Category Archives: Reading . . .

**** The Golden Hour

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Todd Moss, diplomacy, thriller,The Golden HourBy Todd Moss (sounds like a nom de plume, doesn’t it?). Read by Peter Marek. This was the best, most realistic (to me!) political thriller I’ve read in recent months. For a first-time novel, impressive. I bought it after reading this Washington Post profile of Washington insider Moss. The book tells the story of an Amherst academic, Judd Ryker, who develops a theory that the period for action after a military coup is limited—just a few days—otherwise the usurpers will be too entrenched and it will be impossible to easily get rid of them and reestablish the (presumably) more legitimate government. He calls this period “the golden hour,” taking the name from emergency medicine and the limited period after a massive traumatic injury in which medical treatment is most likely to avoid death. Ryker is recruited by the State Department to test his theory in real life and promptly ignored.

The book is not only about a newbie in the shark tank of seasoned diplomats, a coup in Mali, the kidnapping of a powerful Senator’s daughter, and U.S. security imperatives, but also about finding out whom you can trust. I liked that the main character isn’t an armed-to-the-teeth master of 20 forms of martial arts. He’s just a guy, a very smart guy, using his wits. He doesn’t meet up with a woman character as a flimsy excuse for the author to write a couple of steamy sex scenes. He doesn’t make decisions that had me silently screaming, “Why are you DOING that?” He doesn’t fall predictably off the wagon–a dead giveaway that things are going to go very wrong. Instead, he goes quietly about his business, calls his wife, checks on his kids at the beach, and learns who his friends really are. When he makes one most fateful decision, you understand he makes it based on his principles, not the external exigencies of the author’s plot.

Thriller writer John Sandford called it “A tough, realistic, well-written tale of American diplomats scrambling to reverse an African coup amidst intense turf battles – State, Defense, White House, Congress, and CIA – and ever-shifting facts on the ground. Moss is an insider who knows how these things are really done – and how thin the line is between triumph and disaster.”

The narration may make Judd sound a drop more tentative than necessary, but Marek’s portrayal of the African characters and military were beautiful. Awesome first book by Todd Moss. First of a series.

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* The Highway

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By C.J. Box – I met this popular and award-winning thriller author at a conference two years ago, and he was so highly praised there, I figured I was missing something by CJ Box, The Highwaynot having read any of his books. I still am. Box, a Wyoming native, sets his books in the West, with his series character, Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden. This book (a gift) isn’t part of that series, and it was a real disappointment. The book is told through the eyes of several of the characters, including long-haul trucker Ronald Pergram, who calls himself the Lizard King, for his well developed schemes for trapping, torturing, and murdering “lot lizards,” the prostitutes who prowl the parking areas of the big Interstate truck stops—and any other women he comes across when the need to “go hunting” overtakes him.

Being inside the head of this character and privy to his disturbed (and not very original) thoughts is some especially sordid category of TMI. It’s a relief when Box switches to the point of view of the women in the story. We follow Cassie Dewell, a new Investigator for the Lewis and Clark County (Montana) Sheriff’s Department. Inexperienced and unsure of herself, she ends up alone on the trail of disappeared teen sisters—disappeared, as the reader knows, by Pergram. And parts of the story are told from the perspective of the younger of the sisters, sixteen-year-old Gracie Sullivan. Box handles girl teen-speak rather well, and the girls seem plausible enough, as is Cassie.

The book doesn’t lack for tension. During the early scenes in which Pergram is chasing down the girls’ little red car in his 80,000-pound Peterbilt (teach your daughters to pay attention to the “check engine” light!), I wasn’t sure I could keep reading. A number of Amazon readers’ comments show mine was a common reaction: “I almost took an early exit from ‘The Highway.’” “I hope that ‘The Highway’ was just the result of [Box] taking a wrong turn on a bad day.” “I love the Pickett series, but I just couldn’t stomach this one.” I may have to try again.

The West is a great place to live in, but Ronald Pergram’s head is not.

