Category Archives: thriller

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.

****The Breaks

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streetwalker, San Francisco

(photo: David Selsky, creative commons license)

By Eden Sharp – In the hardboiled thriller The Breaks, readers are introduced to two engaging and memorable characters—private investigator Angela McGlynn and her sometime associate John Knox. McGlynn is self-assured and sassy, a computer hacking whiz and martial arts expert, not above using her attractiveness to lure bad guys into compromising positions. Knox is a recently discharged U.S. Marine with PTSD haunted by his Afghanistan experiences. McGlynn takes on Knox as a favor to a friend, who thinks the man needs something to occupy him, a way to feel useful again, and, as the case she’s embarking on turns darker and more dangerous, she’s damn glad to have him at her side.

This thriller takes place in San Francisco, where you can go from exclusive neighborhood to dangerous gang territory in a few steps. “The worst parts were only blocks away from the tourist traps and not marked on the map. It was easy to stray off track.” All strata of society are compressed on that small peninsula, and McGlynn and Knox stray way off track in this complex story, presented in short scenes from multiple points of view. McGlynn narrates in the first person, keeping her in the center of the action, but the scenes from Knox and others are third-person. There are quite a few characters to keep in your head, and I often had to use the search function to find the first mention of a name to place them.

Trouble begins when a retired suburban high school teacher asks McGlynn to find his teenage daughter. She’s run away from home, missing two weeks, and the police aren’t doing much. About all the father can tell McGlynn about the girl’s disappearance is that she had a serious cocaine habit and threatened to turn to prostitution to support it. Through her contacts in the community of working girls, McGlynn finds who the girl has been running with.

McGlynn suspects the girl was snatched because of an identity mix-up. She was carrying the stolen phone and I.D. of the daughter of a big-time narcotics smuggler. The police are trying to pull off an ambitious sting operation against him. But as they move forward, they keep tripping over McGlynn and Knox, and they aren’t happy.

Meanwhile, apart from her paying work for clients like the distraught dad, McGlynn uses her hacking skills to expose child pornographers. She’s tracked down a big-time seller of these images who lives in the city and is scheming to put him out of business.

These three skeins of criminality and investigation inevitably become tangled, which makes for a challenging guessing game among McGlynn, Knox, the cops, and the reader. Sharp has a talent for energetic prose that keeps this complicated story moving and the ability to put her characters in credible danger. The choreography of the final showdown scene is a little confusing, though the outcome is clear.

Ironically, I learned more about Knox’s character and motivations than McGlynn’s, despite the first-person narration. It makes for an interesting switch in expectations that McGlynn reacts to situations (after sex, in dangerous straits) in a coolly logical way typically associated with male protagonists, whereas Knox, because the trauma of his war experience is just under the skin, has more emotional reactions. One of the most interesting and insightful aspects of the novel is McGlynn’s running analysis of people’s psychology in various situations.

Sharp has a few troublesome writing tics, and the novel would have benefited from copy-editing and proofreading. Nevertheless, it’s an engaging read, and I look forward to more from her and the further exploits of McGlynn and Knox.

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

“He’s Got a Gun!”

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gun, firearm, weapon

(photo: r. nial bradshaw, creative commons license)

The late Elmore Leonard advised budding crime-writers, “when your story starts to drag, have someone pull out a gun.” Maybe too many of us have been following that advice, because several recent books aim to inject more accuracy into the portrayal of guns (and other weaponry). Errors make some readers swear off a writer and, as the introduction to The Writer’s Guide to Weapons: A Practical Reference for Using Firearms and Knives in Fiction
explains, “no wrath is greater than that of firearms enthusiasts.”

According to a recent post in Jane Friedman’s excellent “Resources for Writers” blog, written by Benjamin Sobieck, who also wrote the Writer’s Guide, above, here are key points about guns that writers should keep in mind to avoid those credibility-shattering results:

  1. Clip and magazine are not the same. A clip holds cartridges that go into a magazine. Most modern firearms don’t require a clip. But it sounds good, no? Clip: Manly. Magazine: Better Homes & Gardens
  2. Bullet is not the same as shell, round, or cartridge. You never find empty bullets on the ground after a shooting. Casings, yes.
  3. The whole pumping of a shotgun or cocking the hammer of a handgun is a sound cue from the movies, intended for intimidation, but, as Sobieck says, “less to do with looking tough and more to do with being stupid.” These extra and in most cases unnecessary pumps/cocks just “dump unfired ammunition onto the ground.” Why would anyone intimidate another person with a firearm, if it weren’t ready to fire? Good question. Ask your author.
  4. While this would seem to be an “it goes without saying” kind of thing, a character should never look down the barrel of a gun to see whether it’s loaded. Who’d be that stupid? I had a clip showing a tv character actually doing this, but it has disappeared. Sorry!
  5. And, perhaps the most pervasive of all gun errors in both news and entertainment media currently, the term “assault weapon.” This actually is meaningless. ANY weapon can be used for assault. The industry doesn’t use it. Sobieck says “tactical rifle (or shotgun), machine gun, submachine gun, fully automatic rifle,” or even “gun” are more meaningful than “assault weapon.”
  6. The term “automatic weapon” is often elided to mean either a semi-automatic weapon (which shoots one time with each trigger pull) or a “fully automatic weapon” which fires many times with a single pull. The idea of “automatic” weapons needs to be well defined. Fully automatic weapons are not very accurate after the first few shots because of recoil, so long, Rambo-inspired bursts of fire are actually useless if the goal is to hit anything.

Finally, in his book, Sobieck includes “Ten Golden Tips for Writing about Weapons,” which includes this advice: “If it’s in a movie or on television, it’s probably inaccurate.”