Category Archives: thriller

Precipice

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One of the best books I’ve read this year is Robert Harris’s new political novel, Precipice. He has a penchant for looking at historical fact through the lens of fiction, and in this instance has a fascinating trove of detail to work with. The book begins in July 1914, when 27-year-old Venetia Stanley receives one of her frequent letters from UK Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, 35 years her senior. The story isn’t a thriller in the conventional sense, but the stakes are so high, the risks so great, and the potential for serious crimes no more than a hair’s-breadth away that it earns its place in that category.

As the story begins, Asquith has been Prime Minister for six years. The country—is mere weeks from the beginning of the military catastrophe of World War I. Not only is the world “on the precipice” of disaster, Asquith himself is courting political calamity, with many, many tough calculations and decisions looming. Yet he finds time and mental energy to devote to this astonishing epistolary romance. It isn’t terribly surprising that a charismatic, handsome politician would have an affair. Goodness knows, political leaders are hardly models of marital fidelity. The surprise is the degree of his obsession.

The public first learned of this correspondence when about half the letters were published in 1982, and history buffs may be familiar with this story, but it was new to me. Thus, I was particular struck by Harris’s assurance that all the Prime Minister’s letters quoted are authentic, as are excerpts from other official documents. On his last day at Number 10, after being ousted by ambitious David Lloyd George, Asquith burned Venetia’s letters to him. Now Harris has created her half of the conversation in this book.

Asquith writes Venetia not just an occasional letter, but an astonishing 560 over a three-year period, at times as many as three a day. He writes them during deliberations of the war council, when he should be writing speeches, during cabinet meetings, and he sends her copies of telegrams and other official and secret correspondence. At critical points in the government’s deliberations leading up to and during the war, he is severely distracted.

You may start out with some sympathy for them both. He is under almost unbearable pressure, surrounded by officials whose motives are partially or wholly self-interested. He cannot confide in his wife, as Harris describes her, because she is highly opinionated and indiscreet. She wants so badly to be an insider, but her behavior assures she cannot be. When he first became Prime Minister, she referred to herself as the Prime Ministress, but he soon put a stop to that.

Harris invents a fictional Scotland Yard operative, Paul Deemer, who’s assigned to read their correspondence, which is being intercepted, and determine whether it’s being leaked to German spies. It’s filled with endearments, but also contains war plans, troop movements, and political maneuverings. Venetia knows more about what is going on at the top of British government than almost anyone else. Plus, she’s privy to the PM’s take on things, which in his hands-off, wait-and-see management style, plenty of other people would like to know.

Venetia, as Harris portrays her, justifies her closeness to Prime, as she calls him, because she serves a unique role as his confidant and safety valve. He relies on her judgment and loyalty. If that were the extent of their relationship (the full extent is unknown, but if you read between the lines of his correspondence, you may have an opinion)—it would be irregular, possibly traitorous, but understandable. Gradually, however, his preoccupation with her becomes oppressive.

As wartime events mount in their seriousness, the burden of all her special knowledge becomes almost unbearable, and she resolves to create a life of her own. She takes up a nursing course with an eye to tending wounded soldiers in France, a move the PM finds almost intolerable. She can no longer be available to him as often as he would wish and his letters take on a whining, wheedling tone, that you may find more appropriate to a fifteen-year-old boy, not a mature, successful man in his sixties. You may have to keep reminding yourself that these are his actual words.

As an experienced writer of historical fiction, Harris has a good eye for period detail and the telling anecdote that will create believable, almost overpowering drama. In a great many thrillers, you may not care all that much about the characters, but in Precipice, you do and you must. It’s a terrific book.

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Last Night at Villa Lucia by Simon McCleave

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What could be more appealing than a murder mystery set in an elegant villa high on a hill overlooking the Tuscan countryside? Prolific crime novelist Simon McCleave’s Last Night at Villa Lucia feels like a vacation from the first page.

