Category Archives: thriller

Eye in the Sky

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Alan Rickman, Eye in the Sky

Alan Rickman in Eye in the Sky

Exactly what a thriller should be, Eye in the Sky has high stakes, conflicting motives, believable characters with a tangle of personalities, and a ticking clock. If you’ve seen the trailer for this film, you know that British and American military forces have put an “eye in the sky”—an armed drone with a powerful camera—to track members of a terrorist cell in Kenya, including an American citizen and two Brits. It finds them. The rest of the film is “what next?”

When the terrorists are found to be preparing for more suicide bombings, what was intended to be a capture mission soon must be reevaluated—legally, militarily, and politically.

Director Gavin Hood assembled a terrific cast, with Helen Mirren as the U.K.’s colonel in charge of the operation from an underground military bunker and Aaron Paul as the Nevada-based “pilot” of the drone. Alan Rickman (so glad to see him, so unutterably sad he’s gone) is a British lieutenant general supervising the mission from a wood-paneled conference room, along with high-ranking British government officials (reminiscent of the crowded situation room when Osama bin Laden was killed). It’s a room filled with more indecision than people.

On the ground in Kenya is a British agent played by Academy Award nominee Barkhad Abdi, whose life if caught isn’t worth the proverbial plugged nickel, the terrorists in a supposed safe house, the local Sharia law enforcement and security squads, and a neighboring family of innocents.

Most of the movie concerns the deliberations of the groups in the bunker, in the conference room, and in the Nevada “pilot house” as they see what the cameras can tell them—a lot, really—about what is unfolding inside the safe house. They’re aided by a facial recognition expert based in Hawai`i watching the same screens, attempting to verify the terrorists’ identities. Because of the incredible detail of these images, the transitions from screens to street scenes (mostly from the point of view of Abdi) feel seamless.

The key issues are “collateral damage”— inevitable or unacceptable?—and whether a nation can pursue its citizens across friendly countries’ borders. Says Wired reviewer K. M. McFarland, “it’s the best movie yet to tackle the legal and moral quagmire surrounding modern technological warfare.” That review also describes the degree of realism behind the movie’s rather amazing drone technology.

In the screenplay written by Guy Hibbert, the military and the political leaders views’ on the situation differ irreconcilably. The U.K. military want to move; the politicians are cautious. Those views are flipped for the Americans. (Actor Laila Robins, seen locally on stage numerous times, plays a U.S. security official.)

Filmed in South Africa in 2014, the staging of the safe house neighborhood carries a dusty realism that’s a stark contrast to the diplomatic h.q. and the high-tech pilots’ domain. Yet, the decision makers in those far-removed settings are not at all disengaged from the consequences on the ground. Alan Rickman’s final words to a recalcitrant politician are: “Never tell a soldier he does not know the cost of war.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 93%; audiences 88%.

****The Short Drop

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noose

(photo: Petri Damstén, creative commons license)

By Matthew FitzSimmons, narrated by James Patrick Cronin – In this fast-paced thriller, 28-year-old Gibson Vaughn is drawn into a renewed effort to solve the decade-old disappearance of a childhood friend, fourteen-year-old Suzanne Lombard. She was the daughter of prominent political figure and now presidential candidate Benjamin Lombard, and the impending tenth anniversary of when she went missing is bringing up painful memories.

As a teenager, Gibson hacked into Ben Lombard’s computers in an attempted campaign financing expose and traded a potential prison sentence for a stint in the Marines. Now he’s home and having difficulty finding work. Despite his skills, he carries too much baggage.

George Abe, Lombard’s former chief of security—a man Gibson has every reason not to trust—dangles the possibility Suzanne is alive or at least that they can finally learn her fate. He ensures Gibson’s participation with the one statement he knows will be irresistible: Suzanne loved you better than anyone.

Abe shows Gibson clever new electronic evidence that has surfaced, and with two members of Abe’s team, Gibson sets out to track it down. They end up in Somerset, Pennsylvania, on the trail of another hacker who stays one step ahead.

