friend and fellow crime-writer A.J. Sidransky, is a success on many levels. This nonfiction book is part travelog, part family history, part culinary adventure, and part coming of age story, as seen through a father’s loving eyes, and it satisfies on many levels.

I particularly liked the author’s writing style. It was as if he and I were sitting at a tiny outdoor café table somewhere in Hungary and, over a plate of cherry strudel (not apple for me), he was telling me a story. It’s that personal, immediate, and written from the heart.

You don’t have to be Hungarian as he and I (not my Texas half) are to enjoy the touches of Old Europe he found, interspersed with enough history to make events unfolding there today more meaningful. He tells the story of his Jewish immigrant ancestors and how they came to America from Hungary and Slovakia (which was part of Hungary until after World War I) and made new lives here. Not all came, though, and many of those who clung to their homeland perished in the Holocaust.

My grandparents were likewise Hungarian and Slovakian, from the same part of the country, though they were Roman Catholic, and I treasured each detail and scene. But you needn’t share his family’s history to find a thrilling tale in his forebears’ determination, their courage in embarking on the long journey and starting their lives anew, their daily difficulties in a country whose language they didn’t speak. When Alan found remnants of the family’s homes and the businesses they left behind, it was compelling evidence of their past lives, like a lingering fingerprint in the community.

Alan had envisioned taking this trip ever since he became interested in family history several decades ago. Finally, as his son Jake graduated from law school, they decided to do it together. As a result, you see several Central European countries not just through Alan’s eyes, a man who has “lived it” vicariously for a long time, but through the eyes of his son Jake, who came of age more than a half-century after the Holocaust. Alan wasn’t sure Jake would be interested, but the young man’s observations proved him a perceptive, compassionate observer. In this way, it’s a story about the maturing of a father-son relationship that is heart-warming to read amidst all the tribulations and disconnects in the world, past and present.

Alan is also a trained chef, and you’ll be extra-pleased to find several family recipes he’s collected at the back of the book. They are just another way he transforms the abstractions of history and culture into something meaningful in daily life. Jó étvágyat!

P.S. I’m told my grandmother’s strudel dough was so thin, your could see the pattern of the cloth beneath it, as in this photograph. Alas, none of her six daughters did what Alan has done and preserved those precious recipes. — VW

A Murderous Reading Vacation–Right in Your Own Back Yard

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So your friends are off to the Jersey Shore or Thailand or the Maritime Provinces. You can have your own exciting vacation right from the ol’ lounge chair. Here are five recent crime stories that will give you a taste of sea, sand, and foreign climes.

Pele’s Prerogative by Albert Tucher
If a Hawai`i vacation is just what you need, you’ll find plenty of local color to make you think you’ve vacationed in that island paradise. Pele, you’ll recall, is the goddess of volcanoes and fire who created the Hawaiian Islands. The flowing lava creates lava tubes, akin to cave systems. Seventy-three-year-old Langston Otsaka, is found dead at the bottom of a lava tube in his back yard, and the wound on the back of his head suggests it wasn’t an accidental. Read my full review here.

Runaway Horses by the Italian literary duo Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini
Lawyer Enzo Maggioni and his wife Valeria, traveling to Siena, encounter a violent hailstorm, take a wrong turn, and end up at an enormous villa, where they remain guests for several days. They’ve arrived shortly before Siena’s August Palio, a centuries-old event in which horses race three laps around the town’s Piazza del Campo. The competition is vigorous and not always fair. Then there’s the dead jockey in the library. My full review is here.

Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch
This story sneaks up on you and before long has its claws in you good and solid. From the moment Evie Gordon walks up to her clients’ quirky Southern California mansion and finds the front door wide open, you know she’s about to uncover something better avoided. A young woman is tied up inside, and Evie’s employers are dead. When suspicion falls on the two women, they go on the run across the US—a 2025 Thelma and Louise. Here’s the full review.