A few flies in the ointment—or in this case, vodka—soon appear. The middle-aged woman who owns Villa Lucia has a significant drinking problem, once controlled with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, but now seriously relapsed. This, and the death that follows, is all foreshadowed in an unnecessary prologue, lifted from a place well into the story. Chapter One rewinds to two days earlier with the arrival of a new set of guests—the overbearing, deeply entitled Harry Collard, his mousy wife Zoe, and their handsome nineteen-year-old son, Charlie.

When the family arrives at the villa, they find their hostess, Cerys, who’s divorced, and her luscious daughter Lowri, about Charlie’s age. One plot point boldly forecasts itself from the moment Harry meets Lowri.

So. At least until the police arrive, you have two couples (one dad absent, but very “present” in the minds of his ex-wife and daughter). Two young adults. And, rounding out the cast, the two people who keep the place humming—Lucia De Nardi, the maid, who grew up in the villa before her uncle lost possession of it, a sore point for sure, and her husband, Lorenzo, who has a sketchy past and takes care of the pool and the gardens.

You see some of the English husbands’ arrogant behavior, in real time, in flashback, and in what the women say about them. This story might fail the Bechdel test—which checks whether a book or movie “features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man.” (Thanks, Wikipedia.) Granted, Cerys and Zoe do occasionally talk about fashion or food.

You know from the prologue that someone ends up in the infinity pool, and they aren’t swimming. That death occurs, about two days into the Collards’ stay, and by then you probably have a favored candidate for drowning and a universe of potential motives.

McCleave effectively conveys the enervating heat, the villa’s isolation, and the effects of too much alcohol, so that the arrival of the sober Policia di Stato Detective Franco Saachi is a relief. Naturally, the villa occupants don’t tell him everything. At least not right off. In a postscript, McCleave tells readers that his intentions for this book were to explore toxic masculinity, alcoholism, and abusive relationships. He achieved this goal, with a few caveats. Making both husbands so very toxic doesn’t give the narrative much nuance. It was good to see Cerys and Zoe open up to each other, and good for them, too. Cerys’s preoccupation with alcohol became a bit redundant, but it was probably an accurate way to portray this particular addiction. McCleave does give his characters some grace at the book’s end, as a reward—to you and them—for suffering through their travails. Meanwhile, you can enjoy the spectacular setting.

Looking for a Weekend Movie?

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Here are brief takes on four films we’ve seen lately. All have good points. The one I enjoyed most is first.

The Cowboy and the Queen
You may have seen previous coverage of horse whisperer Monty Roberts. Now you see him in a reflective mood, looking back over the shape of his career. Son of an abusive dad, he was determined not to follow that path (trailer). By watching horses in the wild, he began to understand how they communicated, and he adopted their approach in his training. “Breaking horses,” he says, amounts to breaking their spirit; they’re abused until they give up. He doesn’t do it that way. So, where does the Queen come in? We’re talking about Elizabeth II, late monarch of Britain, who read articles about Roberts and wanted him to coach some of her equerries in his methods. Like most traditional U.S. horsemen, they were skeptical. They relied on using their aggressive techniques for a week or two until the horse would accept a saddle and, ultimately, a rider. Roberts could achieve this in less than twenty minutes. The Queen comes across beautifully, and so does the cowboy! A real feel-good film. For a fictional take on humane horse-training, there’s the wonderful 2018 film, The Rider.

The Critic
You can’t fault Ian McKellan’s portrayal of an odious 1930s theater critic for a dying London newspaper (trailer). He delights in skewering the shows and performers he reviews, and, although at first I found him a nice contrast to the starchy newspaper publisher, when he roped an ambitious female lead into his manipulative schemes, I gave up on him. The performances are all good, but he’s no hero.
Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Rating: 47%; Audiences: 73%.

Between the Temples
Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) is the nebbishy cantor of a synagogue with a transparently ambitious rabbi (trailer). Through stress and anxiety, he’s lost his voice and is near suicide. Coming to his rescue (in more ways than one) is Mrs. Kessler (Carol Kane), his elementary school choral teacher. No one in their families is sure what the relationship is, exactly, they just know they don’t like it. Some good jokes, some outlandish family behavior. A pleasant film with a few slow spots.
Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Rating: 85%; Audiences: 41%.

