Tag Archives: thriller

****The Bitter Season

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Samurai

photo: David Pursehouse, creative commons license

By Tami Hoag – The Bitter Season is Hoag’s latest crime thriller featuring the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based team of police detectives Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska. This time, the pair is split up, because Liska has joined a new Cold Case unit, hoping for more regular working hours that will let her spend time with her teenage sons.

The first case she’s assigned is the 25-year-old murder of a fellow detective, Ted Duffy, a star in the department’s sex crimes division, was shot to death in his back yard. The man’s family is less than enthusiastic about dredging up the details of the crime again. Repeated investigations over the years have plowed the same unpromising ground, unearthing nothing more than painful memories.

Meanwhile, Kovac has a new partner, newbie Michael Taylor, who is not only easy to look at, but actually knows a few useful things. An adolescence spent watching martial arts movies comes in handy when Kovac and Taylor are assigned to a brutal new murder case. Lucien Chamberlain, a University of Minnesota faculty member in the running for the chair of the East Asia studies department and his wealthy, socially connected, alcoholic wife Sondra have been viciously murdered in their home. They were slashed and stabbed with items from the professor’s collection of martial arts paraphernalia—a collection that is, the medical examiner’s investigator says, “a homicidal maniac’s wet dream.”

Out of the woodwork comes a parade of victims. Or are they suspects?

Despite working on separate cases, Kovac and Liska interact fairly often, and the banter between them and their teams’ other detectives is lively. They’re experts at bringing in a spot of erudition, too. “Shakespeare would have had a freaking field day with these people,” Kovac says, and another detective responds, “ʻThou hast spoken right, ʼtis true. The wheel is come full circle . . .’”

But are Kovac’s and Liska’s cases truly separate? Through fast-moving chapters written from alternating perspectives, you see these skilled detectives work their way through to the core of their respective cases, culminating in a surprising confrontation that demonstrates how skillfully Hoag has laid out her clues.

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

*****Redemption Road

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rural church

photo: Wayne Stadler, creative commons license

Written by John Hart, narrated by Scott Shepherd. You’d never guess this crime thriller is award-winning author John Hart’s first novel with a female protagonist. He writes from her point of view compellingly and expertly slips himself into her high heels where gender perspective makes a difference—as a detective partner, as a daughter, and as unofficial guardian to two troubled teens.

Elizabeth Black is a detective in a mid-sized North Carolina city who over 13 years has proved herself a good cop, though the men around her seem anxious to dismiss all that as soon as she encounters difficulties. And she encounters them by the bushel.

When a radio call leads her to an abandoned house where a missing 18-year-old girl, Channing Shore, might be hidden away, Elizabeth doesn’t wait for backup. A few hours later, Elizabeth and Channing walk out. In the basement are the bodies of Brendan and Titus Monroe with 18 bullet wounds. Bullets lodged in the floor suggest at least some of the shots occurred after the men were down.

There’s no question Channing was raped and tortured for 40 hours and that Elizabeth saved her. But the case has drawn the attention of the North Carolina attorney general, who sends state police investigators to determine whether the brothers’ death involved police brutality. A newspaper headline says it all: “Hero Cop or Angel of Death?”

As a rookie, Elizabeth looked up to and perhaps even loved a detective named Adrian Wall, a detective’s detective whom other cops and the media admired. Wall has spent the last dozen years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. He’s released just as the pressure on Elizabeth Black is mounting, but he’s no sooner out than a second woman’s body is found killed in the same way. Then a third.

From that point on, the two stories—Elizabeth’s quest to clear her reputation and be reinstated on the force and her desire to prove Adrian Wall’s innocence of the women’s murders are intertwined.

One consistent ally is retired lawyer Faircloth “Crybaby” Jones, nearly 90, who unsuccessfully defended Wall during his trial and has regretted that failure ever since. Crybaby is a wonderful character who combines the courtliness of the Old South with a fox’s wily instincts.

In a post-book interview, author Hart revealed that he’d basically written the book—some 300 pages—before discovering that the protagonist was not whom he had chosen. He found that the center of the book, its heart, was Elizabeth. Changing the point of view of a novel involves a lot more than changing “he’s” to “she’s.” That was a decision with time-gobbling consequences that has really paid off for readers.

