Category Archives: Reading . . .

***The Forsaken

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Ace Atkins, motorcycle

(photo: Heinrich Klaffs, creative commons license)

By Ace Atkins – This crime thriller series featuring Jericho, Mississippi, sheriff Quinn Colson has been widely praised as offering “a new standard for Southern crime novels.” I haven’t read the others in the series or perhaps enough Southern crime literature to judge, but I’m puzzled by that characterization. Perhaps it’s inevitable, as cultural homogenization and Wal-Mart have taken over this country, but the people didn’t behave, speak, think, or live in a landscape that seemed uniquely Southern to me.

The principal character—Sheriff Quinn Colson—didn’t come off the page. He’s kind of laid back, kind of taciturn, kind of boring. I definitely did enjoy several of the women characters: smart-ass Chief Deputy Sheriff Lillie Virgil (good banter with Colson) and townswoman-with-a-fractured-past Diana Tull. The assorted criminals, low-lifes, and ne’er-do-wells were mostly off-putting and two-dimensional. Also, is it really necessary for there to be a beheading any time Mexicans are involved in a story? It seems like authorial shorthand to show how badass they are. (We’ve reached a sorry state when fictional beheading can become ho-hum, though it is definitely not in The Cartel, reviewed last Friday.)

The set-up of the novel is this: In 1977, 17-year-old Diana Tull and her 14-year-old girlfriend Lori Stillwell were abducted on a lonely country road by a badly scarred black man driving a gleaming Monte Carlo. Diana was raped, shot, and left for dead, and Lori was murdered. Within days a local motorcycle gang, the Born Losers (apt, that) vowed to avenge these crimes on behalf of their member, Lori’s father, and abduct a black loner, beat him, and lynch him.

Sheriff Colson’s absent father—a former Hollywood stunt man—was loosely affiliated with the biker gang and witnessed the execution. Colson’s uncle, the former sheriff, allowed the crime to take place and didn’t investigate, following the precepts of the “let sleeping dogs lie” school of law enforcement, which he continued to follow, even when Diana told him she’d seen the murderer again, several weeks after the crime. The lynched man lived alone in a shack in the woods, owned practically nothing and certainly no fancy car; nor did he have the terrible scars that Diana described. Why the townspeople are surprised to eventually learn the wrong man was lynched is a mystery in itself.

Fast-forward to the current day, and the pot is boiling: the old sheriff is dead and replaced by his nephew Quinn; Diana is a successful store-owner who, initially egged on by Lori’s father—now an impoverished drunk—has decided for reasons not entirely clear to reignite the investigation into the tragedy of the murder and lynching; and Chains LeDoux, the leader of the Born Losers in its heyday is about to be released from state prison.

To his credit, Sheriff Quinn is not ready to consign the resurfaced lynching to the cold case file, and investigating it predictably causes all kinds of secrets to slither out of the woodwork. While the theme of revisiting past crimes and depredations in order to establish responsibility is worthy, in this book, we learn next-to-nothing about the nameless victim of the lynching, enabling scant emotional investment in the crime’s unraveling.

I’m prepared to believe readers of Atkins’s other four novels in this series have become attached to the characters and may like this one better than I did. Atkins has received many award nominations in the genre and was selected by the Robert B. Parker estate to continue writing books for the popular Spenser private investigator series.

****The Cartel

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Mexico, drug cartels

(graphic by Christopher Dombres, creative commons license)

By Don Winslow, read by Ray Porter – Is there anyone who still thinks a little illegal drug use is a victimless crime? Who thinks the American “war on drugs” is actually accomplishing anything other than creating vast, lucrative criminal enterprises? Don Winslow’s much-publicized new thriller about the Mexican drug cartels will cure any such addictions to fantasy.