Skincare
This thriller loosely inspired by a true story, centers on a Hollywood entrepreneur who has developed her own line of facial products, using European (fancy!) ingredients (trailer). Her struggling business faces an existential crisis when a competitor moves in across the street. Violence ensues (nothing too graphic). Entertaining, and Elizabeth Banks is perfect as the increasingly frantic beauty maven. Coincidentally, I recently read a short piece about her in The New Yorker, where she talked about difficulty getting parts in her early career, in part because “I wasn’t pretty enough.” In this film, she’s a knockout!
Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Rating: 65%; Audiences: 64%.

Correction Line

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Craig Terlson’s crime thriller, Correction Line, underscores how badly off track people can become if they just keep doing what they’re doing. Surveyors learned this in a late-1800s project to survey the vast prairies of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba and divide them into equal sections. They soon realized the longitudinal (north-south) meridians they established would converge as they reached higher latitudes, so that truly square sections would be impossible to achieve. They needed correction lines.

Just as the survey’s meridian lines met at a single point, the characters in Terlson’s story converge on a destructive human nexus named Dave. Like a black hole, he draws people and their energy to him. Being involved with Dave is extremely risky business. His career has gone from bringing in liquor, to marijuana, to hard drugs, to human trafficking. Dave doesn’t appear all that much in the story, yet he is everywhere in it. He’s the motivating force behind almost everything Terlson’s fascinating cast of characters does.

Terlson uses the wide open prairie of western Canada to great effect, as the characters range over its empty spaces in their pickup trucks and old Dodges and Pontiacs. Much of the novel is set several decades ago, and the gas-guzzlers cruise the surveyors’ grid and take the gentle curves—the correction lines—that adjust the strict geometry. He describes the stunning sunrises, the farm fields and grasslands that stretch to the horizon, and the lonely dwellings. When it seems you can see forever, the sky becomes more present. Terlson’s descriptions are more than painting pretty pictures. You need this solid grounding in the familiar, because what the characters are up to will stretch your perspective.

A young woman named Lucy has a past relationship with Dave, but she’s disappeared. Now he has cancer, and he wants her back. Alive. Lucy’s late mother made a strange potion he thinks will cure him, and Lucy makes something similar, but does it work? Dave puts his best man, Lawrence, on the job, and Lawrence recruits the rootless Curtis to help him search.

Whether she can replicate her mother’s strange mixture or not, her real talent is precognition. Maybe she doesn’t know exactly what bad thing is going to happen, but she knows something bad is heading her way. And it isn’t Roy, the failing door-to-door encyclopedia salesman who’s taken up with her.

Roy is a good guy in way over his head, with the opportunity to do something worthwhile for a change. He also has a sixth sense when trouble is brewing. Of course, this realization isn’t much of a stretch, when violent armed men are lurking about. Houses get destroyed. Cars, even big ones, don’t have a chance. Hospitals are visited. Much of the drama plays out along the roads surrounded by those endless fields, and, as you gradually get to know these dodgy characters, you come to like most of them too. You may yearn for their travels to make the slight angle of correction that would bend their lives in new directions—somewhere Dave is not.

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Dark Streets and Dark Deeds

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The last two films in our class on neo-noir were A Simple Plan and the remake of the classic noir, Nightmare Alley (which I’d seen in a movie theater and was NOT looking forward to!).

A Simple Plan
I guess we should have learned from previously seeing the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple that, when it comes to murderous intent, nothing is simple. And it sure isn’t in Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, written by Scott B. Smith, author of the novel the film is based on (trailer).

Straight-arrow Hank Mitchell (played by Bill Paxton), his slower-witted brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), and Jacob’s friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) discover a small plane that has crashed in the snowy woods of rural Minnesota. They check on the pilot, who’s dead, of course, and discover a duffel stuffed with more than $4 million. Whose is it? What to do with it?

