Category Archives: Reading . . .

The Missing Family

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The Missing Family is the latest in Tim Weaver’s popular series of thrillers featuring missing-persons investigator David Raker. Here, Weaver presents an impossible crime, the unexpected tentacles of which stretch clear from England across the Atlantic to the North American continent.

Sarah Fowler hires Raker to solve the mysterious disappearance of her family a year earlier. After a day at a favorite Dartmoor lake, her husband, teenage son, and his girlfriend row the family’s twenty-foot dinghy out onto the water one last time. Drowsy from the sun, Sarah briefly falls asleep—her wristwatch confirms she napped for no more than a minute or two—until her toddler, Mable, awakens her. Halfway across the lake, the dinghy bobs, empty. The police are baffled. The boat’s too far out for the trio to have swum to shore in the available time, not to mention the girlfriend’s arm was in a cast. They find no evidence of violence and have no witnesses.

You don’t stay with the grieving Sarah long, though. In Los Angeles, detectives from two different departments—eventually three jurisdictions—are baffled by a trio of shootings. Five bodies, killed by bullets typically used in hunting rifles, are found in remote areas. Far apart, there’s nothing to link them, and they continue for years as separate cold cases.

In yet a third plotline, at a massive London-area casino resort, the Skyline, a high-rolling gambler and casino investor is viciously stabbed to death. He and the two brothers who own the casino have been best friends for years. Despite the owners’ determination to find the murderer, security camera footage of the victim in the frequent company of another man is notably—possibly suspiciously—uninformative. Who was this stranger?

The brothers also own the world’s largest casino, The Afrique, in Las Vegas. (Coincidentally, I was at a conference in Las Vegas while reading this book, which was almost too much verisimilitude!) Weaver certainly captures the over-the-top, mildly uneasy, anything-can-happen casino buzz.

The suspected murderer returns to the Skyline, is identified (facial recognition software at work), detained, and put in one of the casino’s secure holding cells under guard. When the police arrive to arrest him, the locked cell is empty. It’s another missing person case, which cries out for Raker’s assistance. Raker’s investigations—the missing family and the casino murder and disappearance—work in tandem, while you learn about the West Coast murders through the eyes of the California detectives. A lot is going on. You may suspect that all three plot lines will eventually weave together, but how?

Though the plot is complex, Weaver’s chapters are short and keep things moving. Sometimes he tries a little too hard to end each chapter with a startling revelation, just before the next chapter switches to another plot. That said, you’ll encounter quite a few nifty surprises.

The book is written in both first-person (the Raker chapters) and third-person (all the others), which effectively provides immediacy from the lead detective, plus the differing points of view and voices of other characters. It’s never confusing. Overall, an entertaining puzzle.

Order here from Amazon.

Imaginations on Fire

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As news of the Southern California Line Fire explodes, another in a long line of catastrophes, authors have taken note. Fire’s destructiveness reveals heroism, and can equally well hide dastardly deeds. These thrillers have some strong points, and I also recommend the nonfiction Fire Weather by John Vaillant. You’ll discover real-life heroes (and villains) and understand fire’s dangers much better.

What Fire Brings
From the first pages of Rachel Howzell Hall’s new psychological thriller, What Fire Brings, Bailey Meadows’s situation is fraught with deception. This young Black woman has finagled a writing internship with noted thriller author Jack Beckham, but she isn’t a writer. She’s secretly working toward obtaining her private investigator’s license, and wants to use this opportunity to find out what happened to a woman who disappeared near Beckham’s Topanga Canyon property.

Topanga is a famously bohemian community west of Los Angeles whose hilly terrain and dense tree cover make it seem remote and wild. Thanks to Hall’s deft descriptions, the Canyon, with its one road in and one road out, becomes another potentially dangerous character here.

The story is told entirely from Bailey’s point of view. If you’ve read other works by Howzell, notably her debut, Land of Shadows, you won’t be surprised her narrative reads as if she is in an existential crisis. Living in two worlds makes her easily distracted—not the best headspace for conducting an investigation.

On a hike in the canyon, she sees a fire in the distance—too far away to pose any risk to the Beckham property, or is it? I read an advance reader copy of this book, which was labelled an ‘uncorrected proof.’ Typos will (presumably) be caught, and other changes may be made. However, when Bailey asks the fire chief about the maximum temperature a human body can tolerate, and he says 250 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s so wrong, I thought it was another intentional deception. The human body is about 60 percent water, which boils at 212 degrees F. Then he says higher temperatures are survivable “if there’s water around.” Water (humidity) actually worsens heat’s effects of heat on the body. This apparent slip-up is much more than a cosmetic problem, it affected my understanding of the plot.