Actor Scott Shepherd does a brilliant job narrating this novel with its range of characters. Often a female narrator is selected for a book with a female protagonist, but his rendering of Elizabeth is perfect. She’s female, but not in any clichéd way. The same goes for Channing and the several other women. He has just the right amount of easygoing South in his voice and avoids caricature. Amazing how one talent can produce all these different people! Just terrific.

The Night Manager

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Tom Hiddleston, The Night ManagerHere at Tom Hiddleston Central this week, we’ve not only seen the Hank Williams biopic, I Saw the Light, but on Tuesday at 10 pm, AMC began its six-part series starring Hiddleston in John Le Carré’s, The Night Manager. The tv show is punctuated by Jaguar ads [DO watch!] starring a Hiddleston who looks awfully like a shoe-in for that rumored James Bond role. (But should he want it? Possibly not.)

Having seen episode 1 of The Night Manager, I eagerly look forward to more. The conceit is that Hiddleston’s character, Jonathan Pine, works as the night manager in upscale hotels—in the updated AMC version, in Cairo during the Arab spring, then in Switzerland—with ample motive to bring down a British arms merchant (Hugh Lorrie), “the worst man in the world,” who tends to stay in such posh places. A delightful surprise is Olivia Colman (she is police detective Ellie Miller in the UK mystery series Broadchurch) as head of an obscure London arms control agency.

Le Carré’s original, published 23 years ago, also began in Cairo in a much less turbulent era, though the double-dealing and “whom can you trust?” elements created excruciating tension in both the book (which I read ages ago) and now in the AMC version, which has a fresh new, LeCarré-approved ending. Says Judith Warner in the New York Times, the new version is “deeply appealing, and in substance and style, for this viewer at least, moved the book forward in a number of fortuitous ways.” For this viewer too. Loved it!

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The 21st Century Spy Novel

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spy, espionage, reading

(photo: David Lytle, creative commons license)

Some readers may long for the (fictional) days of the Cold War—a nostalgia fueled by the brilliant movie Bridge of Spies—and the dark-soul novels of John LeCarré and Graham Greene. At least then, we knew who the enemies were. After the disintegration of the iron curtain that protected Soviet secrets, the spy novel became a bit of an anachronism, but now it’s surging back in popularity and creativity, 21st century style.

While the antagonists may have changed—or, with what’s going on in Russia these days, be cycling back again—clandestine operations persist among countries that are enemies. And, as Wikileaks has reminded us, spying even occurs among friends. “As a piece of news, this surely sits alongside the Pope’s status as a Catholic,” said Christopher J. Murphy for CNN last year. As a consequence, the espionage writer has a lot of conflicts to choose among.

Tthe techno-thriller subgenre, so well explored in the past by writers like Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal) and Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October), has rapidly expanded fictional possibilities. Every day, it seems, more sophisticated technologies emerge that can be used to create political instability in other countries or groups and damage their military and economic security.

A recent Library Journal article said, “One needs look no further than today’s headlines to see the global issues available to present-day storytellers that weren’t there even 20 years ago.” A good case in point was the 2015 near-future thriller, Ghost Fleet (by P.W. Singer and August Cole) about the vulnerability of a U.S. military dependent on communication technologies—like GPS and wireless—and compromised by the computer chips that make them possible.

Recent popular espionage thrillers illustrate how diverse the threats are: Terry Hayes’s I Am Pilgrim, involves deadly biological warfare; cyberespionage in David Ignatius’s The Director; Close Call by Stella Rimington (first female director general of MI5) covers counterterrorism; and the agents in Todd Moss’s Minute Zero face political instability in Africa.

Books like these turn reading and watching the daily news into a quest for the story beneath the story.

UPDATE:  Great minds . . . Dawn Ius wrote about this same trend in The Big Thrill magazine, 1/31/16.

***Passenger 23

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cruise ship

(photo: ed2456 on pixabay; creative commons license)

By Sebastian Fitzek, narrated by Max Beesley, with a cast of actors. Unless you read German, the only way you can enjoy psychological thriller-writer Fitzek’s latest book is through Audible.com, which is perhaps why it’s called “An Audible Original Drama,” though it is available in print and for the Kindle in its original language.