Sayulita Sucker by Craig Terlson
In this story, set in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, you’ll visit back alleys and dicey neighborhoods not featured in any guidebook. Luke Fischer barrels through the pages as unstoppable as a locomotive. He’s not always polite, prefers beer to wine, and raises a dust storm wherever he goes. Yet, he has an uncanny knack for finding missing people. This time, his client is a man whose teenager daughter has disappeared. Full review here.

Murder Takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman
The acclaimed author’s first cozy mystery is a delight. Muriel Blossom, widowed and newly wealthy, has planned her first trip to Europe—Paris and a splurgy river cruise. You might suspect that Lippman has an older auntie or family friend who inspired her to so perfectly create open-hearted, naïve Mrs. Blossom. From the first page, you’ll peg her as the inevitable victim of an assortment of solicitous character. Read the full review.

reading, apple

Fair Haven

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Laury A. Egan’s new crime thriller, set in the suburban town of Fair Haven, dispels any notion you might have that the suburbs are dull. Fair Haven is an actual town in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and Egan grew up there, so while she describes its Jersey Shore locale with convincing authenticity, the residents’ shenanigans are, one hopes, wholly fictional.

Coincidentally, while reading this book, my husband and I found ourselves practically next door, attending the opening day of Monmouth Park Racetrack’s 2025 season. I kept glancing around at my fellow racing fans in search of doppelgangers for Egan’s lively characters! As Egan describes the area in a foreword, it’s a middle-income to wealthy year-round community with sailing, yacht clubs, the ocean, two rivers, and a rich history. Homicides, she says, are rare.

Maybe so, but she’s put a juicy one in Fair Haven. The protagonist is Chris Clarke, a professional photographer in her early 40s, who formerly worked for Monmouth County’s Forensic and Technical Services Bureau. Though she no longer works for them, the local police call her in when a staff overload leaves the Fair Haven Police with a dead body on their hands and no photographer.

The dead woman is Sally Ann Shaffer, a tennis pro at the Sycamore Country Club, who was electrocuted in her hot tub, and there is no shortage of suspects. It seems quite a few people, men and women alike, had sexual liaisons with Sally Ann. She may even have had her eye on a Roman Catholic priest, new in the community, who runs a summer tennis clinic for children of the parish.

Chris is in an intimate relationship with physical therapist Kate Morgan, and what I liked about this story is that Egan has made the sexuality of this couple and several other characters an integral part of the plot. Kate has been married and has a 14-year-old son, but one of the dilemmas she and Chris face is that the son doesn’t want to live with his mom as long as she’s with Chris. Too embarrassing.

Kate lost custody of her son in the divorce, when the judge received a letter from Sally Ann revealing that Kate is a lesbian. The hypocrisy eludes Kate’s ex-husband Harry, who drinks too much, and has been carrying on with Sally Ann for years. With justification, Kate wants their son back. Both of them end up among the several suspects in Sally Ann’s death.

There’s blackmail, thievery, fraud, assault, and more awaiting readers of this book. Although the characters engage in much antisocial behavior and hold quite a few prejudices, Chris is a likeable protagonist and remains the moral center of the story. I did feel that her old friend, Police Chief Mackie, and the department’s lead detective share more information with her than they should, but that does keep the story moving along briskly. While there are twists, they are all earned—Egan lays her groundwork well.

Another Winner from Tim Sullivan

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When I scan the list of books I’ll be reviewing in the next few months for crimefictionlover.com, I’m thrilled when I see one of Tim Sullivan’s entertaining murder mysteries coming up. The series, each entry titled with the profession of the victim, proves no occupation is safe from murderous impulses. His latest is The Bookseller. You might think a bookseller, particularly one whose esoteric specialty is dusty rare books and first editions, couldn’t rile anybody up to the point of murder, but Ed Squire appears to have done just that.

In this story, Detective Sergeant George Cross, somewhere on the autism spectrum, again burnishes his reputation as an investigative bulldog. Once George’s jaws latch onto a case, he isn’t letting it go until he’s absolutely and completely satisfied the right perpetrator has been brought to justice. This is good for justice and frustrating for his colleagues in the Avon and Somerset Major Crimes Unit, who meanwhile have been barking up a great many wrong trees and just want to move on.