It’s clear that Winslow wanted to write an important book, possibly even a consequential one, and main character U.S. DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) agent Art Keller occasionally climbs on his soap box to tell us how bad things are. Those speeches are hardly necessary after the author’s detailing of the mayhem resulting from the turf wars between the Mexican drug cartels of 2004 to 2012 and the repeated U.S. missteps in fighting them. American initiatives have been undermanned, outgunned, and overconfident. Time and again, they have underestimated the strength and determination of their foes and the extent of their penetration in the highest levels of the military, the police, and the government.

At the opening of Winslow’s novel, Keller has retired from the DEA and lives incognito as a bee-keeper at a southern California monastery. Still he’s intrigued when his old boss tells him Adan Barrera—Keller’s arch-enemy imprisoned near San Diego—has started to talk. Barrera is the mastermind of the Sinaloa drug cartel, and one of his conditions for providing information is that he be transferred to a prison in Mexico. The Americans agree.

In the Mexican prison, Barrera lives like a king and before long escapes, pulling Keller into a frustrating and labyrinthine pursuit. (If you’ve read about the IRL escape last July of Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin Guzman Lorea from Mexico’s only super-max prison, via a tunnel lit by fluorescent lights, provided with fresh air, and containing metal tracks for a small rail-car pulled by a motorcycle—a down-market version of the supertunnels the cartels use to smuggle drugs into the United States—this fictional escape is perfectly believable.)

When Barrera puts up a $2 million reward for Keller’s murder, the ex-DEA man is forced back into the arms of his former employer, and the hunt for Barrera, begun in his previous book, The Power of the Dog, renews. But there are distractions as the war intensifies among the cartels, each trying to control territory and the transit of drugs—cocaine, methamphetamines, marijuana, heroin. It’s at this point that the “innocence” of smoking a little pot or doing a few lines of coke breaks down. Because the market for drugs currently illegal in the United States and Europe makes the profits so high, people can and do torture, burn, dismember, behead, rape, and murder their competitors and many innocent civilians to maintain those profits. Every day, day after day.

With Winslow’s book, you have 640 pages of torture, burning, dismemberment. You have the cooperating police and complicit Mexican army, the corrupt politicians, the pre-teen killers, the squads of sicarios (assassins), the brazen narcotraficantes, the intimidated officials, the killers who leave a Jack of Spades on each corpse. And, in all this, you must consider U.S. complicity both directly and indirectly—by our behavior and by deploying a drug policy that produces so much collateral damage.

Mexico, drug cartels

“Silence Makes Me Furious” (photo: Knight Foundation, creative commons license)

In addition to Art Keller, portions of the story are told from the point of view of an admittedly not-very-courageous Ciudad Juarez newspaperman, Pablo, working with his feisty colleague Ana. They love and want to save their city, but it slips beyond journalism’s ability to prod action, as fear and graft overwhelm every sector, and reporters are threatened, bribed, and coerced into not reporting. (Winslow lists the names of 53 journalists murdered or “disappeared” during the period covered by his book and says, “There are more.”) And some is told from the point of view of a young boy who drifts into increasingly brutal killings, though no person whose pieces he leaves behind is more dead than he is.

If this sounds depressing and difficult, it is. And as Americans have become bored with the failures and setbacks and hypocrisies of the war on drugs, ever more so. For the people living in Guatemala, Mexico, and Honduras, this war never goes away and they live every day with the deadly consequences of our personal habits and public policies. How can we, in good conscience, look the other way?

Nevertheless, Winslow pulls together his many characters from the competing cartels, the silenced journalists, the ordinary citizens, and the military leaders to create a compelling story. La Familia Michoacana, The Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas, the Sinaloans, the Juarez cartel, the South Pacific cartel. The gangs are all here, as is the Zetas’ IRL expansion into kidnapping and its efforts to horn in on the oil and natural gas supply. Yes, this is fiction, but of a “ripped from the headlines” variety with a powerful cumulative effect.

