Category Archives: thriller

****The Collection

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Art Gallery

photo: WellDone2012, creative commons license

By Lance Charnes – If you like “ticking clock thrillers,” in this first-person caper, narrator Matt Friedrich faces a whole clockwork factory ticking toward deadlines, emphasis on “dead.”

If he doesn’t find certain stolen art, the women in his life will be dead at the hands of ʼNdràngheta, the Calabrian mafia, a group that makes those Sicilian guys look like amateurs. If he doesn’t find out who’s fencing stolen art, he won’t be paid the desperately needed $10,000 he’s supposed to earn for this mysterious gig. Meanwhile, he has to come up with a plausible tale and report in on time to his parole officer, who would send him back to the slammer if he knew Matt was flitting all over Europe on a venture with a growing body count.

But Matt is an engaging protagonist and you can’t help but hope he finds a way out of all these dilemmas–in time!

He trained as an architect and got into trouble working for a corner-cutting Southern California art gallery. In a tense early scene, we see him pushing up the auction price of a Corot landscape with fake bids. Eventually, his shenanigans landed him in the federal Prison Camp Pensacola for 14 months. Now Matt’s out of prison, working as a barista, staying with a generous friend, and broke. Lawyer fees and restitution payments take almost everything he earns.

He reconnects with a woman he met in Geneva, Allyson DeWitt, who said she sometimes needs art experts. She’s purposefully vague about the nature of her business and the identity of her clients, but a few weeks later, a bike messenger gives Matt a package containing a flash drive, a packet of €1,100 in used bills, a well-used fake passport, and a European itinerary. Consumed with curiosity, lust for Allyson, and the need for cash, Matt flies to Europe and the adventure begins.

Charnes’s writing is full of Matt’s self-deprecating humor, breezy asides, and an occasional pleasing literary flourish. They cleverly elucidate Matt’s character, putting you squarely in his corner, as in: “The pressure from the fifty hundred-euro notes in my pocket eventually cuts off the blood flow to my better instincts.”

Even though he’s seriously back-footed by everything he does not know (and won’t be told) about his assignment, Matt gamely plows ahead. He’s aware that stolen artworks are being used to move large amounts of dirty money, since cash has become too easy for governments to track. Allyson’s assigned him a partner named Carson, a woman short on details and temper. They make an interesting pair, as they delve into this complicated scam. Matt and Carson each have skills the other lacks, which makes for a believable partnership, even if Matt is never quite sure whether he trusts her.

Author Charnes has developed a meticulously complex, rapid-paced plot, and some of the ways the scam works are briefly difficult to follow, but you never believe for a moment that he hasn’t thought the whole thing through. The subtitle of this book is The Dewitt Agency Files #1, which sets you up for the final scene, when Matt the bike messenger reappears with an envelope containing information for his next case. Can’t wait!

The Critics Pick: Best Crime/Mystery/Thrillers of 2016

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police, San Francisco, passersby

(photo: Thomas Hawk, Creative Commons license)

Yesterday, I reported on the only book to receive four mentions among eight different “best of 2016” lists for crime, mystery, and thriller fiction, and the three mentioned three times. Below are the books receiving two mentions. All the others—just over 60 books in all—were mentioned only once. So there’s lots of “best” books out there. If readers are interested, I’ll post the list of the 60, as well. Let me know. Yesterday’s post here.

Two Mentions

Putting several of these, starting with those in bold, on my “to read” list!

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley – A suspicious plane crash leads to a damaging media onslaught for survivors while the police investigate.
Black Widow by Chris Brookmyre – A rogue journalist investigates a woman victimized by Internet trolls; when her husband dies, is the “Black Widow” moniker correct?
The Black Widow by Daniel Silva – a political thriller about efforts to prevent an Islamist attack on Paris with a “heart-stopping, unexpected and deeply unsettling” grand finale, says the Washington Post.
Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben – a nanny cam reveals a widow’s husband may not be dead after all in this “smart, fast-paced thriller by a master,” according to Library Journal.
His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet – combines a legal thriller and literary game so well, it wound up on the Man Booker prize shortlist.
I Let You Go by Claire Mackintosh – “A clever combination of police procedural and psychological thriller,” says CrimeFictionLover.com, which begins with a child’s hit-and-run death.
Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner – A missing woman’s nearest and dearest may not be telling the police the whole story.
Rise the Dark by Michael Koryta – Investigator Mark Novak is taunted by a recently released prisoner who claims knowledge of Novak’s wife’s murder.
The Second Life of Nick Mason by Steve Hamilton – Convicted murderer Nick Mason gets a surprise early prison release and must try to build a new life, and goes about it all really, really wrong.
The Trespasser by Tana French, provides another outing of the fascinating Dublin Murder Squad.