****Standing in Another Man’s Grave

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Ian Rankin, Standing in Another Man's Grave, mystery novel, John RebusBy Ian Rankin (read By James Macpherson) – Working my way through the mystery and thriller-writers’ “best of” lists for 2013, I found myself once again in the thrall of Edinburgh detective John Rebus. In this book he is retired and languishing as a civilian in the soon-to-be-dismantled Cold Cases unit but emerges into the light of day when the disappearances of two young women suggest a connection with one of his dusty files. Then we’re hurtle pell-mell into fine-honed police procedural territory. Rebus is one of those complex, cynical characters you never tire of, and Rankin’s story is a good one.

I was tempted to pair this review with that of C.J. Box’s The Highway (reviewed 9/29), partly because of superficial plot similarities, but mostly because of the profoundly different reader experiences they evoke. Both are about a serial killer of women, hiding in a small town where he’s known and the frantic effort to find him just in case his most recent victim is still alive. The similarity stops there. Now I know why agents and publishers tell authors not to send them manuscripts written from the evil protagonist’s point of view. The Highway put me off entirely.

Rebus scolds himself (ineffectually) for his bad behavior, and his long-time partner Siobhan Clarke despairs. “He’s not a team player—never was, never will be,” said New York Times reviewer Marilyn Stasio, and naturally that puts him perpetually on very thin ice in the police department and is an endless source of reader enjoyment as he skates circles around the plodding conformists. It will be interesting to see how Rankin triple Axels his way into cases henceforth. Also, Macpherson’s reading is super!

A number of Rebus novels have been turned into UK television programs. The ones featuring Ken Stott as Rebus are considered the best and the only ones I’ve seen. Also entertaining.

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*** The Woman Who Rode the Wind

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The Woman Who Rode the Wind, aviatrix, Ed Leefeldt, flying machinesBy Ed Leefeldt – Never one to turn down a free book, I was handed a paperback copy of this novel at a local author event and put it in the ‘to-read” pile, without any expectations one way or the other. Now that I’ve worked my way down to it, it turns out to be a charming tale of the early days of flying machines. Told by a two-time Pulitzer-nominated journalist, the book demonstrates a reporter’s skill in picking significant details, and what it lacks in character development and literary flourishes is overcome by the sheer joy it conveys, as people capture the miracle of soaring with the birds. Published in 2001, it was recently reissued for the Nook.

The story takes off from the first chapter when a wealthy Parisian announces a one million franc prize for the first person to circle the Eiffel tower in a powered aircraft. The race is on, and the contestants are three: a dashing Frenchman whom the Parisians adore, a murderous German with the backing of the Kaiser, hopeful the win will demonstrate German technical superiority, and a wealthy American who hires a debauched stuntman to pilot his craft. An American woman—the novel’s main character and daughter of an airplane designer—helps engineer the wealthy man’s plane. There’s plenty of action, intrigue, and romance to keep the pages turning.

Set in 1901, the novel was inspired by such early women in flight as Harriet Quimby. Except for one near-sex scene interrupted by a suicide (no doubt tame stuff by today’s standards), this easy-to-digest story might be one young teen audiences also would enjoy.

 

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****The Danube

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Danube, river

(photo: author)

By Nick Thorpe, a BBC East and Central European correspondent who has lived in Budapest for more than 25 years. Subtitle of this book is “a journey upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest”—in Bavaria, home of Danube’s the headwaters, a spring in the town of Donaueschingen. The Danube, queen of rivers, runs through and along the borders of ten countries of Western and Central Europe—Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany—the middle six of which I’ve visited. In one brief stretch, it passes through four nations’ capitals: Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade. And through great swaths of sparsely populated countryside, known mainly to birds and watermen.

Thorpe’s travelogue-cum-history lesson-cum natural history exploration ranges widely and freely over this vast geographic and intellectual territory. In part his story is told through the wars and occupations, the conquests and lost empires that have shaped the region over thousands of years, and in part through his warm-hearted stories of individual men and women who still depend on the river as neighbor and provider today. Ways of life that withstood centuries of disruption have been torn apart by modern improvements—hydroelectric dams, locks, canals, diversions, “straightening.”

Though Thorpe understands the motives behind these changes, his heart is on the side of the scattered environmentalists who are trying to restore the natural flow of the river and, here and there, to nudge it back into its old, meandering course. Efforts to do so have led to a resurgence of wildlife and an elevation of spirit among those who perceive a river as a living thing, moving and changing, mile by mile, as Thorpe’s book so eloquently shows.