Mexico, drug cartels

“Your Fight is My Fight” (photo: Eneas De Troya)

Keller is endlessly frustrated at how everything the United States has done to combat drugs in Mexico—including such failed ideas as “Operation Fast and Furious”—has made the situation more unstable, more violent. (You will recall that in that sorry episode, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives allowed straw purchases of guns they knew were headed to Mexico, in the hope that tracking them would lead to the higher echelons of the cartels. Instead the ATF lost track of some 2,000 guns, subsequently found at crime scenes in which hundreds of Mexican civilians have been injured or killed.)

If thriller writers typically try to ramp up the sadistic violence perpetrated by their villains, in order to persuade readers how evil they are, in The Cartel, Winslow didn’t need to go beyond what he could find in the daily newspaper. In a Crime Fiction Lover interview, he cited the “astonishing escalation” of drug-related atrocities between the time he wrote The Power of the Dog and more recent years. It’s of a piece with the chilling non-fiction reportage of the late Charles Bowden, in his amazing Down by the River.

This is a long book and a long audiobook—23 and a half hours–and has a huge cast of characters. Still, the excellent narration captured the American, Mexican, and Guatemalan voices so well that I had no trouble following the story. It’s hard to say that I “enjoyed” this book, because it was heartbreaking on so many levels; however, Winslow has done a great service by exposing the deep and bloody wound below the U.S. border in a way that is compelling and unforgettable, and I’m glad I read it.

***A Pattern of Lies

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Canterbury, church wall

Canterbury (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

By Charles Todd – In Book 7 in the Bess Crawford mystery series, Bess works as a World War I field hospital nurse in France (1918), where the terrible surroundings are well imagined and effectively described. On leave and waiting for a train in Canterbury, Bess encounters a past patient, Major Mark Ashton, who invites her to stay the night with his family, as a train to London is not likely before morning. Mark’s mother had come to France to help care for him, and Bess is happy to renew her acquaintance.

Mark tells her about the loss of the family business—a gunpowder mill—which blew up two years previously. A fire ensued, and more than a hundred workers lost their lives. At first, sabotage was suspected, but eventually the explosion—which created a shortfall in vital British armament production—was ruled an accident. Rather than rebuild on the site, the government relocated production to Scotland. The village economy was devastated by the loss of both men and their jobs. Resentments run high.

Recently, a spate of vicious rumors has circulated, accusing Mark’s father of causing the catastrophe. Allegedly, he was at odds with the government over the running of the mill and its possible disposition after the war. The father dismisses these rumors as something no thinking person would take seriously. Unfortunately, evidence of the increasingly uneasy relationship between residents of the Ashton manor and the fictional village of Cranbourne is not hard to come by, with minor, but escalating acts of vandalism and anonymous threatening letters.

Where these problems started—and, more ominously, where they will end up—is increasingly uncertain. Mark hopes that Bess’s arrival will help his parents take their minds off their current troubles, which local police seem loathe to investigate. But during her visit, the unthinkable happens: Mark’s father, Philip Ashton, is arrested on a charge of murder. In the ensuing weeks, the only people he’s allowed to see are his legal representatives. However, with their client facing possible conviction and death, they seem oddly unmotivated.

Bess spends much of her time on duty in France, but several short trips to England, accompanying patients who need more care than can be offered in the field, allow her to stay in touch with the Ashton family. She uses her contacts in the battlefield grapevine to find out about a witness to the tragedy, relying on an Australian sergeant—who has a quite obvious crush on our Bess—as her eyes and ears. She also has resources closer to home: her father, the “Colonel Sahib,” who had retired from the military but was called back for “special duty,” and his former Regimental Sergeant-Major. Both of them are apparently connected with military intelligence, and willing to look into matters for Bess and provide what information they can. Bess becomes more than an interested bystander when her investigations incite an attempt on her own life.

The thoroughness with which an amateur sleuth and an outsider can inject herself into the events of a plot is always a bit tricky to handle plausibly. Todd stretches logic thin in a few instances, but Bess’s interventions mostly work well. While the book has many strengths, in the end, the motivation behind all the trouble seemed to me rather weak.