The Sources

These U.S. and U.K. publications provided the original lists: BookRiot, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, New York Times, The Telegraph (crime & thriller), The Telegraph (50 Best Books for Christmas), Washington Post.

Best of the Best in Crime Fiction – 2016

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chalk outline, body

(image: pixabay, creative commons license)

Been accumulating a list of year-end lists of “Best Mystery/Crime/Thriller Novels of 2016.” A total of 75 books appears on the eight lists I researched. More than 60 of them appear only once, suggesting not only the tremendous volume of good writing in these genres but the wide range of reviewers’ personal tastes.  I’ve read and reviewed 30 new crime books in 2016, and my favorites aren’t on any of these lists. They are:

  • Dodgers by Bill Beverly – Los Angeles teenagers embark on a murder mission and much, much more
  • The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock – ne’er-do-wells in the early 1900’s South meet the inevitable; not for the squeamish
  • The Far Empty by J. Todd Scott – local law enforcement in Big Bend country fighting (or is it helping?) the Mexican drug cartels

Below are the books that appeared on three or four lists; tomorrow the books appearing on two and where to find these lists, if you want to investigate further.

For reviews of great new crime/mystery/thriller releases year-round, bookmark the U.K. website CrimeFictionLover.com. I’m one of the site’s reviewers, and the team there does a fantastic job!

Four Mentions

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott – a book that surely benefited from exquisite timing. This story of an elite gymnast and the sacrifices she, her teammates, and their families must make coincided with the summer Olympics and enthusiasm around the gold-medal-winning U.S. women’s gymnastics team. The story is told mostly from the point of view of the young gymnast’s mother, and it’s full of teen-age angst, parental fixation, and gym-rat rivalries. But are they strong enough to precipitate and cover up murder?

Three Mentions

Disclaimer: I’ve not read any of these. Note to self: get busy!

Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley – Mosley is in his element here, writing about Los Angeles in the uneasy aftermath of the deadly 1960s Watts riots. Says the New York Times review, Mosley’s protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is “an unconventional hero who’s unafraid to lower his fists and use his brain.”

A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny – the twelfth outing of Penny’s popular Chief Inspector Gamache (I’ve listened to two of the audio versions and every time the narrator says “Gamache,” I hear “Ganache” and must go eat a piece of chocolate). He’s ensconced with his pals in Three Pines, Quebec, and charged with searching out corruption within the police academy, an investigation soon confounded by murder.

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware – The blurbs make this sound like Agatha Christie’s classic train case, The Lady Vanishes. In this story, a passenger on a luxury cruise ship thinks she hears and sees the body of a woman hit the water and sink beneath the waves. She swears she met this woman in Cabin 10, but no one believes her.

Have you read any of these “best books”? Were they among your favorites of 2016?

Tomorrow: the ten books that received two votes and how to find mention of the 60 others.

Lee Child is a Pantser

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Superman

graphic: Kooroshication, creative commons license

Someday I hope I inspire a reader as enthusiastic and indulgent as Lee Child has in John Lanchester. Lanchester’s fanboy article in the 14 November New Yorker delves into both the form and process used by Child to create his literary child, Jack Reacher. I’ve read only the first one in this long-running series, The Killing Floor, and didn’t see what the fuss was all about.

Lanchester—a contributing editor at The London Review of Books—was untroubled by my big gripe: I just couldn’t believe in the character. First of all, Childs’s hero, he says, “isn’t just tough; he’s supertough. He is exceptionally good with all manner of weapons. His expertise as a sniper is regularly called upon . . . He routinely gets into fights with multiple opponents” and in a climactic combat, Reacher will be pitted “sometimes against vastly superior numbers, sometimes against an opponent of superhuman size or strength of inability to feel pain, sometimes against all of the above.”

But Lanchester has devised a clever test for whether a novel exceeds his ability to suspend disbelief. He calls it the Superman test: “Is what I’m being asked to believe less likely than the character’s being able to fly?” Everyone has a set-point for their own personal Superman test, and mine must be lower than Lanchester’s.