The timing couldn’t be worse, with Ben Lombard—whom Richard Lipez in The Washington Post calls the book’s “least interesting character”—about to be picked as his party’s presidential nominee. Would resurrecting Suzanne’s case influence the election? Would it garner Lombard the sympathy vote? A lot is at stake, and the political players are ruthless. Among the people trying to stop Gibson and crew are a sociopath who makes one mistake with shoes and the kind of political junkie only Washington can breed.

Gibson is an engaging protagonist, and, as Lipez says, “One of FitzSimmons’s many skills is making the ins and outs of Internet technology more or less comprehensible for techno-klutzy readers, a true public service.”

A debut novelist, FitzSimmons has handled his complex plot deftly, and although there are numerous characters, the excellence of Cronin’s reading kept them all straight for me. This was both an Amazon and a GoodReads Best Book of December 2015. Oh, and “the short drop”? You probably don’t want to know what that is.

****The Empty Quarter

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desert, man in desert

(photo: Ilker Ender, creative commons license)

By David L. Robbins –What an exciting adventure combining military and medical thriller elements! It takes place in the Rub’ al-Khali, the world’s largest desert (“the empty quarter”), which occupies most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula. People are scarce there, except for the ones you most do not want to meet.

It’s a multiple point-of-view novel, told mostly from the perspectives of members of a U.S. Air Force pararescuemen (PJs) team. PJs’ combined military-medical mission is personnel recovery, and they use both conventional and unconventional combat rescue methods. The motto of this branch of service is “That Others May Live,” and Robbins effectively describes the team members’ dedication to that mission, despite their differences in personality and temperament.

We also read the point of view of Arif, a middle-aged Saudi man whose wife Nadya is a member of the Saudi royal family. Her father, Prince Hassan bin Abd al-Aziz is the country’s head of security. Arif has fallen out with his father-in-law, and he and Nadya are in hiding in the tiny Yemeni town of Ma’rib. Robbins portrays their mutual devotion quite movingly.

A third key point of view is that of Josh Cofield, a former Army Ranger, assigned to the American Embassy in the Yemeni capital Sana’a. Everyone, the ambassador included, erroneously believes Josh is CIA, because he is “awkward as a diplomat,” a bit of a bull in a china shop, but a skilled speaker of Arabic.

When an attempt is made on Prince Aziz’s life, he mistakenly blames the exiled Arif. He wants his son-in-law dead and his daughter returned to him, and he wants U.S. help in achieving these goals He cannot get it, however, unless an American life is threatened. A plan begins to take shape in diabolical minds.

A wild nighttime chase across the desert occupies the last half of the book. Part of Robbins’s skill is in avoiding making any of the principal players obvious bad guys. They’re complex characters with conflicting goals, and all doing their best to resolve an impossible situation.

I appreciated that the book includes helpful maps. Not as helpful—and something readers are bound to object to—is the frequent use of military abbreviations and acronyms. While Robbins defines a few of these in footnotes, it might have been better to have a list in an appendix  or to retain the abbreviations in speech, but not rely on them as much in the narrative. It would be a shame if readers abandoned a top-notch tale because of the resulting confusion. Robbins has 10 other novels under his body armor. I’ll be reading more of them!

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

***Devil in the Grass

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alligator

(photo: heymeadow, creative commons license)

By Christopher Bowron – This debut thriller is an ambitious mix of Florida politics, Satanic cults, Seminole tradition, and alligators. And a bull shark. Author Bowron is clearly familiar with the southwest Florida setting, which he describes expertly, bringing the story to vivid life.

The Florida Everglades is home to any number of dangerous predators, including humans of the sort who don’t mix well with civilization. The 9-foot tall sawgrass that gives the Everglades its nickname—River of Grass—provides Canadian author Bowron’s inspiration for the book title as well as superb cover for his characters as they ply their small boats through its waters.

The impetus for the plot is also grounded in real life: the ongoing political battle between those who want to save the Everglades as a unique and irreplaceable natural resource and the agricultural interests making vast fortunes growing sugar cane and raising cattle along its edges. In Devil in the Grass, former pro football player and half-Seminole Jackson Walker works as an intern for Republican State Senator, James Hunter, who supports Clean Water legislation. Walker, in his mid-20s, meets and falls for a woman working for the state Republican Party. She seeks him out, seduces him, and gradually exposes him to the Satanic cult called The Brotherhood of Set.