That stumble aside, when you finally understand the whole of Bailey’s predicament, you may, like me, be struck by Hall’s accomplishment here. She turns the tables on some issues I didn’t realize were actually on the table. Despite Bailey’s annoying dithering, and the unanswered story questions (like, who was that old lady?), What Fire Brings is an exciting and memorable read.

Into the Flames
James Delargy’s incendiary new crime thriller, Into the Flames, like his previous two, is set in wildfire-prone rural southeastern Australia. Former Sydney police Detective Alex Kennard is making a heroic effort to reach the hilltop home of a missing artist—Tracy Hilmeyer—on one of the most threatened blocks in the rapidly burning fictional town of Rislake.

The superheated road surface pulls away as the tires of his commandeered Personnel Carrier labor up to the Hilmeyer house. Kennard doesn’t expect to find much at the house, certainly not what he does find—Tracy’s dead body, lying in a pool of blood. It takes superhuman cajoling to persuade the firefighters to concentrate on saving this one structure—now a crime scene—and to get the necessary investigating officers up the hill to the endangered dwelling. All the usual trappings of a murder investigation are here—coroner’s reports, paper trails, motor vehicle searches, warrants, interviews, development of suspects—all of which takes place amid an utter catastrophe.

Author Delargy is good at developing a complicated plot, red herrings and all. And, if you like a flat-out adventure, the story moves quickly from one event to the next. His writing style doesn’t lend itself to much character development, and he tends to tell you what his characters are feeling, rather than convey their motivations through more subtler means. As a result, I didn’t become really attached to any of them and to outright dislike a few.

What I did like was the dramatic set-up. The increasing number of devastating real-life wildfires around the world are a growing menace, and a story like this one vividly brings home the kinds of perils that such tragedies pose.

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What Fire Brings
Into the Flames
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The Serpent Dance

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With Sofia Slater’s latest crime mystery, you have not only an intriguing whodunnit, but, although it’s set in contemporary times, The Serpent Dance feels like a trip back in time to the era when Cornish midsummer revelries first involved bonfires, iconic music, river offerings, and the creation of wicker animals, later consumed by the ritual fire. Slater draws on the persistence of these ancient practices, mixing the traditional and the modern in ways that occasionally baffle her protagonist.

London graphic designer Audrey Delaney’s boyfriend of ten months, Noah, has planned a surprise getaway for them. She’s convinced herself (and prematurely told all her friends) that he’s taking her to Paris. When it turns out they’re headed to the fictional Cornish village of Trevennick, she tries not to show her disappointment, but Noah realizes he’s missed the mark.

From there, their situation goes from bad to much, much worse. Their B&B is a modern, glass-walled home overlooking the river. Inside, it’s open-plan carried to an extreme. Their landlady will be staying in the master bedroom, with just a wisp of separation between her and the guest bedroom.

Their hostess is a renowned television personality, and Noah takes to her with unexpected enthusiasm. Something isn’t right. Why this place? What’s Noah’s real agenda? Why his interest in this older woman? The twisting lines of the eponymous serpent dance itself can’t compare to the secrets Audrey is about to discover.

No need to worry be jealous of their hostess, though, because before morning she lies dead in a pool of blood, a knife to her throat. The police initially consider it a suicide, but elements of the crime scene simply don’t add up. Since Audrey and Noah are the only other people in the house, and since anyone else padding about could not do so without risking being seen (all those glass walls), police attention is on them. On Noah, particularly.

The town is preparing for the midsummer Golowan festivities, masks and wicker obby orses everywhere. It’s a deeply local tradition and outsiders aren’t especially welcome, especially when the shadow of murder has fallen on them.

Though Noah is tucked away in jail, their hostess’s isn’t the only body to turn up. Audrey tackles her predicament in the way she tries to work through any difficult circumstance, by drawing, and the realism of her depiction of Stella’s corpse, among other local characters is inevitably misunderstood. It’s a classic case of being out of one’s own element. This profoundly unsettling atmosphere makes Audrey anxious about the wrong things, so that she doesn’t recognize the danger to herself.

I found the mix of past and present, culture and calamity quite captivating. Nice job, Sofia Slater! Order your copy here.