As you will anticipate, this stash brings out all the characters’ worst instincts. Even Hank and his wife (Bridget Fonda in her last film before retiring from the screen), who start out wanting to be on the up-and-up, are at risk of succumbing to the lure of unexpected wealth. This makes the film on one hand an exploration of ethical behavior and on another a thriller full of menace and surprise. While I couldn’t warm up to any of the characters, Thornton’s performance alone makes it worth a viewing

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 90%; audiences: 81%.

Nightmare Alley
Guillermo Del Toro’s 2021 remake of the 1947 noir classic, which starred Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, and Colleen Gray, was the sixth and final film in our neo-noir class (trailer). The acting in the new version can’t be faulted, with stars Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett [wearing a LOT of red lipstick], Toni Collette, and Rooney Mara, along with Willem Dafoe, David Strathairn, and Richard Jenkins. They all do a great job.

\Cooper plays charming, ambitious Stanton Carlisle, who’s apparently just killed his father and is looking for a fresh start in life. He finds work doing odd jobs for a seedy traveling carnival. The movie is set in 1939, and the carnival includes all the cheesy acts and mysterious biological specimens in jars that you can imagine.

Carlisle observes the system that the show’s mentalist uses to “read the minds” of the patrons and eventually goes on the road with his partner Molly to do the same work wearing a tuxedo at high-class nightclubs. Disaster is inevitable.

The remake (2h, 30 m) adds all the content about the father, whereas the 1947 version (1h, 51m) added an upbeat closing scene to assuage producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s concerns about commercial potential. Both versions were based on a 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 80%; audiences 68%.

Our Class
The neo-noir film class was a Princeton Adult School program, taught by Mark Schwartzberg, who holds a PhD in English literature from NYU, and much of his research has been in film studies. He’s taught at the high school and college levels in New York and New Jersey, and many film classes at the Adult School. His—and several of our fellow students’—knowledge about film, including the gossipy bits, is encyclopedic. A real pleasure!

The Missing Family

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The Missing Family is the latest in Tim Weaver’s popular series of thrillers featuring missing-persons investigator David Raker. Here, Weaver presents an impossible crime, the unexpected tentacles of which stretch clear from England across the Atlantic to the North American continent.

Sarah Fowler hires Raker to solve the mysterious disappearance of her family a year earlier. After a day at a favorite Dartmoor lake, her husband, teenage son, and his girlfriend row the family’s twenty-foot dinghy out onto the water one last time. Drowsy from the sun, Sarah briefly falls asleep—her wristwatch confirms she napped for no more than a minute or two—until her toddler, Mable, awakens her. Halfway across the lake, the dinghy bobs, empty. The police are baffled. The boat’s too far out for the trio to have swum to shore in the available time, not to mention the girlfriend’s arm was in a cast. They find no evidence of violence and have no witnesses.

You don’t stay with the grieving Sarah long, though. In Los Angeles, detectives from two different departments—eventually three jurisdictions—are baffled by a trio of shootings. Five bodies, killed by bullets typically used in hunting rifles, are found in remote areas. Far apart, there’s nothing to link them, and they continue for years as separate cold cases.

In yet a third plotline, at a massive London-area casino resort, the Skyline, a high-rolling gambler and casino investor is viciously stabbed to death. He and the two brothers who own the casino have been best friends for years. Despite the owners’ determination to find the murderer, security camera footage of the victim in the frequent company of another man is notably—possibly suspiciously—uninformative. Who was this stranger?

The brothers also own the world’s largest casino, The Afrique, in Las Vegas. (Coincidentally, I was at a conference in Las Vegas while reading this book, which was almost too much verisimilitude!) Weaver certainly captures the over-the-top, mildly uneasy, anything-can-happen casino buzz.