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*** Three Ellery Queens

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jaguar

“Spotted Ghost” by Lou Hedge

Finished three issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine recently—August 2014, September/October 2014, and, embarrassingly, August 2012. Some items in my reading pile are truly “aging in place”! For variety of locale and time, the monthly collections in this deliciously pulpy magazine can’t be beat. These three issues contain stories from Colonial America, to 1890s San Francisco, to modern Taiwan, to Belize City, where tourists hunt the elusive jaguar.

One of the scariest involved the escalating war of nerves between an adolescent boy and his new neighbor, written by popular short story writer David Dean, author of the novel The Thirteenth Child. A funny tale about a couple who owns a dry cleaners’ shop also appeared in the 8/14 issue, by British author Belinda Bauer, known for the “blackly funny” style of some of her books.

The most recent issue departs from longstanding EQMM tradition by including some stories with paranormal elements. Despite its title, “Ghost Town,” by Terence Faherty, does not. It refers to the near-abandoned Ocean City, New Jersey, in February, plagued by a series of mysterious break-ins. One of the shorter stories—“The Hard Type” by Carl Robinette—packed the most emotional punch. In it a young boy questions his actions when he sees a couple terrorized by a motorcycle gang.

I also enjoyed “Jaguar,” about a young girl brought to New York as part of a human trafficking ring. Short stories by its author, Joseph Wallace, have appeared in several anthologies, including the Best American Mystery Stories. His most recent novel, Invasive Species, is a science fiction thriller.

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****The Cottoncrest Curse

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Michael H. Rubin, The Cottoncrest CurseBy Michael H. Rubin – Met this author—a Baton Rouge-based lawyer—at a recent mystery writers’ conference and was fascinated by the premise of his brand new book. (And a bit awed that it was published by the prestigious LSU Press, which has created a nice website for it.) The story takes place in three time periods—in 1893, with Reconstruction ended, and the wounds of the Civil War a decade fresher than the end of the Vietnam War is now; in 1961, when Freedom Riders went South to push the Civil Rights movement; and a much briefer framing story set in current time.

Cottoncrest is the eponymous plantation in which the novel’s inciting events take place—the murder-suicide of a respected Civil War Colonel and his beautiful young wife. The book’s hero, Jewish peddler Jake Gold, in the course of his itinerant business interacts with everyone for miles about—the erudite Colonel, as well as black shantytown residents, poor white sharecroppers, and wily Cajun trappers. And with Gold’s egalitarian streak, he gets along with most of them, too—the honest ones.

Rubin portrays these complicated Louisiana social milieux convincingly, though I hardly had time to fully enjoy the richness of the lives he portrays because the plot was speeding me through the burning cane fields and down the treacherous bayous. Breakneck plots have a way of reaching implausible velocity, but not this one. Every danger and twist he describes is absolutely believable. Though the reader ends up unraveling the mystery behind the murders and the recurrence of the curse, the characters from the present-day scenes will never know what we know, for good and certain.

Rubin’s accomplishment is all the more impressive because this is his first novel. An impressive debut!

****All The Light We Cannot See

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Anthony DoerrBy Anthony Doerr. (Read by Zach Appelman.) A sweet and satisfying story of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a French girl blind from childhood, and an orphaned German boy, Werner Pfennig, who is a genius with radios, and how their paths intersect in the desperate, waning days of World War II. Marie-Laure’s father—keeper of the keys at Paris’s Museum of Natural History—builds her a perfect model of their neighborhood, first in Paris, then in the walled city of Saint-Malo, where they flee to live with his uncle when the Nazis invade. By studying these replicas, she learns how to navigate her world.

The Saint-Malo model hides a secret, an invaluable diamond, a diamond with a peculiar light in its center, entrusted to her father for safekeeping, but a Nazi loot-hunter is on the trail. The difficulty of surviving for these two extremely perceptive prodigies, is tensely portrayed, and the light and lack of it in their worlds takes different forms, both literal and symbolic. While the circumstances of war are familiar—especially World War II in Europe—the particular reactions of these main characters are “surprisingly fresh and enveloping,” says Janet Maslin in the New York Times.

