Category Archives: thriller

****Minute Zero

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Africa, Sunset

(photo: Andrew Moore, creative commons license)

By Todd Moss – If you missed Todd Moss’s dramatic 2013 debut with The Golden Hour, catch up with his protagonist Judd Ryker in his second thriller set in an unstable Africa, the recently released Minute Zero for more political chicanery, assassination, theft and corruption at the most brazen level.

Ryker is an academic working in the uneasy surroundings of the U.S. State Department. The careerists don’t trust him, his brief—as head of the department’s new Crisis Reaction Unit—puts him outside the bureaucracy’s normal chain of command, and in many ways he’s in over his head. What landed him there was his theory that in every international crisis there is a short period—the golden hour—in which events can be successfully directed toward a positive conclusion. Once a situation settles, that opportunity is lost.

This novel elaborates that idea, with the proposition that at times of extreme national disruption, there is an even briefer period of breakdown, when outcomes are uncertain and dramatic change is possible. For U.S. diplomats, Ryker counsels, that “zero minute” offers a unique opportunity.

Moss places this thriller in Zimbabwe, under the long-time leadership of fictional President Winston Tinotenda, a man in his 90s (clearly modeled on IRL president Robert Mugabe), aided by his considerably younger national security advisor, General Simba Chimurenga. This pair did not retain power for decades without a hefty dose of corruption, violence, and heavy-handed political tactics. Now the country faces an election pitting Tinotenda against a formidable challenger, a woman lawyer, Gugu Mutonga.

In this situation, U.S. goals are clear and limited, says the State Department’s Africa lead, Bill Rogerson: a safe, peaceful vote and stability into the post-election period, translated as “no bodies in the streets.” Tinotenda’s hold on the office look like a certainty, but Mutonga has strong support among the country’s youth and in its southern region, and Ryker isn’t so sure the president can hold on. Disruption is in the air.

The Secretary of State asks Ryker to fly to Zimbabwe and demonstrate definitively that his crisis reaction analytics can work. But Rogerson considers Ryker a thorn in his side and is anxious to expel him from the body diplomatique. To thwart Ryker’s efforts, Rogerson colludes with the U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe—a rather dim political appointee counting the minutes until he can take up a new posting in London. Ryker’s wife Jessica is an agronomist working on African water purification projects. She provides helpful counsel to him as he negotiates these treacherous bureaucratic waters. Only over time does the reader begin to suspect Jessica has her own dangerous agenda.

The political and diplomatic chess game Ryker undertakes to protect American interests and the integrity of the vote is just as cutthroat as an assassination and its outcome can be just as fatal (at least to careers).

Moss is uniquely qualified to write his thrillers, having been the deputy assistant secretary of state covering 16 countries in West Africa. Currently, he’s chief operating officer and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. He’s also the author of four nonfiction books on international economic affairs and has taught at Georgetown University and the London School of Economics. Luckily for his readers, in addition to his solid background and experience, he knows how to tell a compelling story!

****Career of Evil

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package, box

(photo: Jonathan, creative commons license)

By Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling), narrated by Robert Glenister – Devotees of the heavy metal rock band Blue Öyster Cult will recognize that its allusive and sometimes violent lyrics give this book its title, chapter titles, and break headings. Chapter 1, for example, is “This Ain’t the Summer of Love.” Nor is it.

Former Army Special Investigator Cameron Strike runs a not-exactly-thriving London private detection business, aided by his attractive factotum Robin Ellacott. They have only two cases going when a delivery man shows up with a package addressed to Robin and containing the severed leg of a young girl. Strike can think of three people from his past with the misogynistic leanings, brutality, and sufficient grudge against him to make them suspects in such a crime and desirous to involve him in it. Sending a leg—instead of some other body part—seems a cruel reference to Strike’s own leg, lost in a land mine detonation in Afghanistan and replaced by a prosthesis.

Kinky theories also emerge, and Robin uncovers in their file of “nutter” letters one from a young woman who wanted to cut off her leg. Robin, a psychology major before leaving university, recognizes the syndrome. Her exploration of Internet sites for transabled people and Body Integrity Identity Disorder yields more leads.

Two of Strike’s suspects are people he encountered in the military. The third, Jeff Whittaker, is the much younger second husband of Strike’s mother. Strike is convinced Whittaker orchestrated her death from a heroin overdose, but he was acquitted. Strike and Robin reconstruct the decades-cold trails of their three suspects. They have plenty of time to do so, as publicity about the leg business has discouraged any other would-be clients. They are inevitably brought into conflict with the police, still smarting from previous cases in which Strike out-investigated them.