After a while, Walker does what he believes will be an innocent errand for the cult leader, and at the book’s opening we find him hiding out in Big Cypress Swamp, accused of slaying a man and woman in a Satanic ritual. Although he believes he’s being framed because of his work with the Senator, letting himself become soft and apathetic may have contributed. He regrets the demise of his football career and its heroes: “It was the fearlessness with which they marched onto the field that had mattered to him.” Inevitably, Walker will be called upon to demonstrate that same fearlessness before the book’s last page.

If the leaders of the Satanic cult weren’t creepy enough, they have for generations used a particular local family—the McFaddens—to be their clean-up crew. They are prone to torture and killing, and they let the vastness of the Everglades hide the evidence. I’m a little burned out on serial killers with chain saws, but the alligators make for heart-pounding excitement.

As the story gets rolling, not only the police, but also the Satanists and their instruments, the McFaddens, are after Walker. And don’t forget the gators.

The book clearly ends with the promise of a sequel, which I hope can make the bad guys as believable as the environment and that Bowron gets a little help with dialog. I’m not sure when this novel takes place, but if Buck Henderson’s “old Cadillac” was manufactured after 2002, it has a trunk release lever. And I ardently wish he hadn’t laid Jimmy McFadden’s psychotic behavior at the door of “severe autism.” Scientific study has failed to link the two.

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

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***Jump Cut

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boy, desert

(photo: Claus Rebler, creative commons license)

By Libby Fischer Hellmann – In Jump Cut, Chicago-based thriller author Hellmann brings her outspoken heroine Ellie Foreman back for another exciting adventure after a 10-year hiatus. In the new book, video producer Foreman and her team have been hired to produce a series of puff pieces about ginormous Delcroft Aviation.

Her project is going well until a client meeting to review a rough cut, when a Delcroft executive unexpectedly tears into the video, the project, and Ellie herself. Given the vehemence of this reaction, the suits around the table have no choice but to postpone further work, and in short order they cancel Ellie’s contract altogether.

Ellie struggles to figure out what caused her to lose her client and fixes on a stranger who appears in the background of the video. She’d conversed with him, finding him oddly curious about her project, and they’d exchanged business cards. In the hope he can help her understand what went wrong, he agrees to meet her, but just before their rendezvous, he is killed. Suicide, the authorities say. Ellie suspects otherwise, especially when she realizes she possesses a flash drive containing significant clues. But various people want it back and aren’t picky about how they get it.

With its up-to-the-minute subject matter involving sophisticated surveillance, secret drone projects, quasi-political assassination, and international intrigue, Jump Cut is a timely, fast-paced read. The plot relies on a couple of shaky coincidences, especially finding the flash drive in the first place. And it includes the typical device of not spilling to the authorities when every bone of the reader’s body is screaming “Tell them! Now!”

Ellie’s close and believable relationships with boyfriend Luke, daughter Rachel, and dad Jake provide a warm counterpoint to the terrifying situation in which she finds herself. Hellmann writes in a breezy, easy-to-read style, but ultimately, the writing style is a jarring contrast to the book’s bleak take on the modern zeitgeist, in which the killing of innocent people is seen “as not just an acceptable but an inevitable part of war. Collateral damage.” That point is underscored a bit heavily by a prologue that recounts the death of a nine-year-old boy in a dusty desert on the far side of the world. We don’t hear another word about him until the epilogue, as a mother laments the loss of her children. Not until then do we know who he and his sister were and what their deaths have been: collateral damage.

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

****The Drifter

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wild dog

(photo: numb photo, creative commons license)

By Nicholas Petrie, narrated by Stephen Mendel – This exciting debut thriller pits U.S. Marine lieutenant and veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars Peter Ash against a mysterious conspiracy involving psychologically damaged vets, some serious explosives, and $400,000 in cash. Ash has post-traumatic stress, a “white static” that rises up whenever he’s indoors too long. This extreme claustrophobia promises to be more than an inconvenience with winter coming on in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the story is set.