I’m not a fan of final chapter postscripts that let you know what happened to characters and their families in later years, feeling that better left to the reader’s devising, based on a book’s-worth of clues and insights. And, while I usually bow down in praise of the skills of audiobook narrators, this one was oddly off-hand, floaty and lacking in necessary heft.

****Mystery Girl

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Los Angeles, Hollywood

(photo source: farm9.staticflickr.com)

By David Gordon – This book
was a gift, so I knew nothing about it when I opened its pages and fell in love with its surprises. Funny, complicated, well-drawn characters—B-movie cinephiles—living on the tattered fringes of Hollywood. “Some things are inexplicable. The human heart is one. Los Angeles is another,” said the New York Post review. The story involves failed experimental novelist, abandoned husband, and tyro-detective Sam Kornberg’s search for Mona Naught, a woman of elusive identity and tenuous reality.

The first-person narrator’s voice, occasionally uncertain, is consistently insightful and entertaining. Here’s a description of a cemetery in Mexico: “a city of tiny palaces that the good citizens had constructed to house their souls, like elaborate birdcages or the dollhouses of spoiled girls, far more splendid than their own mortal homes. After all, we are alive a short while, dead forever.” That last tiny zinger is what makes it.

Or this unpromising exchange with the Korean housekeeper of his prospective employer, when she answered his knock:

“Warren?” she asked. “No, I’m not Warren. I’m Samuel. Sam really. Sam Kornberg.”

            “You show warrant?”

            “Oh, warrant,” I said. “I thought you said Warren. No, no warrant. I still don’t know what you mean.” . . .

“Norman?”

“No, not Norman either. I’m Sam.”

“No.” She spoke slowly, for my benefit, as if explaining a simple fact. “You are Mormon.”

“A Mormon? No, I’m not a Mormon. Sorry. Jewish, I’m afraid.”

Occasionally, the narration is interrupted by other narrators, with their critical observations about Sam and his shortcomings, which put his actions in a new light. Author Gordon, in a recent New York Times blog, describes writing as a “risky, humiliating endeavor.” No surprise, maybe that about his writing, the fictional Sam is skewering: “I myself could no longer stand to read these sorts of novels, the kind I couldn’t seem to stop writing . . . It seemed I had dedicated my life to a question whose point even I had forgotten along the way.” His detecting assignment from Solar Lonsky helped him find it again.

*** The Director

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Robin Hood

“Robin Hood’s Band Made Merry by Killing the King’s Deer” (photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

By David Ignatius (narrated by George Guidall). This thriller is set in the bowels of the nation’s national security apparatus, at the time a new CIA director is appointed who is not a Beltway insider, but plucked from the corporate world. The new director, Graham Weber, is pitted against the puppeteers of competing security agencies and (this is not a spoiler) a computer wizard inside the Agency who has gone rogue, James Morris.

How much readers like the book seems to depend on how excited they were by the electronic shenanigans of Morris, though there didn’t seem to be a lot new there—not for readers of Wired, anyway. Still, while Morris and his network were entertaining, the old-school-tie boys on Weber’s other flank were palpably less convincing. The women in the story fell into their respective stereotypes. A flimsy seduction scene is best ignored.

But the bigger problem—and where this book diverges from the best writing of, say, Neal Stephenson—is that, while it has the geeky stuff down, it has no social science sense. “Rob from the banks of the rich countries and give to the poor ones?” Really? Which poor countries would that be? Zimbabwe? North Korea? Myanmar? Uganda? Many of the world’s poorest countries stay that way because the leadership class steals everything they can get their hands on. Sending them “free” cash makes no sense. I didn’t want to read a lecture on political science and economics, but needed some acknowledgement that such sophisticated technologists thought deeper than a Robin Hood fantasy. Unfortunately, this gap undercuts their whole motivation for the crime.

If you can ignore that problem, and if you, like me, worry about our growing electronic vulnerabilities, you may like this book! And, you’ll notice the similarities in supposed high-mindedness between Morris and real-life cyber-spy Ed Snowden.

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