He likes Reacher, even when he skates perilously close to Superman territory. He says it’s because Child balances Reacher’s extraordinary skills with realism. The fighting seems “realistic within its implausibility”; Reacher fights for the good guys, but he’s a realist, he’ll fight dirty.

Reacher’s given up everything and travels around the country, righting wrongs, carrying no more than a folding toothbrush. To every cube warrior who longs to get out from under, this sounds pretty good. Even if such a life isn’t really possible, “The alienated possessionless freedom of Reacher has a core of emotional truth,” Lanchester says.

Another seductive aspect of the books for Lanchester is Reacher’s thought process as he tries to decipher what’s going on, who the bad guys are. Turns out, Child is a pantser! He doesn’t write the books with the whole plot worked out in advance; he writes by the seat of his pants. He captures Reacher’s figuring-out activity so well, because he’s figuring it out at the exact same time.

This way of working was revealed when author Andy Martin—another Jack Reacher devotee—literally sat with Child as he worked on his recent book Make Me. Martin turned his observations into Reacher Said Nothing (2015), a “genuinely enlightening” literary biography that’s one of a kind.

Reacher’s work-it-out-as-you-go method is the way I write, too. Although some writers storyboard each scene and conversation ahead of time, that would take all the fun out of writing—the thrill of discovery—for me. This faint kinship is why I’ll give old Jack another go. I think I’ll read Persuader. Lanchester says it’s Reacher at his best.

****Triple Crown

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horse-racing

photo: Tsutomu Takasu, creative commons license

By Felix Francis — Carrying on his late father’s series of horse-racing mysteries, Felix Francis has now written his fifth about the most famous set of horse races in the world, the U.S. Triple Crown. The Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs is the first of the three, and the most prestigious. The Preakness Stakes at Baltimore’s Pimlico Race Course is the oldest, dating back to 1873. The mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes at New York’s Belmont Park, which takes place exactly five weeks after the Derby, is the most demanding—an insurmountable hurdle in many Triple Crown quests. Francis effectively captures the excitement, behind-the-scenes anxiety, traditions, and pageantry of these iconic meets.

Protagonist and narrator Jefferson Hinkley is an investigator for the British Horseracing Authority invited to the States by a colleague from the fictional U.S. Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency (FACSA) on a secret quest to identify a mole in the agency. Horse owners and trainers are being tipped off before FACSA raids. Hinkley, who misses his adrenaline-fueled days working undercover, is grateful for the change of pace.

A few days before the Kentucky Derby, the timing of a FACSA raid on barns at Churchill Downs is moved up several days, surprising even the agents and certainly the suspect trainer, and one of them shoots the trainer dead. It’s evident the mole is still at work, but worse is about to happen.

Two Derby favorites come down with equine influenza, leaving only one favorite, Fire Point, who wins both the Derby and Preakness. To speed up his investigation, Hinkley poses as an Irish groom, and gets himself hired by Fire Point’s trainer at his Belmont Park stables. Oddly, since author Francis is from the U.K., Hinkley’s speech doesn’t seem especially British, nor particularly Irish in word choice or rhythm when he’s acting as the groom.

Before long, there isn’t much mystery as to who’s is tampering with the horses and how they’re doing it—Francis provides a clue as big as Secretariat’s legendary 31-length win in the Belmont Stakes. Nor is there a puzzle regarding motive. Any Triple Crown winner will generate many millions in stud fees, well beyond his potential racing purses. But if a horse has had equine influenza, his stud career is over before it starts.

Francis’s plot effortlessly and admirably engages the ticking clock device that has become such a staple of thrillers. The rapidly approaching Belmont Stakes means some of the world’s most valuable equine athletes are at risk. And that mole is still out there.

In an unconvincing subplot, a young Puerto Rican groom is overtly hostile to Hinkley, which only adds to his unease as he works around the barns. Plus, there’s the risk he’ll be recognized, and he is well aware of the lengths to which people will go to make sure Fire Point becomes a Triple Crown winner.

If you liked Francis’s other novels or if you just love the pulse-pounding Sport of Kings, you should enjoy this latest entrant in a storied bloodline. Or watch the excellent television series Luck, starring Dustin Hoffman, alas, only one season.