“Tell Me What You Think the Problem Is”

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French Windows by Antoine Laurain

This unconventional short novel by French author Antoine Laurain, translated into English by Louise Rogers Lalaurie, proves once again that delving into another person’s psyche is tricky business. You know from the cover that the book is a murder mystery, but what is this murder? When and where does it occur? And when the event finally appears in the story, the victim and perpetrator are a surprise. What the book has been up to in reaching that point is a trip through the richly imagined garden of a psychiatric patient’s mind.

Parisian psychiatrist Dr. J. Faber relates his encounters with a new patient, Nathalia Guitry, a beautiful young woman who is a successful photographer. But she’s stopped taking pictures. In fact, she says the last photograph she took was of a murder. Shocked, Faber ends the session. Nathalia returns for a second appointment and reveals that she spends her days observing the people in the flats opposite hers. Observing is what she’s good at, after all.

To get their conversations started, he suggests she write down what she thinks she’s seeing—the stories of these other people’s lives. He hopes her written words will be a window into her own thoughts. She agrees, and she writes interesting and clever stories from these other people’s points of view, which become chapters in the book. Some of these stories become so engaging, you may wish they weren’t so short. They also capture many aspects of daily life in Paris, deconstructing French people’s attitudes and preoccupations. I felt as if that apartment building revealed an entire world through its residents’ friendships, regrets, ambitions, and longings.

But what about that murder? You just have to wait for it

Order a copy here.

Jack & I

Laury Egan’sJack & I is the dark tale of a 16-year-old New Jersey boy growing up in a succession of foster homes offering varying degrees of sympathy and exploitation. Most of his problems result from undiagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder – what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder.

Sometimes, Jack is his painfully shy and socially inept self, but when his alter ego takes over he is brash, aggressive, and predatory. The unpredictable emergence of this other Jack (whom I’ll call Jack2 for this review) is one of the reasons foster families don’t keep him long. Egan states up-front that her depiction of Dissociative Identity Disorder takes a few liberties for fiction’s purposes, but the condition usually originates in early childhood trauma. Jack has learned not just to seal off this trauma, he also hides the existence of Jack2. He has only fragmentary memories of Jack2’s misdeeds, and sometimes none at all, though he has to bear the punishment and social exclusion that result.

While Jack is a sympathetic character, Jack2 is not, and with a story involving the sexual exploitation of minors Jack and I is a difficult read. The depravity of the adults involved is shocking, but Jack2 is completely complicit and is disdainful of Jack, upon whom his whole existence depends. But don’t despair. At last, there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

The previous book by Egan reviewed here, The Psychologist’s Shadow, also featured a significant psychological component, and the author handles these issues with great sensitivity.

Itʼs an extreme case study, yes, as well as a reminder of how badly the world treats the most vulnerable among us and how high the stakes are.

Order a copy here.

The Translator

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Harriet Crawley’s The Translator—lauded by UK media as one of the best thrillers of 2023—is finally available in the United States. In it, a British translator is called away from his vacation in the Scottish Highlands to accompany the Prime Minister on a lightning trip to Moscow. Clive Franklin is one of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s best Russian-English-Russian translators, and before he can say Kinlochleven, he’s snatched out of his vacation and loaded onto a helicopter. The Prime Minister’s staff has taken care of providing everything—documents, clothing, new business cards, and medications—he’ll need.

While staff members tried to prepare for any contingency, they didn’t anticipate that his opposite number in Moscow, Marina Volina, an equally expert translator for Russian President Nikolai Serov, is someone Clive fell in love with when they both worked at the United Nations. Marina broke it off, married, became a widow, and is now one of Serov’s most trusted aides. When Clive sees her again, he’s smitten anew, and Crawley convincingly portrays the emotion they feel for each other and how hard they must work to hide it in a land of paranoia.

If Marina looks older, tired, it is mostly because a young man she considered her son, Pasha, has died, reportedly of a drug overdose. The morning of the UK-Russia meeting, she receives this note from Vanya, Pasha’s brother: “Pasha was murdered. By your lot.” That is, the FSB (successor to the KGB). It’s unthinkable, but Marina is convinced it’s true.

The UK-Russian discussions do not go well. Underneath all the diplomatic blustering, the Russians are evidently up to something. In her grief and anger, Marina determines to find out what it is, tell Clive, avert some unknown catastrophe, and somehow get herself and Vanya out of the country.

