Category Archives: thriller

Appointment in Tehran

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By James Stejskal – If like me you remember the 1979 episode when radical Iranian students seized the US embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 Americans hostage, you’ll read James Stejskal’s riveting new thriller with an increasing sense of foreboding. That’s especially if you also recall that the US military launched a rescue mission that came to a disastrous end in the desert south of Tehran. Ultimately, the American hostages—many of them diplomats—were held for 444 days, until the inauguration of a new American president, Ronald Reagan. (The rescue of several Americans who escaped the embassy invasion and hid in the Canadian embassy was the subject of the highly entertaining 2012 film, Argo.)

Given that Stejskal’s characters are smart and skilled Special Forces men, members of Delta Force, I was interested in how he’d handle the botched rescue. No revisionist history here. His description is an accurate picture of how it happened, and, perhaps more important, why it happened: an overly complex strategy, contingency planning failures, and sheer bad luck.

As real events simmer in the story’s background, Stejskal’s characters, led by Master Sergeant Kim Beck and Staff Sergeant Paul Stavros, have a lot of work to do. First, they undergo specific and intensive training in skills likely necessary for the rescue attempt: close quarter battle marksmanship, casing a target location, working as a team following a target through the city without being detected. Fascinating. Naturally, these skills come into play before the story ends.

Even though the Delta team members are not part of the main rescue force headed for disaster in the desert, they have several critical jobs. They must make on-site assessments of the situation where Americans are being held (the embassy and the Iranian Foreign Minister’s office). They must double-check the adequacy and security of sites and logistics for extracting the hostages. It’s dangerous undercover work. Iran isn’t just hostile, it would welcome the chance to make political hay out of the capture of American spies.

And that’s not all. An army intelligence operation has smuggled a tactical nuclear weapon into Iran to be used against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the Americans want their bomb back at all costs. A traitor within US European forces has told the Soviets about the weapon, and they want it too. While this part of the story is purely fictional, the accuracy with which Stejskal portrays real events adds to the credibility of the entire plot.

This then is the Delta Force mission: backstop the rescue efforts, extracting the diplomats held at the foreign minister’s office, find that nuclear device, and move it out of the country. Any or all of this could go badly in so many ways.

Like his previous thriller involving many of the same characters, A Question of Time, this story is a pure adventure. It’s as much a political thriller as a military one, and you become a frustrated observer of the way bureaucracies tie themselves up in knots. Stejskal is a former CIA officer and US Army Special Forces member who had assignments worldwide, which has helped him create a plausible and exciting story.

Order here from Amazon.

Wayward Girls

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A novel that sets out to make a political point runs the risk of straying into the polemical—less novel, more essay. That’s a fate that co-authors Claire Matturro and Penny Koepsel avoid in their engrossing new crime thriller, Wayward Girls. A dedication reveals the novel was “inspired by the well-documented horrors” at a wilderness school in Texas, Artesia Hall, where a female student died in 1972, and by Florida’s infamous Dozier School for Boys, which finally closed in 2011. The result is a highly readable book with a strong sense of purpose.

The story begins in the present day, when the adult Jude receives a call from an old friend, known as Farmer Max, who tells her that her old boarding school, Talbot Hall for Girls, is about to be demolished. Jude had a best friend and fellow-sufferer there—Camille—whom she’s estranged from. Farmer Max calls Camille too.

Jude is now an artist, making a reasonable living with sales of her paintings; Camille is a psychotherapist and college professor. Both women decide to make the trip to central Florida to witness the destruction. Camille digs out her journals, and the impressions of her fifteen-year-old self lead you into the girls’ difficult past.

The school is a giant, gothic-looking building with fake turrets and a tower in the middle of nowhere. What terrible acts brought Jude and Camille to Talbot? Camille skipped school to spend time with her boyfriend (she’s still a virgin). Her psychotherapist, Dr. Hedstrom recommended Talbot, and her parents were happy to have her out of the house. Jude’s therapist reported she had the “potential for violence” after Jude, provoked, shoved her. A “more structured environment” was recommended for them both.

Not that the Talbot students are angels. Warnings pass among them not to trust their housemother, Mrs. Dalfour, or Jack, the young handyman who spies on them. At least Camille is away from creepy Dr. Hedstrom. But he takes a part-time position at the school and keeps trying to insinuate himself into Camille’s life. Another new girl enters the mix: Wanda Ann Mosby, the wildest of them—loud and brash and undereducated.