****Shadows the Sizes of Cities

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morocco

photo: Carlos ZGZ, creative commons license

By Gregory W. Beaubien – In this tension-filled debut thriller, you get rather quickly to the point where you don’t trust anyone—and that includes first-person narrator Will Clark, who claims to be a travel writer from Chicago. Yet it always seems possible he might be something more. You never really learn how Will acquired his fighting skills or whether there is more to his agenda than appears on the surface. Beaubien takes advantage of using a first-person narrative to let Will tell you exactly what and how much he wants you to know.

The book starts in Madrid, where Will is waiting to hook up with three friends for a trip to Morocco and a writing assignment. He needs money, and he’s preoccupied with “the Dutchman’s offer,” a mysterious phrase invoked a couple of times too many, though when the explanation finally comes, it turns the story on its head.

If you don’t trust Will, you certainly don’t trust his friends. There’s Tammy, the spoiled rich girl accustomed to having the whole world bend to her wishes, and her loser (Will’s opinion) Irish boyfriend Nigel. Nor do you trust Will’s women—the unpleasant Marissa, especially, and Stacy, who’s just arrive on the scene. Stacy keeps turning up, her cool blonde beauty a salve to Will’s overheated spirit, but who is she, really?

Tammy and Nigel and Will and Marissa meet up in Madrid before heading across the Strait of Gibraltar to Tangier. The couple recklessly embroils Will and Marissa in a small-town drug deal that goes frightfully bad. People are dead, and the escape south to Marrakesh is risky. I really don’t want to say more about the fast-moving plot, to let you discover its surprises for yourself.

Much of the excitement in reading the book is that the story—and Will—are never predictable. You can’t be sure where you’ll end up—geographically, morally, or metaphorically. If there’s a fault in the writing, it is that Beaubien (via Will) tends to name the emotions he’s feeling, rather than trusting the readers to discern them through his Will’s actions.

Beaubien is a journalist and has a reporter’s eye for descriptive detail that takes you right to where you feel the gritty desert, the heat, and the hostile stares of the men in tea shops. If you’ve been to Morocco, you will experience it all again, down to the hair-raising trek over the Atlas mountains. If you haven’t, you’ll believe you have. This dense atmosphere is one of the book’s most compelling aspects.

 

****Ghosts of Havana

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havana, Cuba

photo: Les Haines, creative commons license

By Todd Moss – The long tail of the 1961 U.S. Bay of Pigs invasion  disaster swings around to sting a married couple in this fast-paced political thriller—third in a series by former U.S. State Department diplomat Todd Moss.

With his insider’s background, Moss believably portrays the interdepartmental rivalries inside the Washington Beltway, where high-stakes diplomacy faces off against the less, shall we say, conventional means of asserting American interests deployed by the rival Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Moss’s protagonist, in these novels, is former Amherst College professor Judd Ryker. He developed a political theory suggesting that, in times of a country’s destabilization—whether because of natural calamity or military coup or political upheaval—quick U.S. intervention can help mold the new status quo to fit American interests. He’s been brought into the State Department to create a one-man Crisis Reaction Unit. In other words, to put his theory to the test. Not surprisingly, the State Department’s career diplomats are not interested in this outsider’s theories, and do all they can, by foot-dragging and outright sabotage, to assure he fails.

Judd’s wife Jessica has what he has been led to believe is a job in international relief efforts. As this book opens, she has just revealed that she works for the CIA. In fact, she heads a super-secret unit that operates with total independence and is available for various tricky problem-solving tasks around the world.

Now that Jessica’s responsibilities are out in the open, the couple has agreed on three fundamentals going forward: they will assist each other whenever possible; they will avoid working on the same problem whenever they can; and they will admit to each other when a situation arises that they cannot follow through with assist or avoid. Relevant to all three of these is a commitment to always tell each other the truth, even though at times they may need to keep their employers’ secrets. Like so many principles, stating them turns out to be easier than living them.

Within three days, Jessica counts up at least eight lies she’s told Judd already. Yet, at the same time, he’s reassuring her that he’s in his State Department office, when he’s actually headed to Gauntánamo Bay Naval Base to meet with the shadowy director of Cuban intelligence.

Cuba’s top leaders are elderly. Sick too. There’s every reason to believe that a moment of disruption—of the kind Judd believes is ripe for positive intervention—is imminent. His trip to Cuba is the first step, though the stated reason for the meeting is to extricate four Americans caught on a fishing boat in Cuban waters.