Of course, George and his partner, Josie Ottey, would find it easier to quickly home in on the proper suspect if victims didn’t tend to go through life accumulating a significant array of enemies. Over the course of this investigation, the detectives uncover serious family problems—financial and interpersonal. It begins to look as if everything isn’t on the up-and-up in the book shop, either. Most dangerous of all, the deceased ran afoul of a Russian oligarch to whom he sold some stolen documents, and the man wants his £2 million back.

The Russians—not just the fabulously wealthy oligarch, but also his gangsterish henchmen—bring a sense of real menace to the proceedings. Only some clever police work by Ottey and Cross’s team reveals the extent of their rather persistent presence and how they have been staking out the Squires’ shop.

Meanwhile, George is beset by his own problems. DS Ottey is now a Detective Inspector, outranking him. He fears he’ll be assigned a new partner. Of course, everyone recognizes she’s the only person who’s been able to work with him. As a reader, I also want her to stay! She’s an interesting character and a perfect foil for George.

More significantly, George’s father, Raymond, has had a stroke and will need a long course of rehabilitation, which George assumes he should take charge of. No one, especially Raymond, believes that would be a good idea, but changing George’s mind is never easy. The relationship between George and his father—and in more recent books, his mother—is one of the many charms of this series. Like Ottey, his parents know they can’t interact with their unusual son in the usual ways, and they’re models of effective coping.

Tim Sullivan is crime writer, screenwriter, and director, and his George Cross series benefits from that background in both (“I didn’t see that coming!”) plotting and the development of a diverse, never-boring cast of characters. Highly recommended.

Queen of Diamonds

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This is the third in Beezy Marsh’s trilogy inspired by a real-life female shoplifting gang that operated in London in the first half of the twentieth century. The first two books, Queen of Thieves and Queen of Clubs, deal with the gang’s activities during their heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, while this book describes how their leader—Alice Diamond—got her dubious start two decades earlier.

Alice, the future Queen of Diamonds, is an orphan working long hot hours in Pink’s Jam Factory. Aspiring to a better life, she shoplifts little indulgences for herself on her off-hours—silk stockings, colorful scarves, and the like. Alice’s story is interspersed with that of Mary Carr, another legendary leader of a real-life shoplifting gang whose career began several decades earlier. Mary grew up in one of London’s most notorious slums, Seven Dials.

In Marsh’s story, Mary is noticed by a Mayfair lady out slumming. She’s looking for subjects for her paintings of dirty, downtrodden, poverty-stricken children and finds Mary a perfect model for her art. By inviting the girl to her home and studio, the condescending Lady Harcourt exposes Mary to a completely different side of life, whetting her appetite for better things. Mary soon realizes she’s treated completely differently when she’s wearing Lady Harcourt’s daughter’s hand-me-downs than when dressed in her own dirty rags. From that point, there’s no going back for her.

Author Marsh evokes sympathy with her descriptions of the women’s sordid living conditions and unambitious, resentful family members. It isn’t surprising they aspire to glamour beyond the understanding of the people they grew up with. What’s remarkable is that both Mary and Alice are brash and determined enough to get it, with potential trouble with the authorities always right around the corner.

All that is fairly sociological. What about the story? It never flags and rests on the tremendous strength of the characters Marsh has created. She puts us right there, fingering those silks, decorating those bonnets, and running for our lives when the coppers appear.

Gabriel’s Moon & Havoc

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Pack your traveling clothes. These two books will take you on adventures far afield.

In Gabriel’s Moon, the new espionage thriller by William Boyd, a brief prologue tells how thirty-something Gabriel Dax is haunted by the house fire that took his widowed mother’s life and destroyed his childhood home. Gabriel has become a book author and travel writer, speeding off to one destination after another, trying to outrun the flames.