When some of Camille’s possessions go missing, she makes a big deal of it, but then they reappear. She doesn’t know what to think, but the other girls do. They think she’s crazy, and you can’t believe anything she says. A perfect gaslight.

The reconstruction of Camille and Jude’s teen years occupies most of the story, but there are flash forwards to today as they meet at Farmer Max’s bar and juke joint. Authors Matturro and Koepsel provide hints about the final tragedy all those years before—a fire, an allegation of murder—and it’s uncertain whether Camille and Jude can get past all that to reconnect.

Matturro and Koepsel have plotted the tale well, with high stakes and believable motives. The central Florida location—hot, humid, buggy—seems the very definition of a neglected, out-of-sight place where bad things can happen unimpeded. The authors falter a bit in characterization, without the depth you might want, and Dr. Hedstrom, especially, is too transparently awful. Nevertheless, I grew to care about Jude and Camille, about Wanda and Farmer Max and how they might escape Talbot’s influence.

Husbands’ ability to commit their unruly wives to a mental hospital in the 1800s is fairly well known. The cases that inspired Matturro and Koepsel show the continued vulnerability of young people, especially girls and women, to exploitation. And if you think society has finally extinguished the desire to control women through drastic means, you haven’t been following the sad saga of Britney Spears.

Order here from Amazon.
Or here from IndieBound and your local indie bookstore.

Weekend Movie Pick: The Courier

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The Cold War spy film The Courier, which came out last year (I missed it totally), is available on Netflix. A “based on true events” tale that took place around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it describes how a British businessman was persuaded by MI6 and the CIA to make contact with a Soviet scientist who appeared eager to share information about his country’s nuclear program with the West. As we now know, that cascade of events in 1962 came much closer to disaster than our leaders and the American public believed.

The film, directed by Dominic Cooke and written by Tom O’Connor (trailer), stars Benedict Cumberbatch as real-life businessman Grenville Wynne. The Soviet contact, Oleg Penkovsky, is played by a sad-eyed Merab Ninidze. The cast is great and the story gripping, even though it follows a well-trodden path. The stakes couldn’t have been higher. For both Wynne and Penkovsky, it was either take the risk or total annihilation.

The film was originally titled Ironbark, the Brits’ code name for Penkovsky, but the star turn belongs to Cumberbatch, the courier. The touches of Soviet perfidy seem right out of John le Carré. When the MI6 crowd starts talking about exfiltrating Penkovsky, it seemed like an impossible long-shot. (I wish they’d make a film about Oleg Gordievsky, another real-life Soviet spy, whose story was told in Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor, which gives a hair-raising account of how difficult saving Soviet spies really was.

The Courier is a cautionary tale and a solid bit of filmmaking about a period people under 60 weren’t alive to experience.Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 87%; audiences 95%

Disappointed Expectations

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You may have noticed that the book reviews on this website tend toward the positive. I decided a few months ago to post reviews here of only those books I could recommend. I’m choosy about what I read in the first place, but if a book doesn’t meet expectations, OK. What’s the point of giving a tepid review to a book that probably won’t ever come to the notice of most readers? Let those authors have their shot. Tastes differ.

Two books I’ve read lately are exceptions. Both are receiving a healthy dose of publicity—one because the author is popular and the other, a debut, because the publisher has put big bucks behind it. So these books may actually may attract your attention. Here’s what troubled me about them.

The Hollows

Mark Edwards is a popular British thriller writer. He set this story at a family camp in Maine—remote, wooded. A grisly double murder occurred there twenty years earlier, and the local teenager thought to have committed the crime disappears and isn’t seen again. When British journalist Tom and his teenage daughter arrive for a getaway, they learn right away about the killings and that many of the camp’s visitors are murder-porn tourists. Creepy events ensue. Is the place haunted, has the killer been living in the woods all this time, why are people warning them to leave? Of course, they don’t take any of this good advice (or there wouldn’t be a story), but Tom’s second-guessing and the predictable plot become tiresome.