Her chief antagonist is Pasha’s former boss, General Varlamov, deputy director of the FSB, who believes himself in line for the top position. Protecting Russia’s secrets and punishing those who violate them would be his crowning achievement. Varlamov’s spies, cameras, and microphones are everywhere. Resentful of Marina’s close relationship with President Serov, Varlamov makes sure her every move is watched.

At their first Moscow diplomatic meeting together, small talk reveals both Marina and Clive are marathon runners. Training for the forthcoming Moscow marathon helps Marina keep her wits about her. Serov encourages Clive to enter also, thinking he’ll get a photograph of the Englishman on his knees—some propaganda victory, there. At first Clive demurs, as he hasn’t planned to stay in Moscow for long, but it turns out that practice runs let him and Marina exchange information, as their minders can’t keep up. Hoping he’ll pry some information from her, the Brits ask him to stay. Clive and Marina must carve a path through a cast of interesting and believable characters—spies, diplomats, apparatchiks, and brave anti-regime protestors, friends and enemies alike.

Crawley creates a strong sense of the oppressive atmosphere—constantly watched, every conversation listened to. Marina is playing a dangerous chess game, calculating every move based not only on what she hopes to accomplish, but how it will appear to Varlamov.

The story contains several ticking clocks that raise the tension to keep-you-up-reading levels. There’s whatever the Russians are planning, the timeline of which is uncertain because Serov is dithering. The British want to deploy countermeasures, but need more information to do it in time. There’s the marathon, which is on a date certain. There is Varlamov’s persistent circling closer to the truth about Marina. And, there is the unfolding of the cleverly planned and innocent-seeming actions Marina sets in motion, in order to secure her and Vanya’s escape. Crawley’s expert plotting brings all these streams together in an entirely satisfying way.

I love a good spy story, and The Translator is terrific!

Another Taste of France: Bruno: Chief of Police

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Now that we’re all Frenchified from watching the Olympics and their stunning opening ceremonies, which showed the Paris at its best, we can take a breath and turn to some of the country’s many other charms.

Millions of UK and US readers have basked in the sunny French countryside via the books by the late Peter Mayle, author of 1989’s A Year in Provence. If you’re one of them, Martin Walker’s more recently written detective series will transport you to a similar, simpler time and place. A place where a meal is something to be lingered over (and described in mouth-watering detail) and a glass of wine is savored, even if it’s the not-all-that-delicious small batch created by your hillside neighbor.

Martin Walker’s series of seventeen mystery novels, published beginning in 2009, retains the witty, warm-hearted, utterly charming feeling Mayle exemplified. Bruno, Chief of Police, is the series opener. The chief’s actual name is Benoît Courrèges, but to everyone, he’s Bruno. His beat is the small town of Saint-Denis and surrounding countryside, located on the Vézère River in the Dordogne—some 450 miles west and a bit north of Provence.

Bruno uses a cell phone, relies on DNA testing, and uses other up-to-date forensic methods, but his real skill is understanding the psychology and behavior of Saint-Denis’s residents. His understanding of what methods will and will not work in getting to the bottom of crimes committed there is acute. Big-city police authorities and the head of the local gendarmerie are ever convinced they know best how to handle situations that arise. But, faced with Bruno’s local intelligence, they’re usually defeated in a most gratifying, often amusing, way—such as a gendarme’s attempt to arrest a boy for possession of a potato (on market day, no less!), which runs quickly aground.

Walker weaves significant contemporary concerns into his rosy descriptions of markets, cafés and wineries. For example, market day offers the opportunity for rule-obsessed EU inspectors to search out cheeses, pâtés, and meats that, despite new restrictions, continue to be produced and sold just the way the sellers’ parents and grand-parents did. A woman cited for selling eggs without the required date stamp actually buys her eggs at the supermarket, washes off the dates, and packages them up with a bit of straw and (don’t think about it) to sell to tourists as real country eggs. And tourists there are, with all their agendas and cultural mishaps.

Intruding on this idyllic existence is the occasional murder, rare for the area, but perfect for Bruno’s particular skills Some stories’ strong political undertow allows the author to explore residents’ attitudes about immigrants, social cohesion, wartime behavior, and the like, which give the stories considerable weight.

Bruno is more than the town’s chief of police. For one thing, he coaches the town’s children who want to play tennis. He thinks it’s A good way to get to know the next generation, whose members soon will enter the risk-prone years of adolescence. He travels the area’s indifferent roadways to visit farm families, keep tabs on their concerns, making numerous friendships among them. When he needs them, they cooperate.