A Pattern of Lies will especially appeal to fans of the recent television mini-series about British nurses in France in World War I, The Crimson Field. Charles Todd is a mother and son writing team based in Delaware and North Carolina. One wonders how such a team works, though, in their case, with numerous books behind them, the results are seamless and speak for themselves.

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****The Long Fire

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fire, night

(photo: Montecruz foto, creative commons license)

By Meghan Tifft – This sparkling debut mystery is narrated by the book’s protagonist, Natalie Krupin, a 27-year-old woman adrift in a hazy, smoke-obscured world. Her mysteries revolve around her gypsy mother, dead in a fire that destroyed her parents’ home, her unkempt father, one cheap apartment away from homelessness, and her older brother, a social outcast among his peers, a drug addict and runaway, lost and presumed dead. To a person, members of this family do not live by the ordinary conventions, and, over the generations, suspicious fires have stalked them (“wherever gypsies go, fire follows,” Natalie’s mother says). They pursue Natalie throughout.

Natalie herself is aggressively unconventional. She wears thrift-shop clothing assembled into bizarre costumes; she has furnished her apartment with child-sized furniture. Most unusually, she suffers from pica, though “suffer” is not an accurate verb, since she often revels in it, literally devouring her world. She’s as likely to eat a book as to read it. This odd character plunges into the deep family mystery when her father receives a phone message from someone whose voice sounds like her dead mother’s rasp, followed by the discovery of cryptic notes hidden in a flame-scarred cigarette case and written on the paper of a hand-rolled cigarette. Propelled by the phone message, Natalie resolves to unravel her family’s past.

This set-up for the plot cannot capture the terrific voice Tifft has created for Natalie—quirky, funny, observant, and understandably confused. For example, I particularly enjoyed a scene in which Natalie interprets her life through the koan-like platitudes found in a bag of fortune cookies: “The truth hides in small places. You must search to find it.” Truly.

Tifft never fails to surprise as Natalie sets out to discover what really happened to her mother, and whether she can find the answers in the closed-mouthed gypsy community. The more she investigates, the more secrets she encounters, involving not just her mother, but her missing brother too. Their present absences have roots in the past, and the narrative delves into the childhood of the siblings, as idiosyncratic and fraught as you’d expect, given the adult products. They were both, as Natalie says about her brother “fashioned too near the fire.”

Readers will find Natalie an engaging, unforgettable character, courageous in confronting the uncertainties of her life, wry and compassionate. Like so many novels in which characters embark on a quest, they are really searching for and most likely to find themselves. This is a literary mystery, not bound by the typical mystery/thriller conventions and, paradoxically, therefore, more revealing.

Read my interview with author Meghan Tifft for Crime Fiction Lover. A somewhat longer version of this review is on that website.

*****The Children Act

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justice

(photo: Mike Gifford, creative commons license)

By Ian McEwan -There may be a reason justice is blind, and, in this novel, a woman. Fiona Maye is a British High Court family division judge who must decide, Solomon-like, some of the more wrenching issues of our time. How to proceed when an Englishwoman fears her five-year-old daughter will be spirited away to Morocco by her strict Muslim father, then is? What to do when a pair of conjoined twins must be separated or both will die, but if they are separated, one will surely die? The hospital urgently wants to separate them, but the devoutly Catholic parents refuse to sanction murder. Everyone in reach of the news media has an opinion about these cases, but only Fiona’s counts. She must be blind to distractions, keeping uppermost The Children Act of 1989, “which declares in its opening lines for the primacy of the child’s welfare.”

The Lord Chief Justice describes her as a woman with “Godly distance, devilish understanding, and still beautiful.” But that’s insufficient on the home front. Fiona’s husband has announced his desire to have an affair with a much-younger woman and doesn’t see why that should disrupt their marriage. Fiona’s legendary dispassionate judgment counts for nothing in this situation and is replaced by pure emotion. She throws him out and changes the locks—even though she knows the law wouldn’t back her up in this.