Falling

TJ Newman’s debut thriller is an exciting read, so much so (especially for us formerly-frequent flyers) that it may distract you from the plot’s implausibility. But after you close the book, the head-scratching will begin. Newman is a former flight attendant and captures the technical aspects of commercial flight very persuasively and her flight attendant characters are nicely three-dimensional. In a nutshell, a transcontinental passenger airline is hijacked and the pilot is told he must crash the plane when it reaches New York. If he refuses, his kidnapped wife and children will be killed. But aside from the behavioral clichés in the story, the bad guys’ plot is way way more complicated than it needed to be. Ultimately, it makes no sense. (I won’t say why in case you decide to give it a go.) There’s a lot of feel-good stuff near the end that doesn’t hold up either. This book has already been optioned for film and has Hollywood fakery written all over it.

Revisited: The Water Knife

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By Paolo Bacigalupi, narrated by Almarie Guerra – Recent news about the drought in the American Southwest reminds me to revisit this excellent 2015 thriller that pits governments against each other and new technology (interesting in itself) benefits some people more than others (go figure). Set in the not-too-distant future, Bacigalupi’s story uses real-life issues as a springboard, adds in toxic intergovernmental rivalries and a healthy dose of greed. It’s an exciting and thought-provoking tale.

In Bacigalupi’s Southwest, Nevada (specifically Las Vegas), Arizona, and California are battling over a dwindling water supply caused by climate change, population pressure, and brazen political brokering. The situation has escalated, with states declaring their sovereignty, closing their borders, and enforcing interstate transit rules with armed militias that shoot to kill. Zoners (Arizonans) have few ways to make a living, and those with weapons prey on the desperate poor. To have water is to be rich or, as the saying goes, “water flows toward money.” The wealthy have bought their way into “arcologies”—high-rise buildings with complex plant and aquatic ecosystems for recycling and recirculating virtually every drop.

In Las Vegas, the Cypress arcologies were built by Catherine Case, nicknamed the Queen of the Colorado River, and head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Las Vegas is to some extent thriving, because of her cunning and cutthroat tactics. But Phoenix is dying.

Angel Velasquez, one of the book’s three protagonists, is an ex-prison inmate—smart, ruthless, a “water knife” who works for Case, cutting other people’s water supplies. Lucy Monroe is a Phoenix-based Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and social media star (#PhoenixDowntheTubes) who just might have a lead on some serious water rights, and Maria Villarosa is a highly disposable Texas refugee barely surviving in Phoenix and at the constant mercy of a brutal gang headed by “the Vet,” who throws enemies to his pack of hyenas.

Angel must visit Phoenix to investigate the mutilation death of one of Catherine Case’s undercover operatives, and the plot really starts to flow. He finds Phoenix swimming with Calis—Californians also working undercover to assure that state’s gluttonous water requirements are met, regardless what happens to everyone upriver. Before long, all the players are after the same thing—original water rights documents that would supersede everything on the books—and no one is sure who has them.

While the story is a critique of a policy environment in which local interests are allowed to supersede regional and federal goals, it never reads like a political tract. And, while quite a bit is imparted about the issue of water rights and reclamation strategies, it isn’t a legal or scientific tome, either. It’s a thriller about a compelling trio of people with different motivations, different places in the water aristocracy, and different strategies for coping. The drought, dust, and poverty that envelop Angel, Lucy, and Maria and their cities affect everyone who lives there. “Somehow they hadn’t been able to see something that was plain as day, coming straight at them.”

A lot of powerful straight journalism has been written recently about water rights, droughts, agricultural demand, and intergovernmental bickering about rights. This important novel makes the stakes eminently—and memorably—clear.

Almarie Guerra does a solid narration, putting just the right Latino topspin on the Mexican voices.

Order here from Amazon, or from your local indie bookstore.

As of July 2021, Lake Mead, the nation’s largest water reservoir by volume, is at 37% of capacity.

The Beresford

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In Will Carver’s new literary thriller, The Beresford is a grand old pile at the edge of an unnamed city. The bottom two floors contain the quarters of Mrs. May, the landlady, the ‘library,’ and four furnished flats—spacious, airy, and cheap—and she has no difficulty keeping them filled. From the time a tenant departs, no more than a minute passes before a replacement rings the front bell.