Now Gabriel is in Léopoldville (Kinshasha), capital of the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo. A friend arranges a spectacular journalistic coup: an interview with the prime minister, the controversial, pro-Soviet Patrice Lamumba—a poor political choice for a leader sitting on a “gold mine” of uranium. Gabriel works hard on the Lamumba article, but his editors spike it. Lamumba, apparently, is old news. Kidnapped in a coup.

Rumors say Lamumba is dead. His editor says that’s not true, and if it were, he’d know it. Of course, it is true, and Gabriel slides into a mirror-world of truths, half-truths, and lies, delivered most convincingly of all. Someone desperately wants his interview tapes, in which Lamumba claimed US, British, and Belgian government operatives were out to get him. He named names.

It’s an exciting read as Gabriel zooms from one assignment to the next, from one strange encounter to another, and develops the self-preservation skills he seems increasingly likely to need. The story is packed with interesting, richly developed characters. Aside from Gabriel, there’s a Spanish artist whose star is falling; a young American woman with a dubious agenda; a CIA operative who uses a minor French author for his nom de guerre; his louche, hard-drinking, and slippery contact in Cadiz; an irritating Liverpool journalist; and a dogged insurance investigator who decades earlier doubted the official story about the deadly fire.

London, Warsaw during the Cold War, Spain, the Congo—Boyd captures them all as effectively as travel writer Gabriel himself might. It’s no surprise that award-winning Scottish author Boyd’s writing is top-notch. He’s a two-time finalist for the Booker Prize.

Christopher Bollen’s protagonist in the new psychological thriller Havoc is Maggie Burkhardt, an 81-year-old widow from Milwaukee, residing at a somewhat unfashionable hotel in Luxor, Egypt. She’s lost everything—husband, daughter—and is making up for their absences by trying to become a presence in other peoples’ lives and “fixing” their problems. Truth told, she’s an interfering busybody, and you may wish she’d get her comeuppance.

Probably you won’t expect her nemesis will turn out to be an eight-year-old boy. Otto Seeber is cunning, fearless, and the orchestrator of much of the havoc that descends on the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel. (This fictional hotel was in part inspired by Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel, where Bollen got his first notion for this story and Agatha Christie wrote part of Death on the Nile. I’ve been there myself and can attest to the loveliness of the garden with its exotic birds, a frequent meeting place for Bollen’s characters.)

Only Maggie—and her archaeologist friend Ben—see through Otto’s mask of childish innocence to the demonic personality underneath. Ben’s husband, Zachary, having a belated stirring of paternal interest, draws the boy into their circle, and Maggie cannot avoid Otto. He has her in his sights and keeps her there.

Maggie attempts to arrange situations that will prompt Otto’s mother to return with him to Paris. Her plots only succeed in drawing her deeper into a cycle of retribution from Otto. It’s a chess game between them, with a core of malevolence that has prompted comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s writing.

Bollen’s vivid descriptions seem exactly right. Egypt is a distinctive, “romantic” place, but an unfamiliar world. The rules are different there. Things can go wrong. And do. Maggie is a completely believable, if not completely likeable character. I thought I understood her and her flaws, but in the end, Bollen has some revelations in store that may lead you to reevaluate her. In short, Havoc is a beautifully stage-managed trip to another world.

Sunscreen Shower by JP Rieger

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Sunscreen Shower, the new crime novel by Baltimore author JP Rieger takes advantage of the varied cast of characters from his first novel as they, it’s fair to say, lurch through life. This group of friends who survived the horrors of high school together has managed to stay close over the decades since, despite wildly different life paths. The main character, Kev Dixit, is a South Asian police detective, who finds creative uses for his friends’ varied skills in serving and protecting the citizens of Baltimore. Dixit, his friends, and his team in the police department are well-developed characters, and their occasional quirks make them believably human.