Into her roiling personal situation comes a new case, a 17-year-old son of Jehovah’s Witnesses has contracted a severe leukemia that will kill him unless he has a blood transfusion, which his religion disallows. His parents refuse. He refuses, too, though he’s not quite yet at the age of majority, so within Fiona’s purview. The hospital says it can save him. To establish whether the teenager’s views are what has been purported or whether he has been unduly influenced by his parents and church elders, she visits him in his sick-bed, and from there the pavers from Good Intentions Roadworks take over.

The Children Act is relatively short for a novel today, about two-thirds the typical length—“a svelte novel as crisp and spotless as a priest’s collar” says Washington Post reviewer Ron Charles. He also seems to believe it’s about Jehovah’s Witnesses, but it’s larger than that. Its subject is intractable dilemmas, hierarchies of belief, and unintended consequences. It is the unnavigable intersection between law and blind faith. So there we have it: faith and justice, each blind to the other, fighting primacy, blood everywhere on the ground.

McEwan is a beautiful writer, with a compelling yet accessible style, even for the weighty issues explored here. This is a portion of his simple, vivid description of Adam Henry, the boy needing the transfusion: “It was a long thin face, ghoulishly pale, but beautiful, with crescents of bruised purple fading delicately to white under the eyes, and full lips that appeared purplish too in the intense light. The eyes themselves looked violet and were huge.”

McEwan gives us realistic characters grappling with significant problems that require them to probe every inch of their humanity and interrogate every motivation. Something to both think about and feel. And when I reached the end, I had to wonder whether he meant the last word of the book’s title as a noun, or in Adam Henry’s case, is it a verb?

****The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

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graduate

Rob Peace, Yale Graduation

By Jeff Hobbs, read by George Newbern
– This biography, which signals its key irony by the subtitle A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League, is an honest and heartfelt tribute to a dear friend. Rob’s many gifts—a brilliant mind, athletic talent, easy social skills, and powerful loyalty to his parents, family, and friends—cry out for a different life path, while the forecast conclusion hangs over the book like a shroud. Nearing the end, the reader wants to go more and more slowly to delay it. Forecast, but foreordained? Hobbs wrestles with this question throughout.

Rob graduated from Yale with a degree in the intellectually rigorous fields of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and Jeff Hobbs was his roommate there for four years. But in addition to studying and working in a cancer research lab, Rob dealt marijuana. He did it mainly, it seems, to relieve his single mother—a nursing home food service employee—of some of her financial burdens. After graduation, he taught for a while, then lapsed into work as a baggage handler at Newark Airport because that job allowed him to fly free all over the world. He fell in love with Rio, visited Seoul, and kept up with a water polo teammate in Croatia. Now in his mid-20s, he continued to deal marijuana, even though the gang-infused streets of East Orange and Newark had become many times more dangerous than in the past.

Although Hobbs recorded the thoughts of so many friends and acquaintances Peace had during his post-college years, he cannot definitively answer the urgent question that so many of them asked Rob repeatedly and urgently, “What are you doing?” A question that is as much unanswered as, perhaps, unanswerable. They saw the growing danger and weren’t satisfied with his typical answer: “It’s all good.”

But it was not. When Rob was a boy his father went to prison for a pair of murders he most likely didn’t commit, and Rob took on the job of looking after his hard-working mother. She sacrificed mightily to keep him into private school, to see her dreams flower with his Yale education then burst when he just somehow couldn’t grab onto a life that would keep him moving forward.

Rob was the son of two entirely separate worlds—a New Jersey ghetto and a privileged Ivy League university. “That one man can contain such contradictions makes for an astonishing, tragic story,” said New York Times reviewer Anand Giridharadas, “but it becomes something more: an interrogation of our national creed of self-invention.” Try as we might, “there are origins in this country of ours that cannot be escaped,” he says, believing the most significant of which may be lack of an intact family.