When the story opens, Mrs. May has two tenants in residence, a third arriving momentarily. One is the insufferably pretentious conceptual artist Sythe, né Aidan Gallagher, desperate to escape his Irish farm-boy roots and even more desperate to become a famous painter. He makes heavy use of Mrs. May’s immaculate back garden and its burning bin, where he destroys piles of disappointing artworks.

A longer-term tenant is Abe Schwartz, whom the narrator introduces by saying, “Your daughter brings home Abe Schwartz and you’re pleased. Not for her.” He’s polite, normal, nice. So of course Abe interrupts what he’s doing to help the new tenant, Blair Conroy, shuttle her boxes up the Beresford’s imposing staircase. After a week or so, she notices that, although she’s heard a lot about Sythe, she hasn’t met him. Nor will she, as Abe has murdered him. When she arrived that first day, he was preparing to dismember the body.

Despite the grim situation, Carver’s deft touch maintains an upbeat tone and romance blossoms between Abe and Blair. Meanwhile, oblivious Mrs. May keeps her rigid schedule, which involves numerous glasses of wine during the day, violent prayer, and an afternoon siesta.

As the story progresses, you may hear a bizarre echo of the Eagles’s hit, “Hotel California”: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” At least not in one piece. Carver keeps the story moving along briskly with new people to meet, including some who are asking too many questions and whose tenancy may be rather short. They’re all initially charmed by the building and their dotty new landlady, which conjures up another line from the same song: “This could be Heaven or this could be Hell,” with The Beresford leaning distinctly toward the latter.

Newcomer Gail upends the uneasy equilibrium. She’s escaped an abusive husband, and she and Abe incinerate her cell phone (a literal burner) to stop his offensive texts. Complicating matters, she’s unexpectedly pregnant.

Carver leads off his novel with an epigram credited to Charles Bukowski: “Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live.” This may lead you to wonder about the extent of crazy at work in this story. Being overcome by madness is referred to several times, even when Abe muses about his affection for Blair. For the most part, he thinks, love is interchangeable with madness, but nobody would ask to be mad. As Gail obsesses on the future of her unborn child, she too is increasingly unhinged.

How much does ancient Mrs. May know? Or suspect? You’ll start to wonder that during the awkward dinners she hosts for new arrivals. She challenges her guests with Faustian questions like, What do you most want in the world?, and its dangerous corollary, What would you do to get it?

This is an entertaining book, full of surprises. Carver’s smooth writing style and the hothouse environment he creates prevent you from being troubled by certain logistical details. And, at the end, don’t be surprised if you recall a third “Hotel California” lyric, ‘They just can’t kill the Beast.’

Find it at Amazon or at your favorite indie bookstore.

Long Bright River

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By Liz Moore – This family thriller, set in Philadelphia, is on a number of “best books of 2020” lists, and for good reason. Mickey Fitzpatrick is a 30-something female police officer who loves her patrol job, loves her intimacy with the Kensington area that’s her beat, knows who lives there, who serves the best coffee, who the working girls are, and generally tries to keep bad things from happening.

She’s called out to the site where the body of a young woman has been discovered by disused train tracks. The terror coursing through her body doesn’t subside until she sees the dead woman is not her younger sister Kacey, a many-times-relapsed drug user who’s disappeared. Mickey fears the worst.

The novel’s third significant character is Philadelphia itself, whose gritty neighborhoods and obscure loyalties take on real life in Moore’s telling. Mickey has tried many times to pull Kacey away from the dark side, but every time, the drugs lure her back. That’s an old and familiar story, but the way Moore builds the relationship between the sisters makes it compelling nonetheless.

Mickey is the older of the two—the quiet, bookish one. Kacey was the social butterfly. Their mother died of an overdose, and their father died too. They were raised by their grandmother, a strict and bitter woman with little money and even less affection to share.

Now Kacey’s in the wind, and Mickey takes every opportunity to look for her. At least at home she has a wonderfully bright son, Thomas, whose dad is an older man, a police detective, who befriended the teenage Mickey. He listened to her, gave her understanding and advice, and she responded to his warmth.

I especially enjoyed the scenes with Mickey’s extended family—aunts and uncles, cousins—whom we meet when she drops in unannounced for Thanksgiving. Mickey, with her hard-won academic achievements, is a fish out of water with them. In their opinion, “work was done with your body, with your hands. College was for dreamers and snobs.”