The suspected murderer returns to the Skyline, is identified (facial recognition software at work), detained, and put in one of the casino’s secure holding cells under guard. When the police arrive to arrest him, the locked cell is empty. It’s another missing person case, which cries out for Raker’s assistance. Raker’s investigations—the missing family and the casino murder and disappearance—work in tandem, while you learn about the West Coast murders through the eyes of the California detectives. A lot is going on. You may suspect that all three plot lines will eventually weave together, but how?

Though the plot is complex, Weaver’s chapters are short and keep things moving. Sometimes he tries a little too hard to end each chapter with a startling revelation, just before the next chapter switches to another plot. That said, you’ll encounter quite a few nifty surprises.

The book is written in both first-person (the Raker chapters) and third-person (all the others), which effectively provides immediacy from the lead detective, plus the differing points of view and voices of other characters. It’s never confusing. Overall, an entertaining puzzle.

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Imaginations on Fire

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As news of the Southern California Line Fire explodes, another in a long line of catastrophes, authors have taken note. Fire’s destructiveness reveals heroism, and can equally well hide dastardly deeds. These thrillers have some strong points, and I also recommend the nonfiction Fire Weather by John Vaillant. You’ll discover real-life heroes (and villains) and understand fire’s dangers much better.

What Fire Brings
From the first pages of Rachel Howzell Hall’s new psychological thriller, What Fire Brings, Bailey Meadows’s situation is fraught with deception. This young Black woman has finagled a writing internship with noted thriller author Jack Beckham, but she isn’t a writer. She’s secretly working toward obtaining her private investigator’s license, and wants to use this opportunity to find out what happened to a woman who disappeared near Beckham’s Topanga Canyon property.

Topanga is a famously bohemian community west of Los Angeles whose hilly terrain and dense tree cover make it seem remote and wild. Thanks to Hall’s deft descriptions, the Canyon, with its one road in and one road out, becomes another potentially dangerous character here.

The story is told entirely from Bailey’s point of view. If you’ve read other works by Howzell, notably her debut, Land of Shadows, you won’t be surprised her narrative reads as if she is in an existential crisis. Living in two worlds makes her easily distracted—not the best headspace for conducting an investigation.

On a hike in the canyon, she sees a fire in the distance—too far away to pose any risk to the Beckham property, or is it? I read an advance reader copy of this book, which was labelled an ‘uncorrected proof.’ Typos will (presumably) be caught, and other changes may be made. However, when Bailey asks the fire chief about the maximum temperature a human body can tolerate, and he says 250 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s so wrong, I thought it was another intentional deception. The human body is about 60 percent water, which boils at 212 degrees F. Then he says higher temperatures are survivable “if there’s water around.” Water (humidity) actually worsens heat’s effects of heat on the body. This apparent slip-up is much more than a cosmetic problem, it affected my understanding of the plot.

That stumble aside, when you finally understand the whole of Bailey’s predicament, you may, like me, be struck by Hall’s accomplishment here. She turns the tables on some issues I didn’t realize were actually on the table. Despite Bailey’s annoying dithering, and the unanswered story questions (like, who was that old lady?), What Fire Brings is an exciting and memorable read.

Into the Flames
James Delargy’s incendiary new crime thriller, Into the Flames, like his previous two, is set in wildfire-prone rural southeastern Australia. Former Sydney police Detective Alex Kennard is making a heroic effort to reach the hilltop home of a missing artist—Tracy Hilmeyer—on one of the most threatened blocks in the rapidly burning fictional town of Rislake.

The superheated road surface pulls away as the tires of his commandeered Personnel Carrier labor up to the Hilmeyer house. Kennard doesn’t expect to find much at the house, certainly not what he does find—Tracy’s dead body, lying in a pool of blood. It takes superhuman cajoling to persuade the firefighters to concentrate on saving this one structure—now a crime scene—and to get the necessary investigating officers up the hill to the endangered dwelling. All the usual trappings of a murder investigation are here—coroner’s reports, paper trails, motor vehicle searches, warrants, interviews, development of suspects—all of which takes place amid an utter catastrophe.