When Ash hears of the suicide of his former comrade Big Jimmie Johnson, guilt motivates him to try to make it up to his widow Dinah and her two young sons. He invents a Marine Corps program that supports families by doing free home repairs and sets to work first on the Johnson family’s dilapidated porch. But he can’t rebuild the porch supports until he does something about the huge, vicious, and rank-smelling dog that’s taken up residence underneath it.

Once the dog is secure, he finds another surprise: a Samsonite suitcase filled with money and four packs of explosives. Dinah says she knows nothing about the money, but someone does, because the house was recently broken into and is still being watched by a man driving a big black SUV.

Ash wants to protect Dinah and the boys, but he also wants to get to the bottom of Johnson’s death. At first he buys the police story that his former sergeant was a suicide, but the more he finds out about Jimmie’s recent actions, the more he suspects something else was in play. Although what Jimmie might have gotten himself involved in—either as a participant or a sleuth—is unclear, it must be serious, or people wouldn’t have started trying to kill Ash too.

Rehabilitating the wild dog Mingus, author Petrie has said, was Ash’s “first useful act.” Certainly it has powerful parallels to Ash’s own need to learn how to live with people and civilization again.

Petrie went a little overboard in describing the construction the bad guys’ bomb. I was prepared to accept that the bomb-maker—after all, his nickname was “Boomer”—knew what he was doing. But most of the descriptions of damage done, whether to people, property, vehicles, or psyches, was just right. I also appreciated that Ash’s “everyday” home repair skills were put to new and creative purposes. They make Ash a down-to-earth hero readers can easily identify with and get behind.

Television and movie actor Stephen Mendel—who seems to make a specialty of narrating the thriller genre—does a nice job in the book’s audio version. The characters’ voices are believable—regardless of race or social class—and easy to distinguish, and the women and children are realistic. With his portrayal of Peter Ash, Mendel has made his own contribution to the creation of a likeable protagonist.

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

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Go Home, Girl—Well, Maybe Not

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Ingrid Bergman, Gaslight

Ingrid Bergman in “Gaslight”

It’s come to the point that Twitter pundits have suggested a moratorium on books with the word “Girl” in the title. They might have extended the ban to dark covers with open type and a mysterious photograph suggesting rapid movement. The Stieg Larsson books started “The Girl” craze, and Vulture.com compiled a list of some 91 “The Girl Who/With . . .” copykitties, 2010-2014. That list doesn’t even include Gone Girl, The Girl on The Train (not to be confused with Girl on a Train), and Luckiest Girl Alive.

Those last books have become so popular a new literary subgenre has been created for them, variously titled: “chick noir” (ick) and “domestic thriller.” The “chick noir” label is justly reviled for implying “a lesser sort of noir, marginalized away from the ‘real’ noir,” and might have the unfortunate effect of turning away readers, says Kelly Anderson in BookRiot.

It’s probably not a coincidence that there’s also a resurgent use of the term “gaslighting.” (Gaslighting, of course, refers to the 1944 film Gaslight, in which husband Charles Boyer tries to rid himself of wife Ingrid Bergman by convincing her she’s insane. Once again proving there’s no accounting for taste.)

Domestic thrillers—and Gaslight was definitely a leading example—focus on everyday domestic life and relations with intimate partners. Through this ordinariness, they produce “their own brand of suspense—the disturbing feeling that it could happen to me,” says Dawn Ius in The Big Thrill magazine. Knowing whom to trust is a fundamental dilemma in people’s lives—especially women’s lives. Domestic thrillers play to that uncertainty, building an atmosphere in which “something’s-a-little-bit-off,” Anderson says.

Like other thrillers, domestic thrillers are about The End of the World as We Know It, but written in small letters, and one person in the “we” is usually the female narrator. Those narrators are deeply engaging and honest—at least readers must think so—and, Anderson says, they “do and say things that women know are against the code to say out loud.” As a result, many of these books are not just mysteries but also interesting character studies.

What’s notable is that many domestic thrillers are written by women. In New York Magazine, in a review of a great new boxed set of classic crime, writer Megan Abbott says crime fiction by women “has always been about more than solving a mystery.” By exploring the most compelling fears and pervasive anxieties of the times, domestic thrillers can show that “the darkest and most resonant tales are the ones that hit closest to home.”