Mickey doesn’t fit in at work, either. Her boss actively dislikes her, and as the local prostitutes’ death count begins to climb, a frantic Mickey takes some liberties with departmental rules. Her suspicions are mostly ignored and even backfire.

The serial killer theme and the good-girl/bad-girl dynamic are crime fiction staples, but the quality of Moore’s writing and the honesty at the novel’s core make them fresh again. And Moore delivers some surprises along the way that will keep you turning pages.

Red Widow

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By Alma Katsu – I really wanted to like this book more. Written by a former officer of both the US Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, Red Widow plunges you right into the world of partial information, hidden agendas, latent violence, and self-interested double-dealing.

Lyndsey Duncan is a CIA officer whose romantic attachment to an agent of Britain’s MI6 has put her under a cloud. This, despite her remarkable success on her first overseas assignment. Detailed to the high-stakes Moscow Field Station, she recruited and ran an invaluable asset, Yaromir Popov, a high-ranking officer in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. Now she’s been sent back to CIA headquarters, unsure of her future there, while an investigation drags on.

On the promising side, the Chief of the Russia Division, Eric Newman, wants her help in investigating the disappearance of two Russian double-agents. The coincidence suggests Russian internal security was onto them. And that information on their identity came from within CIA.

In another shock, Eric tells Lyndsey that her prize, Yaromir Popov, has died of poisoning.

Since Lyndsey has been overseas for several years, many of the Division staff she knew have moved on. However, she recognizes one woman, Theresa Warner, whom she knew slightly in the old days. Theresa’s husband was killed while conducting a sketchy Russian operation, and her colleagues regard her simply as The Widow. These two quasi-outsiders, Lyndsey and Theresa, form a friendship.

The extreme compartmentalization of the Agency, particularly Lyndsey’s sensitive task, means not much job-related information can be exchanged, but author Katsu doesn’t give the women any other common interests—movies, tennis—that they could share. As a result, the basis for their relationship is thin and feels contrived.

Katsu does what I assume is a creditable job describing operational constraints and office operations within the CIA—who can talk to whom, when, and about what. The big reveal the women experience isn’t much of a surprise for readers of espionage fiction, nor is what they do with that knowledge.

Additional plot information risks being a spoiler. Suffice it to say that, even if Lyndsey and Theresa’s actions are a tad predictable, they remain interesting characters. The bigger problem is that the male characters didn’t come across as real, three-dimensional people.

Authors worry, maybe a little, sometimes a lot, that friends and family will think they recognize themselves among a novel’s characters. (They’re almost always wrong about this.) Perhaps Katsu was hampered in writing about a world she knows so well, precisely to avoid any such misconceptions.

Reading Red Widow, you come away with a strong impression of what it’s like to work in a clandestine service, the resources at your disposal, those withheld from you, and the cynicism of many of the participants. You won’t develop a strong affinity for many of the people involved, and perhaps that’s part of the game.

Order it from Amazon here or from Indiebound here.

The Cut

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By Chris Brookmyre – “Millicent Spark’s life ended on the twenty-third of January, 1994,” starts Chris Brookmyre’s new thriller. She woke up with the body of her lover Markus next to her, covered in stab wounds. She served 20-some years in prison for his murder – her sentence lengthened because she insisted she was innocent. She’s finally out, living in Glasgow, trying to cobble together some kind of modus vivendi in a vastly changed world.

At a university across town, Jerry Kelly is an uneasy first-year student, having trouble fitting in. He’s black, from a village in North Ayrshire, and grew up with almost nothing. A big piece of his education, such as it was, came from obsessive viewing of horror videos from his gran’s rental outlet. This explains his encyclopedic knowledge of film in general and especially the legendary gore-fests.

Brookmyre’s two misfits have plenty of depth and individuality; they’re sympathetic, despite their flaws, with a wry sense of themselves. On the surface they appear to be polar opposites, but plot magic happens once their paths cross.

Jerry applies to live in an off-campus house, not expecting to be accepted, given who he is and how he looks—dreadlocks, black wardrobe of metal band t-shirts—and given that his prospective housemates are three elderly ladies. To his surprise and theirs, they take him in. He discovers that pre-prison, his prickly new housemate Millie Spark had been a genius makeup artist on many of the blood-soaked films he loves. Grisly wounds were her specialty. The movie-banter between them is highly entertaining, and she’s not put off by his dark affect. But what cements their relationship is when he rescues her from a man trying to smother her with a bed-pillow.