Hobbs’s prose is unadorned. He’s writing about a friend, after all, and actor Newbern’s narration fits the text well. The clichés Giridharadas objected to in his review are probably not as glaring in the audio version as they would be on the page and, while the writing isn’t lyrical, it gets the job done, building an indelible portrait of so much good forever lost.

*****Ghost Fleet

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navy ships, ghost fleet

America’s “ghost fleet” (photo: Ingrid Taylar, creative commons license)

By P. W. Singer and August Cole – This gripping thriller about what the next world war might look like has captured the attention of Washington policymakers and defense industry insiders alike. Singer is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank, and Cole is a former defense industry reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Unlike so many other speculative fiction outings, this one is based on technologies already plausibly “in the works,” and the authors provide 374 endnotes to backstop the action and interfere with readers’ ability to sleep peacefully at night. Ghost Fleet is a novel of the post-Snowden world, in which the techniques the U.S. National Security Agency used on others are turned back against the Americans.

The story begins at the International Space Station. Russia and China have declared war against the United States, and a U.S. Air Force Colonel, on a disastrously timed space-walk, becomes the unwitting point of the spear. Oblivious to the political developments taking place on the blue globe spinning below, he finds the ISS reentry hatches sealed against him. “Goodbye, my friend. I am truly sorry. It is orders,” says his Russian cosmonaut colleague.

It’s the initial action in a war fought not solely, but significantly, in cyberspace. Takeover of the ISS enables the analogous Chinese space station, Tiangong-3, to systematically knock out every communications satellite that U.S. armed forces depend on. It soon becomes apparent that not only the satellites are down, all local-area communications networks are compromised, because military suppliers have been using low-cost Chinese-made computer chips in their planes, ships, and communications equipment by the unidentifiable thousands, and these chips are insecure, tiny moles. Only the mothballed planes and ships destined for the scrapyard–the Ghost Fleet–are now safe: “The 707 passenger-jet derivatives did not have a modern chip anywhere, unlike the new KC-46s, which had turned out to be missile magnets like all the other Chinese-chipped gear.” This new top-to-bottom vulnerability of the military, which has become overly confident in the security of its communications systems, shows in brilliant and devastating relief.

This is a multiple point-of-view novel, with short scenes from many locations involving numerous protagonists, though most of the action takes place in the Pacific, San Francisco, and Hawaii, where “The Directorate”—comprising Chinese military, along with Russian elements under their command—has established an important outpost. At the story’s heart are the trials of the USS Zumwalt, an oddly designed, mothballed ship recalled into action after much of the modern U.S. fleet is destroyed—again at Pearl Harbor. The Zumwalt’s newly appointed captain, Jamie Simmons, is challenged militarily and by relations with his estranged father, retired chief petty officer Mike Simmons. Like the vintage tin cans—seagoing and aerial—rescued for the U.S. counterattack, retired military personnel are called back into service, and by some inevitable cosmic sense of humor or irony, Mike is assigned to the Zumwalt.

Other principal characters include: a Hawaiian woman working as a freelance assassin who is tracked by the omnipresent surveillance drones and a live Russian operative; a small team of surviving Marine insurgents harassing the Chinese forces on Oahu; a Russian who attempts to aid the Americans and ends up in a neuroscience laboratory nightmare; Sun-Tzu-spouting Admiral Wang, captain of the Chinese battleship Admiral Zheng He; and a wealthy Brit-turned-space-privateer. Other non-state players also emerge, providing a level of DIY unpredictability.

The epigrams for the several parts of the book come from Sun-Tzu’s advice to warriors, and the one for Part 3 is “All warfare is based on deception.” The levels of deception between the Chinese and Russian “allies,” between the antagonists, and arising from the inability to rely on secure communications is paranoia-inducing. Meanwhile, the roles of drones and robots escalate, which is great when they’re yours.

If you are a fan of techno-thrillers, like I am, this novel is the ultimate: fast-paced, high stakes, well-grounded, and, one may hope, consequential. International readers may be disappointed that the book is so US-centric—a casualty of “write what you know” or a realization that there’s already so much going on, we have to stop somewhere?! The book doesn’t come to a too-tidy conclusion, either, and that is also sadly realistic. The authors use it to explore in a vivid way what might happen and what we should be thinking about before it comes to pass.