Good food too is a preoccupation. Bruno is an excellent, if unfussy cook, and partakes of the best his region has to over, including the truffles found in the woods behind his house. (I’m salivating.) Naturally, he has a loyal basset hound, Gigi, to keep him company and manage his hunting expeditions.

Bottom line: Walker’s mysteries are a pleasant way to spend a few hours. More than that, the investigations he’s designed dig into many facets of rural life as it has been and as it changes. Not all of them are pretty, and the appearance of simplicity is only on the surface. Along the way he introduces you to interesting local characters and captures a few idyllic moments. You’re very likely to want more of both.

Walker is a former foreign correspondent for The Guardian, has written a number of nonfiction historical and political books and lives in France’s Périgord region.

The Dog That Didn’t Bark

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Earlier this month marked the 94th anniversary of the death of Arthur Conan Doyle. If you read this blog regularly, you may recall that I wrote a series of posts based on themes and stories in an excellent anthology, edited by Richard T. Ryan, Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885. It came out late last year, and my story “A Brick Through the Window” was in it.

I’m pleased to say that story won first place in the Public Safety Writers Association’s annual awards program in the short story category. It tells how in July 1885, Holmes and Watson took part in investigating the impact of laws (only and outrageously punishing women) aimed at reducing sexually transmitted diseases in the military, as well as how extreme poverty had led many families to sell their young daughters into sexual slavery. It’s noteworthy that the laws governing these matters were revised in a good direction shortly thereafter.

The Great Detective became embroiled in these unsavory matters by a request for help from William T. Stead, a real-life character who was a well-known periodical publisher and regarded as the first investigative reporter. Not surprising he’d call on Holmes (if only fictionally). With his facility for disguise, Holmes was able to penetrate some exceedingly seedy places! Stead’s death in 1912 was also notable: he perished aboard the RMS Titanic.

Writing my four published Sherlock Holmes pastiches and doing the posts about the SH:1885 collection inspired me to pick up the stories again. I have a two-volume Collected Works, and I’m nearly through Volume I. It’s been years since I read them, and I’m struck by how almost every story contains a sentence we now think of as iconic Holmes. I just finished “Silver Blaze” about the missing race horse and dead horse trainer, and it’s the one that includes the observation about the dog that didn’t bark. Full of satisfying surprises!

The Infiltrator

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When the tropes of crime fiction—the secrets, the deceit, the evasions, the jealousies—become too much, that’s when a no-holds-barred thriller like TR Hendricks’s new The Infiltrator can be a welcome cleanse. It’s a vein-scouring adventure as you follow retired US Marine and wilderness survival expert Derek Harrington in his effort to extirpate a dangerous group of domestic terrorists.

The Infiltrator is the second book in a series that began in 2023 with The Instructor and can be expected to have at least one more sequel, in order to tie up loose ends. I haven’t read the first book, but that was no handicap to enjoying this one. The only missing piece was why the terrorists were doing what they were doing, but if you accept the premise that they are on some kind of wild and crazy mission, the why is pretty much irrelevant.

The methods Derek uses to stay perfectly hidden in the woods while on a weeks’-long surveillance assignment are quite inventive, though in the early pages, you may feel you’re reading a catalog for survivalists’ gear. The communications lingo will be immediately clear to readers with military experience, but, even as a civilian, I still could follow it easily.

Derek is hiding in the hills of rural West Virginia, watching members of a terrorist group called Autumn’s Tithe prepare for a major attack. Although no longer in the military, he has some official standing. He’s been deputized by the FBI, and can call in massive military and law enforcement resources when he needs to (OK, give the author some leeway). He experiences a conflict of conscience right up front, because the terrorists live as a large family. He sees the wives and children who may become casualtiesm, and some of those kids are his son’s age.

You don’t have to wait for the end of Chapter One for the terrorists to make their move. A three-vehicle convoy, including a fertilizer-bomb-laden box truck and a van of heavily armed terrorists, leaves the camp, intent on committing mass murder. Derek calls it in. A Hellfire missile operated by a soldier way across the country in Arizona destroys the convoy, followed by two attack helicopters whose weapons subdue the people left behind in the camp. Next arrive members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team who take prisoners.

In case this sounds like a massive exercise in commando-porn, rest assured that before long, you learn the situation has a number of nuances. Almost inevitably, they’re political. Relatively modest objections to conducting such a violent attack on US citizens in their home country are raised.