Author Delargy is good at developing a complicated plot, red herrings and all. And, if you like a flat-out adventure, the story moves quickly from one event to the next. His writing style doesn’t lend itself to much character development, and he tends to tell you what his characters are feeling, rather than convey their motivations through more subtler means. As a result, I didn’t become really attached to any of them and to outright dislike a few.

What I did like was the dramatic set-up. The increasing number of devastating real-life wildfires around the world are a growing menace, and a story like this one vividly brings home the kinds of perils that such tragedies pose.

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What Fire Brings
Into the Flames
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The Infiltrator

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When the tropes of crime fiction—the secrets, the deceit, the evasions, the jealousies—become too much, that’s when a no-holds-barred thriller like TR Hendricks’s new The Infiltrator can be a welcome cleanse. It’s a vein-scouring adventure as you follow retired US Marine and wilderness survival expert Derek Harrington in his effort to extirpate a dangerous group of domestic terrorists.

The Infiltrator is the second book in a series that began in 2023 with The Instructor and can be expected to have at least one more sequel, in order to tie up loose ends. I haven’t read the first book, but that was no handicap to enjoying this one. The only missing piece was why the terrorists were doing what they were doing, but if you accept the premise that they are on some kind of wild and crazy mission, the why is pretty much irrelevant.

The methods Derek uses to stay perfectly hidden in the woods while on a weeks’-long surveillance assignment are quite inventive, though in the early pages, you may feel you’re reading a catalog for survivalists’ gear. The communications lingo will be immediately clear to readers with military experience, but, even as a civilian, I still could follow it easily.

Derek is hiding in the hills of rural West Virginia, watching members of a terrorist group called Autumn’s Tithe prepare for a major attack. Although no longer in the military, he has some official standing. He’s been deputized by the FBI, and can call in massive military and law enforcement resources when he needs to (OK, give the author some leeway). He experiences a conflict of conscience right up front, because the terrorists live as a large family. He sees the wives and children who may become casualtiesm, and some of those kids are his son’s age.

You don’t have to wait for the end of Chapter One for the terrorists to make their move. A three-vehicle convoy, including a fertilizer-bomb-laden box truck and a van of heavily armed terrorists, leaves the camp, intent on committing mass murder. Derek calls it in. A Hellfire missile operated by a soldier way across the country in Arizona destroys the convoy, followed by two attack helicopters whose weapons subdue the people left behind in the camp. Next arrive members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team who take prisoners.

In case this sounds like a massive exercise in commando-porn, rest assured that before long, you learn the situation has a number of nuances. Almost inevitably, they’re political. Relatively modest objections to conducting such a violent attack on US citizens in their home country are raised.

Part of what this mission was intended to be—a clean-up operation of Autumn Tithe remnants—included capturing their leader, a former FBI agent. Her role makes this pursuit personal for Derek’s colleagues. But it’s also clear that somewhere in government, a mole is revealing vital information about the FBI’s plans. Bureaucracy and unimaginative, by-the-book leadership rear their ugly heads too. Of course, Derek’s methods don’t appear in any book, so conflict between him and the top dogs is inevitable.

While the ongoing adventure keeps the pages rapidly turning, author Hendricks clearly enjoyed writing the fight scenes and, at times, dragged them out past the point of plausibility. He is a former US Army captain who served as a tank platoon leader and military intelligence officer in Iraq and an advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior’s intelligence arm.

As we say in our house, “If this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like this one.”

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The Coming Storm

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The Coming Storm is a much-anticipated follow-up to Greg Mosse’s well-regarded 2022 debut thriller, The Coming Darkness. The new book takes up the complex, futuristic plot of the first novel. I hadn’t read the earlier book, and there were some situations I didn’t completely understand, at least at first, but that really didn’t affect my experience of this new book. Mosse so effectively establishes that the deteriorating social and political situation in his dystopian future matters greatly to the characters that a little ambiguity didn’t put me off.

Mosse writes about a future (the year is 2037) we can see, at least dimly, especially on our bad days. Eco-terrorism. Drought and a rapidly warming climate. Strange, difficult-to-treat infections. And hazards of any era: people in power who can’t be trusted and whose self-interest trumps any impulse to do good.