The last movie Millie worked on was Mancipium, a film rumored to be such pure evil no one has ever seen it. All copies were destroyed, and everyone connected with it died. Not strictly true, although several unexplained deaths and disappearances gave the story legs. Seeing Mancipium is at the top of Jerry’s all-time wish-list.

Millicent and Jerry discover that her murdered lover Markus was not a film production company rep, as he claimed, but a London cop. Why did he lie, and what was he after? Who really killed him, and why was Millie framed for his murder? The answers to these questions could prove Millie’s innocence and answer the more urgent question, who wants her dead now? Author Brookmyre effectively ramps up the tension as the danger to Millie mounts and as she and Jerry discern the outlines of a much bigger conspiracy.

The long-ago summer Mancipium was wrapping up offers intriguing clues: immense pressures on the production team, a decadent lifestyle of underage sex and over-consumed drugs, and the influx of high-powered guests that lifestyle attracted. Millie and Jerry search out the scattered remnants of the old crew and ask their questions, with their pursuers never more than a half-step behind.

There may be a fifty-year age difference between Jerry and Millie, but a lively and wholly believable friendship grows up between them. Getting out of their predicament will require the knowledge and skills of both. They are fascinating, funny, and spirited protagonists who are such good companions—to the reader and to each other—that I wished the book could continue for another hundred pages. I hated to give them up! In sum, a most satisfying adventure.

Goalposts Moved for Spy Writers

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Desmond Llewelyn, Q, James Bond, Spycraft

The Cipher Brief presentation this week from John Sawers, former Chief of the British Intelligence Service (MI6) covered a lot of ground, including how the world of espionage is changing in the networked age. John le Carré taught us how to understand the motives and tradecraft of Cold War spies, but those days are over. Writers about espionage, like those in the trade itself, must learn new skills.

Tradecraft Trends

Sawers emphasized the shifting importance of the data analyst versus the case officer. In the old days, case officers recruited, trained, and ran their agents. They were, in a way, laws unto themselves. Not any more. James Bond’s “Q” (pictured, as played by Desmond Llewelyn) is no more; agents don’t ask the technologists for help solving a problem, the data analysts and technologists help design the intervention from the outset.

This evolution takes place at a time when the domestic security services of target countries have upped their games considerably. They too may have sophisticated analytic capability, which changes how foreign agents must operate. An example Sawers gave is the availability of facial recognition software and biometric identification. The old methods of disguise—so integral to the spectacular television series, The Americans, set in the 1980s—are next to useless. “The technology is neutral,” he said, and security services have to make it an ally. Our fictional spies can’t put on a wig and run rampant in foreign nations any more.

Strategic Trends

Like many analysts, Sawers keeps a wary eye on China. The country’s behavior around the pandemic has led to “the scales falling from the eyes of EU countries” who’d been less prone to criticize it. While, as writers, we recognize that the Xi Jinping China of today is not the same China that Deng Xiaoping led just over thirty years ago, I admit to being a fan of Tang Dynasty China (700 AD), so I’m really 1300 years behind the times.

Sawers says Western nations are good at identifying security challenges originating from China, but it’s harder to counter Chinese economic strategies, like the Belts and Roads Initiative. Yes, that is an effort to improve the infrastructure of various low-income countries, but it’s also a way to tie the economies of these countries to China and attempt to influence their politics.

Despite recent bumps, the relationship between the US and the UK runs very deep, Sawers maintained, and the two countries’ intelligence agencies’ relationship is solid. The longer-term unease will be between the US and other countries with which it is not as close. Can they trust us not to whipsaw them every four years? That lingering tinge of suspicion should inspire some juicy plot points.

Sawers says the political upheavals and divisions that have occurred in both our nations are at least partly an aftershock of 2008’s economic collapse. This is especially interesting in light of a 2/10 Washington Post report that nearly 60 percent of people facing charges from the January 6 insurrection have a higher-than-average history of serious money troubles: bankruptcies, evictions and foreclosures, bad debts, lawsuits over money owed, or unpaid taxes. Something to keep in mind if these disaffected folk are characters in your new story!