Meanwhile, Robin proceeds half-heartedly with her wedding plans, perpetually annoyed at fiancé Matthew’s repeated attempts to get her to quit her job and his apparent jealousy of Strike. Even her stalker can detect the chill between them. When Matthew reveals a secret of his own, she calls the wedding off. The book’s early action takes place around the time of the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and those festivities are a painful counterpoint to the couple’s unhappiness.

Galbraith has constructed a well paced, compelling narrative. She leaves a few clues on the table and could have had the main characters learn more about themselves, but few thrillers do that. It works well as an audiobook, narrated by Robert Glenister, because there is not an overabundance of characters and the pacing keeps the listener well engaged throughout its nearly 18 hours.

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

Spooky Reads

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haunted house

(photo: Sean MacEntee, creative commons license)

The book-obsessed websites haven’t overlooked the opportunity to capitalize on the scary underpinnings of the Halloween season. A reader poll by the folks at BookRiot yielded this top 10 list, with The Shining scariest of all:

  • The Shining by Stephen King
  • It by Stephen King
  • Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
  • The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
  • Pet Sematary by Stephen King
  • House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
  • The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
  • The Stand by Stephen King
  • Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
  • Bird Box by Joshua Malerman

When you recall that Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son, that family has lock on half the fright mindshare.

Not surprisingly, The American Scholar takes a more high-brow approach to its list of “Spooktacular Books,” with the only overlaps House of Leaves and The Haunting of Hill House.

No time to read whole books? Jonathan Sturgeon, writing for Flavorwire, has assembled 30 of the scariest moments from Western literature—going all the way back to 760 BCE. Once again, Shirley Jackson and Hill House make the bloody cut.

Bridge of Spies

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Tom Hanks, Bridge of Spies

Tom Hanks in Bridge of Spies

Stephen Spielberg’s riveting new film (trailer) portrays the real-life events and personalities that led to a historic U.S.-Soviet-East German prisoner exchange in the frozen depths of the Cold War. In 1962, in a divided Berlin, an accused Soviet spy is to be traded for two Americans, if all goes well. An off-the-books U.S. negotiator has led the Soviets and the East Germans separately to the brink of agreeing the exchange, but hostilities are strong, motives are complex, and success is far from guaranteed.

Based on the 2010 Giles Whittell book of the same name, the story centers around the intertwined fates of William Fisher, born Rudolf Abel, a British-born KGB agent whom the FBI arrested in New York; Francis Gary Powers, U.S. pilot of a super-secret U-2 spy plane shot down while flying over Russia; and Frederic Pryor, an American graduate student who finds himself on the wrong side of the new Berlin Wall and in the hands of the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police.

Spielberg tells these men’s stories, but centers on the role of U.S. insurance attorney James Donovan in the negotiations. Donovan’s role initially is to defend Abel in his trial on espionage charges. He takes on this thankless task, even though everyone in the country, including the judge in the case, believes Abel is guilty. However, American legal processes need to be followed, if only to show the world that every prisoner receives a fair trial (an ironic punctiliousness half a century later). Inevitably, Abel is convicted, but at least Donovan persuades the judge not to invoke the death penalty. It’s a controversial choice for Donovan to decide to appeal the verdict, and one that puts himself—and perhaps his family and career—in some danger.

When Powers’s plane is shot down, the possibility of a prisoner swap is immediately seized upon by the CIA. They want Powers back. He knows too much. Donovan is asked to negotiate an Abel-Powers trade, unofficially. What he encounters on all sides in wintry Berlin is stubborn resistance salted with suffocating paranoia. He also hears about the unlucky American student and insists he be part of the deal, which the CIA rejects. They’re not interested.

The acting is terrific, especially Tom Hanks as Donovan and Mark Rylance as Abel. In smaller roles, the CIA agents and Soviet and East German negotiators are suitably opaque and blustering. Amy Ryan, Donovan’s wife, is always excellent. They have the benefit of working from a strong script by Matt Charman, Ethan Coen, and Joel Coen. I particularly liked how, whenever Donovan asks Abel if he is worried about some particular outcome, Abel responds, “Would it help?”

The look of the film is exactly right—cold, forbidding—and the Glienicke Bridge, site of the hoped-for exchange is a desolate place. Spielberg’s handling of Donovan as “the standing man,” underscoring a metaphor introduced by Abel, works. If only he’d resisted a few message-heavy Hollywood touches (East Germans versus U.S. children scrambling over a wall, for example), it would have been perfect.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 92%; audiences 91%.