In this story, Dixit is confronted at the outset by a bizarre pair of killings, which at first blush appear to be the murder-suicide of a married couple named Matthiesen. The more he learns about the couple the less likely that seems. Something is off. And part of that something, he learns, is that the Matthiesens weren’t husband-and-wife, they were siblings, possibly even twins.

He has little time to spare for the Matthiesen case, though, as he’s confronted with a series of young woman attacked in their homes, each a bit more violent than the last. The women have nothing in common but impending marriage and are from different surrounding towns. The multijurisdictional complications give Dixit the chance to do what he does best, and often quite humorously—figure out a way around mindless bureaucratic obstacles.

In a separate plot, two of his long-time friends—a physician and an actor—have hired an uninterested public relations agent to promote their new book. For an inkling of what the p.r. maven is up against, here’s the book title: Blood Brothers: How Two Longstanding Friends Saved Themselves From The Ugly Streets Of Baltimore In the Midst Of Personal Trials and Chaotic Lives—And The Bonds That Formed, Only To Be Tested, Time And Again, Within The City’s Dark Cultural Wasteland. And, if that isn’t enough, there’s this pair’s great invention: the sunscreen shower. Scenes with them are full of humor (a nice break from the crime), but not especially integrated into the rest of the story.

Already lots is going on in Dixit’s world (did I mention someone is out to get him?), when he’s saddled with a new straight-arrow Academy grad. She carries the notion of political correctness to extremes, and Dixit’s attempts to avoid saying anything inadvertently offensive are hilarious. But not as much as the “sensitivity training” he’s required to complete. The two cases—the possible murder-suicide and the attacks on brides-to-be—are complicated, and watching Dixit and his team make sense of the tiny details is a lot of fun. You also get a big-picture appreciation for the competing pressures urban police departments face and will wish for common sense to win out. That’s Dixit’s view, in any case.

His first book, Clonk! is laugh-out-loud funny. Reviewed here.

An Irish Classic: the International

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hotel bar, barman
(photo: shankar s, creative commons license)

“If I had known history was to be written that Sunday in the International Hotel I might have made an effort to get out of bed before teatime,” writes Daniel Hamilton, an 18-year-old Belfast bartender and narrator of Glenn Patterson’s novel The International: A Novel of Belfast.

The history he refers to is the meeting to launch the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), an organization formed to focus attention on discrimination against Northern Ireland’s mostly Catholic nationalist minority. We call the succeeding three decades of violence and despair The Troubles, and The International “is the best book about the Troubles ever written,” says Irish author and Booker-Prize-winner Anne Enright.

Funny thing is, there’s almost no overt violence in this book, apart from the fact it’s set in a busy bar with lots of coming and going and football on the telly and political shenanigans where money changes hands and gay men and straight women hoping to meet someone and people who should have stopped drinking hours before ordering another and weddings upstairs in the hotel, at one of which the clergyman plays an accordion. In other words, enough latent violence in reserve to keep the average semi-sober person on his toes.

The principal action of the novel takes place during on Saturday evening, January 28, 1967, the night before the big meeting, larded with Danny Hamilton’s memories of other times and barroom encounters. His minutely observed portrayal of everyday life as seen from behind the bar is heartbreaking when, with the lens of hindsight, the reader knows how soon it will all be gone, sucked into a slowly unwinding catastrophe of bombs and gunfire.

The quote at the top of this piece opens the book, and these words about a barmen who was shot dead, Peter Ward, also age 18, help close it:

I can’t tell you much else about him, except that those who knew him thought the world of him. He is, I realise, an absence in this story. I wish it were not so, but guns do that, create holes which no amount of words can fill.

I wrote about this book and a visit to Princeton by Belfast author Glenn Patterson a few years ago, and it seems apt to return to it on St. Patrick’s Day, especially given his writing’s emphasis on history and politics and his deep sense of place. He said that “when history looks back at our present, it will see that what we thought we were at and what we were at, really, were entirely different.” When we think about our current moment in America, that is a sobering thought.

Here’s Glenn Patterson’s list of his top 10 books about Belfast, compiled in 2012.