Moss gives a sharp, up-to-the-minute feel in terms of crazy politics, self-serving politicos, and mainstream diplomatic strategists trying to keep the lid on. Throughout, he does a great job in showing the discrepancy between the way events are played for the public and the reality of the situation as Judd and Jessica perceive it. It’s enough to make you look at the nightly news with an even more skeptical eye!

****You Will Know Me

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You Will Know Me, gymnast

photo: Steven Rasmussen, creative commons license

By Megan Abbott, narrated by Lauren Fortgang – Publication of this new psychological thriller about a family’s sacrifices in producing an elite gymnast was well-timed to coincide with the Olympics and the public’s quadrennial fixation on little girls’ determination to fly. Told almost entirely from the point of view of American gymnast Devon Knox’s mother Katie, this family’s ties only bind tighter when external events threaten.

Thirteen-year-old Devon is on what seems to be a straight path to athletic accomplishment. Katie and her husband Eric have taken a second mortgage to support her training, the competition fees, the $200 leotards. Coach Teddy Belfour is confident, the booster club of BelStar parents pitches in to make expensive upgrades to the practice gym, Coach T brings on his niece Hailey to help with the younger girls. And Devon’s studious younger brother Drew seems willing to put his childhood on permanent hold so that evenings and weekends can be spent at Devon’s practice sessions, driving her to competitions, and participating in booster club events.

In short, Devon’s gymnastics is their life. As Katie says, “When you have an extraordinary child, you’ll do anything for her.” While nothing in the backstory of any of the current crop of elite gymnasts suggests the pathology that overtakes the Knox family, single-minded commitment, extreme sacrifice, and unshakable determination are par for the course.

Abbott, winner of multiple awards in the mystery/thriller domain, convincingly portrays the emotional temperature of the gym, its sounds and smells, the chalk-dust thickness to the air. When Devon practices, you are with her, you feel the adrenaline rush Katie does, watching. You understand the sacrifices, as well as how the family’s fixation is inhibiting the capacity to make moral choices.

For the Knox family, the extent of those sacrifices and choices becomes clear only after Hailey’s handsome boyfriend Ryan Beck comes on the scene. Ryan stirs a stewpot of emotions among girls trained to hold in their feelings, like diminutive adults, and moms who flirt and snipe like adolescents. His presence, then his absence, tests them all when he’s killed in an unexplained hit-and-run accident.

Abbott has divided the novel into parts, each introduced with a quote from Nadia Comaneci’s Letters to a Young Gymnast. This is the epigram for section IV: “But I sometimes wonder, to this day, if courage is just another word for desperation.”

Narrator Lauren Fortgang has recorded some 150 audiobooks and does an excellent job here, especially with the large number of teen girls. I especially admired her wispy Lacey Weaver, Devon’s teammate, whose voice is so light it seems about to float away, taking poor Lacey with it. She gives brother Drew a lisp that never becomes cartoonish, but immediately distinguishes him from the girls.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

Zero Days

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Zero Days, Iran, nuclear

Former Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inspecting centrifuges at Natanz.

This two-hour documentary released Friday, July 8, and playing in selected theaters and streaming online, traces the history and consequences of Stuxnet, a sophisticated piece of malware unleashed on the world in 2010 (trailer & theater list).

Before you yawn and click away, there’s an important feature of the Stuxnet worm and others like it that makes this story of vital interest to you. Stuxnet was not designed to invade your home or office computer, but to attack the industrial control systems (specifically, programmable logic controllers) that manage critical infrastructure. These systems make sure trains and airplanes don’t crash, control car and truck traffic, maintain oil and gas production, manage industrial automation, ensure you have water to brush your teeth with and electricity to run the coffee maker, keep life-saving medical technology operating, and, of course, give you access to the internet. Cyber-attacks on these systems cause real-world, physical destruction, even widespread death.

Behind the Computer Screen

The Stuxnet story—still highly classified, but revealed over time—began with an effort by the United States and Israel to thwart Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons by destroying centrifuges at the country’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility. The software was diabolically clever, virtually undetectable, and essentially untraceable. In theory.

The fact that it was a Zero Day exploit (that is, that the attack would begin before the software problem was discovered and attempts made to fix it or shut it down) and that the Stuxnet code contained not one, but four zero day features, was remarkable. Once it was inside, it worked autonomously; even the attacker could not call it back.