Part of what this mission was intended to be—a clean-up operation of Autumn Tithe remnants—included capturing their leader, a former FBI agent. Her role makes this pursuit personal for Derek’s colleagues. But it’s also clear that somewhere in government, a mole is revealing vital information about the FBI’s plans. Bureaucracy and unimaginative, by-the-book leadership rear their ugly heads too. Of course, Derek’s methods don’t appear in any book, so conflict between him and the top dogs is inevitable.

While the ongoing adventure keeps the pages rapidly turning, author Hendricks clearly enjoyed writing the fight scenes and, at times, dragged them out past the point of plausibility. He is a former US Army captain who served as a tank platoon leader and military intelligence officer in Iraq and an advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior’s intelligence arm.

As we say in our house, “If this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like this one.”

Order your copy here, and Amazon will send me a micropayment!

Heads Up! New Books

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Pull out your credit card. The UK’s The Guardian recently published not one, but two, lists of recommended crime thrillers—the best recent ones, and new ones for the month.

Among the “best” is Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast about local traditionalists and unwelcome visitors preparing to celebrate the summer solstice on England’s Dorset Coast. Complete with fire and the dead. More than a little reminiscent of The Serpent Dance, the new book by Sofia Slater about an off-the-rails celebration of the solstice in Cornwall. Fire and the dead. Hmmm. That celestial event was a couple of weeks back, so we’re safe now.

The editors also recommend the small book, French Windows, by Antoine Laurain, translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie—and it’s one I’ve actually read. It’s about the interplay between a psychoanalyst and his patient, a young women photographer who’s stopped taking pictures after seeing a murder. He focuses on what she does see, and her subject is the fascinating people she observes through the windows opposite. Are her stories real? Or revelatory? The Guardian calls it “a sheer delight,” and I agree!

New ones the editors especially liked include the aforementioned Foley, as well as Stephen King’s collection of short stories, You Like It Darker, ranging from the deliciously creepy to mini-novels. Supernatural elements in some, and “all are worth a read.”

They also like Will Dean’s, The Chamber, set in the claustrophobic environment of a deep-sea-diving chamber. When the crew starts to die, you’ll be hard-pressed not to think of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It might be hard to step into the close confines of an elevator again after reading this one.

The Coming Storm

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The Coming Storm is a much-anticipated follow-up to Greg Mosse’s well-regarded 2022 debut thriller, The Coming Darkness. The new book takes up the complex, futuristic plot of the first novel. I hadn’t read the earlier book, and there were some situations I didn’t completely understand, at least at first, but that really didn’t affect my experience of this new book. Mosse so effectively establishes that the deteriorating social and political situation in his dystopian future matters greatly to the characters that a little ambiguity didn’t put me off.

Mosse writes about a future (the year is 2037) we can see, at least dimly, especially on our bad days. Eco-terrorism. Drought and a rapidly warming climate. Strange, difficult-to-treat infections. And hazards of any era: people in power who can’t be trusted and whose self-interest trumps any impulse to do good.

The action takes place mostly in France and North Africa. The main character, Alexandre Lamarque, is widely regarded as “the man who saved the world” from eco-terrorism. This is an embarrassing level of notoriety he’d just as soon do without. And it’s made him a target. But of whom? Or who all?

Three eco-terrorism plots are in play: opposition to the enlargement of a dam, a plot to destroy the Aswan dam which will practically annihilate Egypt, and sabotage in the lithium mining industry.(I was a bit puzzled by the references to lithium mining, as I thought lithium does not occur in concentrations that would allow it to be mined in any conventional way, but perhaps I missed that explanation.)

Cutting back and forth between these several ambitious plots and Lemarque’s efforts to discover and thwart them, the story speeds along. While Lemarque and his colleagues are strong characters, the terrorists themselves remain somewhat shadowy. Lurking way in the background is a man who seems to be the main plotter, living on a Caribbean island near Haiti, who is the least believable of all.

The unfolding of the terrorists’ plans is certainly exciting. Yet I couldn’t help a bit of a bait-and-switch feeling when I realized they wouldn’t be resolved by the end of the book. Of course, they’re all so significant that, realistically, they can’t be dealt with in any quick way, so perhaps, in spreading the action over several volumes, Mosse has made a good choice. One that will require Book Three, at least. People who read and enjoyed the first book will be happy to see this follow-up and will no doubt look forward to the story’s ultimate resolution. The Coming Storm terrorists are not finished, and neither is Lamarque. And certainly not Mosse.