****Wolf Winter

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arctic wolf

(photo: myri-_bonnie, Creative Commons license)

By Cecilia Ekbäck, narrated by Alyssa Bresnahan – Swedish-born writer Ekbäck’s debut crime thriller is set in remote north Sweden in 1717. The long darkness of winter is closing in, and the scattered homesteads on Blackåsen Mountain are preparing for what the signs suggest will be a rough time. The Lapps who have come south for the season say it will be a “wolf winter,” which they describe as “the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal. Mortal and alone.”

Paavo, his wife Maija (MY-ah), and their daughters, 14-year-old Frederika and six-year-old Dorotea, are new arrivals from Finland, and they haven’t spent a winter this far north before. They aren’t sure what to expect, even though they don’t know the mountain’s dark history of evil portents and mysterious disappearances. One thing they do not expect is for Paavo to decide to leave his womenfolk on their own and travel to the coast to try to earn some money. He won’t return before spring. And they definitely don’t expect that Frederika and Dorotea will discover the mutilated corpse of one of their new neighbors, a man named Eriksson, in a glade where they’d intended to pasture their goats.

When Eriksson’s death comes to light, some of the neighbors attribute the savage attack to a bear, others suggest wolf, but Maija who is an earth-woman by training—a midwife and healer—insists the death was caused by a human agent. Almost certainly, a murderer is in their midst.

Yet no one misses Eriksson, a man who made it his business to ferret out and exploit people’s weaknesses. “Sometimes God did take the right people” seems to be the view. In this tiny community in which everyone knows everyone else and, presumably, most of their secrets and hidden grudges, the layers of deception keep being peeled back.

In the region’s central town the immense power of the church resides in the person of the priest, Olaus Arosander. He starts out as Maija’s adversary, skeptical of her belief Eriksson was murdered. While he doesn’t trust her kind of knowledge, he has secrets of his own that put him at odds with his church’s views. Over time, Maija and Arosander both become committed to determining what happened to Eriksson, and whether his death is the end of violence on Blackåsen Mountain or the beginning.

The notion of wolves takes on both a corporeal and metaphoric significance in the story. It becomes clear that predators are ravaging the countryside, preying on the community’s weakest members. Darkness, too, means more than the months’ long absence of sunlight. It also refers to the special knowledge—call it intuition, call it the ability to read signs, call it something more, but don’t dare call it sorcery—that helps Maija sort truth from misdirection. In that place and time, such “special knowledge” was a potentially deadly inheritance, one that Maija received from her dead grandmother and which she fears has been passed on to Frederika, who doesn’t yet understand its power or how to control it.

Wolf Winter works well as an audio book. Bresnahan’s narration is clear, and the characters are easy to distinguish both by the reader’s voice and Ekbäck’s helpful cues regarding the speaker’s identity. This is a perfect listen for the shortest days of the year—preferably in front of a fire, in heavy socks and woolly robe, because the novel’s chills come from both the weather so ably described and the hearts of the characters. Another great contribution to the Nordic noir tradition.

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

***Deceits of Borneo

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hong kong, woman traveler

(photo: ksobolev0, pixabay)

By H.N. Wake – This is the second full-length thriller by H.N. Wake and a repeat outing for her gutsy female protagonist, CIA Agent Mac Ambrose. (Read my interview with H.N. Wake to find out what she loves about this character.) The action takes place in Hong Kong and various spots in Malaysia—Kuala Lumpur, Miri, and the rain forests of Sarawak Province—with occasional scenes back at the CIA mothership in Langley, Virginia. Wake’s familiarity with Asia and Southeast Asia, gained during more than 20 years’ working overseas for the U.S. government, stands her in good stead here, as the ease and detail with which she describes these lush locales effectively transport the reader right into the setting.

Mac is deep under cover in Hong Kong, at a new job in the Risk Analysis department of a major international financial institution called Legion Bank, and her real identity is known only to one of the bank’s executives. When another Non-Official Cover CIA agent—Josh Halloway—goes missing out of Kuala Lumpur, Mac’s boss back in Langley tells her to find him.