The action takes place mostly in France and North Africa. The main character, Alexandre Lamarque, is widely regarded as “the man who saved the world” from eco-terrorism. This is an embarrassing level of notoriety he’d just as soon do without. And it’s made him a target. But of whom? Or who all?

Three eco-terrorism plots are in play: opposition to the enlargement of a dam, a plot to destroy the Aswan dam which will practically annihilate Egypt, and sabotage in the lithium mining industry.(I was a bit puzzled by the references to lithium mining, as I thought lithium does not occur in concentrations that would allow it to be mined in any conventional way, but perhaps I missed that explanation.)

Cutting back and forth between these several ambitious plots and Lemarque’s efforts to discover and thwart them, the story speeds along. While Lemarque and his colleagues are strong characters, the terrorists themselves remain somewhat shadowy. Lurking way in the background is a man who seems to be the main plotter, living on a Caribbean island near Haiti, who is the least believable of all.

The unfolding of the terrorists’ plans is certainly exciting. Yet I couldn’t help a bit of a bait-and-switch feeling when I realized they wouldn’t be resolved by the end of the book. Of course, they’re all so significant that, realistically, they can’t be dealt with in any quick way, so perhaps, in spreading the action over several volumes, Mosse has made a good choice. One that will require Book Three, at least. People who read and enjoyed the first book will be happy to see this follow-up and will no doubt look forward to the story’s ultimate resolution. The Coming Storm terrorists are not finished, and neither is Lamarque. And certainly not Mosse.

The Debt Collector

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Your expectations will be upended at every turn in Steven Max Russo’s new crime thriller, The Debt Collector. Supposedly, there are only two plots in all of literature: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. This story flows from the latter tradition, and Abigail Barnes is a stranger in almost every respect.

In the opening scene, Abby is driving her BMW through densely urban northern New Jersey, hears a gunshot, and sees what must be a robbery in progress. A man wearing only some dingy underwear and carrying a shotgun runs out of a liquor store and right in front of her car. Does she panic? Not at all. Does she slam the BMW into reverse? No way. She tells him to get in and drives him home. Confused, he leaves the shotgun behind. The next morning, she’s at his front door offering his gun.

That’s how Abby becomes acquainted with pleasantly inept Hector Perez. She’s a pretty, young, rather petite blonde, new in town and looking for work. She’s a debt collector on the dark side, hired by bookies, loan sharks, and others having difficulty collecting what they’re owed. Like Hector did, prospective clients take one look at her and laugh. They can’t believe this tiny woman could get their hard-case borrowers to pay up. She volunteers to demonstrate, and they laugh again. For the last time.

Abby has a saying that works for her, “It isn’t violence but fear of violence that gets people to pay.” Unfortunately, one person Abby collects from is murdered later that same night. Now it’s in everyone’s interest to identify the murderer. Because a big-time investment company is planning to build a fancy new building in the cash-strapped town, everyone from the governor, to the city’s mayor, to the police chief, to various local gang leaders wants to close the case pronto. But Abby realizes “close”’ does not necessarily mean “solve.” That will be her job.

The characters busily scheme against each other, explaining each new development in whatever way suits their own best interests. (I can’t help but think how tricky it must have been to write this, keeping straight everyone’s assumptions, right or wrong.) Their various stratagems make for a very entertaining plot, as well as strong character development, as you learn how each of them thinks. And Russo has some nifty surprises in store, too.

Abby is unsentimental; she just wants to get the job done. She’s an appealing and entertaining character, and author Russo provides some humorous banter, especially between Abby and Hector. But, truly, she can think rings around all of those guys.

Gritty, urban North Jersey, the narrow streets lined with cars, the low-budget hotels, the Italian restaurants, the walk-up offices—they all come through believably. Russo has had a long career as a New Jersey advertising executive, and puts his creative mind to good use now writing fiction. It’s a fun read with characters to believe in.