The Israelis, apparently, were impatient. They assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists, and they changed the Stuxnet code, and it spread. It ended up infecting computers worldwide, at which point it was no longer secret, people were looking for it, and the Russians and others found it. “Israel blew the [malware’s] cover and it could have led to war,” the film says.

Another consequence is that the day when something similar can be unleashed on us grows ever closer. It will come from one of three sources:

  • Cybercriminals, in it for the money
  • Activists, intent on making a political point or
  • Nation-states seeking intelligence or opportunities for sabotage.

U.S. security agencies are not complacent. While they talk publicly about our cyber-defenses, in fact, there is a large (unexamined) effort to develop offensive cyber-weapons. There are reports of an even more draconian cyber-weapon embedded throughout Iranian institutions. Warding off its activation is believed a primary reason the Iranians finally struck a nuclear agreement. Certainly it prompted the rapid development surge in Iran’s cyberarmy.

In putting this story together, writer and director Alex Gibney interviewed former high-ranking U.S. and Israeli security officials, analysts from Symantec who teased the code apart, personnel from Russia’s Kaspersky Lab, and many others, including CIA/NSA/DoD officials unable to speak on camera.

“Fear Does Not Protect Us”

The documentary makes a persuasive case for who holds the smoking Stuxnet gun, but it also suggests that finding fault is not the primary issue. The climate of international secrecy around Stuxnet—and the inevitable clones that will follow—makes an open discussion about them impossible. Nor does it allow development of rational strategies for managing the risks, regardless of how urgently needed those strategies are. Cyber-risk management will never be easy, but as one of the film’s experts points out, “it will never happen unless you start.”

The subject is “hideously overclassified,” says Michael Hayden, former director of both the NSA and CIA. (The climate of secrecy is so extreme that even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security cyber team was unaware that Stuxnet originated across town and spent countless resources trying to track it down.) We, of all nations, need this debate, because there is no more vulnerable country in the world, when it comes to systems’ connectedness.

“Evil and good live side by side,” says an anonymous agent of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. Keeping secrets is a good way to prevent being able to tell one from the other.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 87%; audiences 69%.

“Hush Now, Don’t Explain”–Part 2

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Billie HolidayFiction editor Beth Hill has written excellent advice to authors in her Editor’s Blog essay, “Don’t Explain, Don’t Explain, Don’t Explain.” I covered four of her points here on Friday.

Here are two more and an example from Cormac McCarthy:

  • It isn’t necessary to stop the story’s action to define what something is or how it works, Hill says. These are digressions and most readers don’t like them. Many authors enjoy doing the research for a book (I do!). They aren’t just making stuff up, they’ve grounded their work in reality. They want to share. And probably shouldn’t. That said, readers of some types of sci-fi and techno-thrillers expect to be given an understanding of the science and mechanics behind the story. Authors who write in those genres get a little slack on the “how stuff works” front. I read a terrific military novel lately (The Empty Quarter), where Amazon reviewers criticized it for not explaining every acronym and term. I wasn’t bothered, thinking I’d figured most of it out, but reader frustration was great. So it may be that a careful balance is needed.
  • Hill says if a character speaks several languages, she doesn’t need to repeat her words or thoughts in more than one of them. Writers should pick phrases or opportunities to use the second language when the meaning will be obvious by word form or context. Cormac McCarthy uses a lot of Spanish in The Crossing, and even though a not-to-be-specified number of decades have elapsed since I had high school Spanish–which certainly never touched the topics McCarthy writes about–I had no trouble following. This exchange between several Mexican men and two young Americans takes place after an old man has drawn them a map of where they want to go and walked away (McCarthy does not use quotation marks):

When he was gone, the men on the bench began to laugh. One of them rose to better see the map.

Es un fantasma, he said.

Fantasma?

Sí, sí, Claro.

Cómo?

Cómo? Porque el viejo está loco es cómo.

Loco?

Completamente.

In this and in many different and subtle ways, McCarthy confirms the reader’s understanding of what is said without a mechanical translation of every phrase (or, by extension, technical term). By the time I finished this book, I was following so well, I thought I could actually speak Spanish!

Again, I encourage you to take a good look at Hill’s full essay. Avoiding overexplaining will help keep you in step with your readers, which is what every writer wants!