Gradually we learn her concern about Halloway’s disappearance is not just collegial solidarity, it’s also personal. Halloway is handsome, charming, and intriguing, and they’d met and connected in Hong Kong. Mac was falling for him. The Bank provides cover for her search, when she’s assigned to the risk appraisal of a potential Malaysian client, Alghaba Financing, a major player in Malaysia’s timber and palm oil industries. If the bank takes the company on, it will receive millions of dollars in fees.

Given the opportunity to kill two birds at once, Mac flies to the Malaysian capital. When she checks in with the U.S. Embassy, she finds the ambassador has a chip on his shoulder the size of a teak log and is unwilling to help her. Evidence on the ground is scant, but Mac picks up Halloway’s trail, and the game is literally afoot in the jungles of Borneo. Wake’s choice of a female protagonist with the investigatory skills, cunning, and physical courage to undertake her next steps make this a refreshing antidote to the overdose of testosterone in many thrillers.

However, the goings-on back at Langley aren’t as persuasive. They add complication and some coincidence that detract from the main story. Perhaps it’s a reflection of how people in the field always regard the folks back at the main office: “What are they thinking?” At times Mac’s own behavior is a bit murky. She frequently presses a little too hard in trying to get information from a potential informant, and I never did figure out how she got the key to Josh’s room at the Miri Beach Resort.

What Mac discovers in the rain forest, the lengths people will go to keep her discovery a secret, and the fate of Josh Halloway are the key questions of this compelling story. Wake knows how to put together an exciting narrative, an exotic and interesting setting, and believable characters. H.N. Wake is an exciting new author worth tracking.

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

***Impact

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moon

(photo: halfrain, creative commons license)

By Douglas Preston – This 2010 thriller with a sci-fi premise keeps the reader guessing—and turning pages—start to finish. And, what’s with the moon? Our benign space companion has suffered calamitously in several books I’ve read this year. Not good for us earthlings.

In Impact, Princeton dropout Abbey Straw uses her new telescope to snap a photo of a brilliant meteor coming to ground somewhere in the island-dotted vastness of Muscongus Bay. “It ruined your picture,” says her friend Jackie, peering over her shoulder. “Are you kidding? It made the picture!”

The astronomers all guess the meteor landed somewhere in the Atlantic, where it’s lost forever. Abbey, armed with her photo and data from a buoy showing no sea level perturbations at the time of the crash, believes it hit an island and she can find it. Selling a meteorite will do a great deal to replenish her empty bank account. If she gets there first.

Meanwhile, the President’s science adviser has sent former CIA agent Wyman Ford to Southeast Asia. He’s to investigate the source of some strange new gems finding their way into circulation up from the seedier layers of the international gem market. Called honeys, they’re beautiful, but laced with deadly radioactivity—Americium 241, an isotope of an element not found in nature. The U.S. government, fearing the stones could be ground down to make a dirty bomb, wants a quick and quiet mission to investigate, not the heavy boots of the Agency. If Ford goes, he goes as a freelance. No cover, no backup.

And, Mark Corso, working on a government-funded Mars observation project visits his former professor and mentor’s home and discovers his body—a murder the police describe as a random robbery-gone-wrong. The dead professor had been obsessed with tantalizing evidence that something on Mars is doing the impossible, emitting gamma rays, and sent Mark classified data and an illegal hard drive to prove it. Mark is determined to follow his lead, even though project managers forbid him to spend time on it.

These three pieces of the story come together, of course. Hidden in the islands, in the jungles of Cambodia, and in a crater on Mars’s moon Deimos, is a literally earth-shattering threat. But before that can be understood, more than one opponent is determined to stop them.

The plot moves along energetically and the characters of Abbey and Ford are engaging and believable. Corso is more than a bit irresponsible and self-satisfied, heedless of consequences. In fact, all the staff at the National Propulsion Facility (modeled on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) are two-dimensional. Preston expertly describes the settings Abbey and Ford must negotiate, whether the Cambodian jungles, the labyrinth of Washington, D.C., science agencies, or the stormy waters of the Atlantic.

This book “dances on the edge of sci-fi but definitely is structured like a contemporary thriller,” says Amy Rogers on the review site ScienceThrillers. I enjoyed it, although at the very end, just when the reader understands the significance of the book’s title, he pulled his punches. He has a new one in the Wyman Ford series (The Kraken Project), and I’d certainly read it, too.