*****Seveneves

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Perseids, meteor shower, night

(photo: David Kingham, creative commons license)

By Neal Stephenson – All my book-reviewing predelictions are about to be revealed, when I say this is exactly a kind of book I like best! Even readers who ordinarily don’t gravitate to their book store’s science fiction section because of a severe allergy to tired genre tropes—aliens, ray-guns, and domineering robots—cardboard characters, and future visions that strain believability might like this one. It’s science, all right, but it’s all about human beings and their behavior when really put to the test. Why that is, in Stephenson’s own words.

The novel’s premise is that something (we never know what, and it doesn’t matter) penetrates the moon “like a bullet through an apple” and causes it to explode mostly into seven large and innumerable smaller pieces. Watching the fragments of the moon clank about in space becomes an interesting phenomenon until astronomer and science popularizer Dubois Harris—clearly modeled on Neil deGrasse Tyson—stops wondering about the cause of the breakup and starts worrying about its effects. Scientists around the globe quickly agree with his conclusions: the moon’s fragments—bolides—will keep banging into each other making smaller and smaller pieces whose numbers will rise exponentially.

Eventually (in about two years), enough shattered fragments will begin entering the Earth’s atmosphere to create a cloud of debris that will spread out and, as Harris explains to U.S. President Julia Flaherty, “we are going to witness an event that I am calling the White Sky.” A day or two later would begin the next phase, “the Hard Rain,” as a rapidly increasing number of fragments enter the Earth’s atmosphere and their fiery trails “merge into a dome of fire that will set aflame anything that can see it. The entire surface of the Earth is going to be sterilized. Glaciers will boil.” How long will the Hard Rain last? Harris estimates “Somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand years.”

The only hope for human survival is to gear up the International Space Station (“Izzy”) to receive many more residents and, somehow, survive long-term, growing plants for food and oxygen, and mining asteroids and even the remaining chunks of the moon for materials. But there’s no way Izzy can take on several billion or even several hundred thousand souls, and a difficult selection process will be required. International politics must be set aside and every creative mind and resource focused on the survival of a few. With Doomsday approaching, technological development must move light-years faster than previously believed possible—or safe. Yet the meat of the book is the mechanics of the human psyche when subjected to such an extreme scenario. Inevitably, some readers will find the balance between mind and emotion not to their taste, and this may not be their kind of book.

There’s a lot of science and engineering here, but it’s wrapped in such an exciting adventure tale, and presented so clearly and plausibly, that I never lost interest for a moment. The 860 [!] pages fly by, faster than you can say Bolide Fragmentation Rate. In fact, there was so much there that a few loose ends escaped me—like, what happened to the mission to Mars? I don’t believe it had more than a passing reference. What happened to the rings Earth was supposed to acquire after the Hard Rain? These are hardly worth a quibble, though, amid all this amazing content.

As Jason Sheehan said in his review of Seveneves for NPR, “The experience of reading a modern Stephenson novel is like going out drinking with 20 or 30 of the smartest people on earth.”

***The Turk Who Loved Apples

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apples

(photo: shellac)

By Matt Gross – Glowing reviews of this 2013 book by the former “Frugal Traveler” and “Getting Lost” columnist for the New York Times, made me want to read it. As a young man, Gross picked up and moved to Ho Chi Minh City and from there explored more of Southeast Asia, worked for a local Vietnamese newspaper, and eventually got himself various travel writing gigs. In 2006, the Times gave him a budget for a three-month, around-the-world trip, which was to establish his “frugal traveler” identity. This, he says, was the job “everybody called ‘the best job in the world’—and an opportunity ripe for fucking up.” Which he did, at first.