*****Clockers

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The Wire

Larry Gilliard, Jr., as D’Angelo Barksdale, second from right, on his perch, running his game in The Wire

By Richard Price – When I read Richard Price’s new crime novel The Whites earlier this year, I knew I needed to loop around and read his 1992 classic, widely considered his “best.” It really is knock-your-socks-off. In alternating chapters, it adopts the point of view of Strike, a young crack dealer in the housing projects of fictional Dempsey, New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, and homicide detective Rocco Klein.

Strike is a lower-level dealer who wants to get out of it, but without even a high school education, he can’t see any other path forward. Rocco is a seen-it-all investigator working in the county prosecutor’s office. What brings these two together is the murder confession by Strike’s straight-arrow brother Victor. Strike was supposed to make the hit, and didn’t, but he doesn’t think Victor did it either, and he wants to save his brother whatever way he can. Rocco figures Strike for the shooter, but can’t get Victor to change his story.

It’s a story about poor people, mostly black, and lost fathers, in which a few heroic mothers struggle to maintain family order. Strike’s cocaine- and crack-fueled world (he himself never uses the product) is under constant yet ineffectual harassment by federal, state, and local police, housing police, and narcotics officers. The homicide detectives, who are a little higher on the law enforcement pecking order, are less frequent visitors to this milieu. They have their own agenda and sometimes cooperate with the other authorities, and sometimes not. Strike can never be sure where loyalties lie, even those of his own runners (the “clockers,” because the drug market operates 24/7), who may ally with rival drug lords at any time. He certainly can’t trust Rocco, who is always playing games of his own.

What makes the book so powerful are the deep portraits of the characters. Both the main players are both strong and weak, the reader likes and loathes them in almost equal measure. Supporting characters—Rocco’s partner Mazilli and Strike’s boss Rodney, especially—are fully drawn and absolutely believable. The writing, including the characters’ dialog, is pitch-perfect.

Price was one of the writers for the best-tv-ever series [!!], The Wire, and reading this book after seeing the show, I certainly saw echoes of some of its notable characters: D’Angelo sitting on his perch in the projects, managing a team of young runners; Omar, the invincible hit-man cut down by a child; Officer Thomas Hauc, the violent and racist enforcer. Spike Lee made it into a movie in 1995 starring Mekhi Phifer, Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, and Delroy Lindo.

Even though the narcotics picture has changed in the past 23 years, this remains a riveting book because of the strength of its story and the social dysfunctions it lays bare, which are still, by and large, unresolved.

****Midnight in Europe

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Guernica, tapestry, Picasso

(photo: copyright by Ceridwen, creative commons license)*

By Alan Furst – A new Alan Furst book in my to-read stack is a temptation hard to resist. His ability to evoke the thickening clouds of dread gathering over Europe in the 1930s is unsurpassed, while we, with the benefit of hindsight, would like to reach into the story and propel the characters into different directions and decisions.

This thriller concerns efforts to get weapons to the anti-Fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that gave the Nazis a chance to flex their military muscle on the side of Francisco Franco. The war served as a grim prelude to World War II. This is the Spain of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and the short stories of Julian Zabalbeascoa, the most recent, “Gernika,” published in the fall 2015 Glimmer Train.

In Furst’s novel, a Spanish lawyer working in Paris agrees to help in the arms-buy arrangements, which isn’t easy, as several countries have embargoed munitions shipments to Spain, and spies are everywhere. A little romance, too. I particularly like how Furst takes ordinary people—by that I mean people whom readers can identify with, who don’t know all the secrets of arcane martial arts or who in college did not letter in six grueling sports, including sharpshooting, of course, or who aren’t alumni of elite undercover military units—and puts them in situations that test their wits and their nerve.

I’ve read all of Furst’s books and know how he works. Yet putting myself in his hands remains an absorbing and tension-filled ride through an ominous and bitter historical time.

*This tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s famous anti-war painting “Guernica,” created in response to the Spanish Civil War is interesting in itself. It is on display here in The Whitechapel Gallery, the only British venue to exhibit the painting in 1939. According to the gallery, “The original work is now too fragile to leave Madrid; this tapestry was loaned to the gallery, for its re-opening, by its owner Margaretta Rockefeller. Normally it hangs in the United Nations in New York where in 2003 it was controversially veiled prior to a speech by Colin Powell on the eve of the Iraq war.”

****The Cartel

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Mexico, drug cartels

(graphic by Christopher Dombres, creative commons license)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mexico, drug cartels

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

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

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

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

Mexico, drug cartels

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

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

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

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

*****Ghost Fleet

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navy ships, ghost fleet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****Seveneves

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Perseids, meteor shower, night

(photo: David Kingham, creative commons license)

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

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

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

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

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

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

****Blue Labyrinth

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apothecary bottles, poison

(photo: Michael Flick, Creative Commons license)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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