The book is a mix of his travel experiences, which I enjoyed tremendously, and ruminations on the larger meaning of travel, which weren’t as interesting. The requirements for travel have changed for him over the years—from carrying a single bag to traveling with a wife and infant, from the ability to set his own schedule to being part of a family with all its competing needs. Truthfully, staying home has come to have its own satisfactions.

Across his whole travel-writing career, Gross visited “fifty or sixty countries,” ate their food (whole chapter on the resultant digestive laments), learned to cook much of it, and wrote hundreds of articles for the Times and others. He sums up everything he learned about traveling frugally in two pages in the middle of the book, which can be boiled down further to: use the Web to find deals and recommendations on airfare, lodging, and food. Airfare: use local and in-country airlines. Lodging: stay with others where you can, Airbnb, works when you can’t. Food: be adventurous. Social life: find local connections through Facebook friends-of-friends-of-friends.

The book’s full title is The Turk who Loved Apples and Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World, which refers to his early days, as he was learning how to travel, yes, relatively frugally. Through an organization called World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms—a network of farmers who will provide volunteers free food and lodging in exchange for some farmwork—he stayed a few days on a rural apple farm in Turkey. Gross bonded with this farmer, an engineer who’d left his profession to do what he loved, and learned from that encounter that frugality “was not an end unto itself but one of the many traveler’s tools, a means of getting closer to exotic lands and foreign peoples.” And getting closer to people—from fellow expats in Ho Chi Minh City to refugees in Calais to members of his wife’s and even his own family—is what Gross is all about.

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****Blue Labyrinth

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apothecary bottles, poison

(photo: Michael Flick, Creative Commons license)

By Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, narrated by René Auberjonois – This fast-paced thriller—book 14 in the wild escapades of FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast—follows the agent on the trail of the killer of his son, and, when he is knocked out of commission by an arcane poison, the action shifts to two women desperately seeking the ingredients for a possible antidote.

Pendergast is an eccentric, so wealthy he accepts an annual $1 salary from the FBI only for form’s sake. He has residences on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive, an apartment in The Dakota, and a large Louisiana plantation called Penumbra. His wit and New Orleans courtliness pervades his interactions with everyone, even when he’s aiming his Les Baer .45 at them. His avocations have made him a connoisseur of food, wine, and art, an adept at of various combat disciplines, and the practitioner of a rare form of Eastern mysticism, Chongg Ran, that provides deep insight and, in this novel, allows him to see into the past.

The story opens with an unexpected knock on the door of Pendergast’s Riverside Drive mansion, answered by his ward Constance. A man—a dead man—falls to the ground. Pendergast’s son Alban. Whoever killed Alban is sending a powerful message and appears to have left not a single clue. Is it the perfect crime? Or clever bait to lure the agent into a trap?

Meanwhile, NYPD Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta is investigating a different murder, that of a low-ranking employee at Preston and Childs’s favorite crime scene, the American Museum of Natural History. D’Agosta learns the man had been working with a visiting professor who was interested in only one particular human skeleton. D’Agosta enlists the aid of scientist Margo Green to help him figure out what was so special about this particular set of bones.

There’s skeletons in Pendergast’s family closet, too. For some time, Constance has trolled the underground archives of the Riverside Drive house, becoming well acquainted with Pendergast’s shady ancestors and the basement laboratory filled with arcane materials and dangerous chemicals. When Pendergast falls ill, she and Margo team up to concoct an antidote, but if they are to obtain all the ingredients they need, they must go outside the law to do so. And time is running out.

Preston and Child never let up the tension throughout their complex, information-packed narrative, and they have created unique and well-rounded characters. Pendergast and the novel’s action may occasionally become too “shamelessly, gloriously over the top” (Washington Post review) for some readers, including me, but he and it are always interesting.

This was the first book in the series I’ve read, and I had no difficulty following the story or the subtext of the interactions, even though much had taken place prior to the current story.

Noted American actor René Auberjonois has narrated 13 other volumes by Preston and Child, and conveys Pendergast’s Southern gentleman charm quite convincingly.

A slightly longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website.