Passenger 23 is based on a horrifying premise that sent me straight to fact-checking: Yearly, about 23 people—crew and passengers—disappear from the world’s cruise ships IRL. The true number is unknown, because ship owners have a substantial interest in keeping these disappearances quiet and in portraying those that do come to light as suicides, even when evidence of suicide is nonexistent. And, when disappearances occur at sea, the only investigation may be carried out by a lone policeman from the ship’s often tiny country-of-registry. This investigator’s work will not be mistaken for that of Scotland Yard or the FBI. It’s a perfect set-up for criminal shenanigans.

In Fitzek’s novel, undercover detective Martin Schwartz is willing to take on the Berlin police department’s most dangerous cases, in part because he’s become less attached to his own life in the five years since his wife and young son died in an apparent murder-suicide aboard the cruise ship Sultan of the Seas. When he receives a mysterious invitation to meet an elderly woman aboard that same ship in order to find out what really happened to his family, he can’t resist.

Once aboard, he finds himself drawn into the woman’s theory that a serial killer may be loose on the ship. A young girl who disappeared from the ship some months earlier reappears, carrying the teddy bear of his drowned son. But she’s not not making sense. The girl’s mother disappeared at the same time, in a chilling echo of what happened to Martin’s own family.

Solving this puzzle would be sufficient for any book, but Fitzek also provides an early teaser-scene about a man, located somewhere in the ship’s bowels, who has consented to have his healthy leg amputated. Why, and whether this secondary (and far-fetched) story has anything to do with the principal plot, we don’t learn until the end of the book. It’s in an epilogue that, oddly, comes after the production credits—glad I didn’t turn my iPod off too soon!

For my taste, Fitzek tries a little too hard for the gruesome detail. In addition, the cluster of murder-suicides of single moms and their children has one glaring common denominator that even a police operative far from his tiny island redoubt ought to find suspicious.

As to how well this works as an audiobook, I was disappointed. Beesley had a formal, almost stiff style out of keeping with the material, and while the other actors were used only for the scanty dialog, which felt intrusive. Audible has added intermittent sound effects—feet running, doors clanging, ropes squeaking, and the like—that didn’t add to the experience. I’d just as soon let the author tell me the door slammed than having to think “What was that?” Audible has produced a short trailer for the audio version, available on YouTube.

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

****Hold the Dark

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arctic wolf

(photo: myri-_bonnie, Creative Commons license)

By William Giraldi, narrated by Richard Ferrone. This crime thriller set in the remote villages and tundra of Alaska lays bare different visions of civilization. The inhabitants of remote Keelut have their own ways of doing things—of dealing with birth, and death, and grief—and no matter how strong the forces of conventional culture are, in the end, the old ways win. In the process, the book “peels away the thin membrane that separates entertainment from art, and nature from civilization,” said reviewer Alan Cheuse in the Boston Globe.

Russell Core is a nature writer and an expert on wolves, with a famous book about them. When wolves take two, then three children from Keelut, the mother of the third child, a six-year-old boy named Bailey, asks him to come help her understand what is happening. Untethered from family and any part of life he finds meaningful, Core responds to her plea, and is drawn deeper and deeper into the lives, ways, and secrets of the remote village. The child’s mother, Medora Slone is married, but her husband Vernon has joined the military, fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, this nation’s “desert wars.” Do not assume this has made a regular American of him.

Yet Slone is described as a renegade, and Core wonders how this squares with life as a soldier. His best friend, an Alaska Native named Cheeon says Slone can make himself look like he is doing what he is supposed to, but will be doing what he wants to, nonetheless. Cheeon did not join the military for that reason. He hadn’t that gift.

When Slone returns to find his son dead and his wife missing, well, in the classic crime novel vernacular, “all hell breaks loose.” Hell, in this case, plays out during the year’s longest nights—18 hours of darkness—and over a tundra so vast “whole states could fit on its frozen breadth.” The weather is practically another character in this frozen terrain: “Like grief, cold is an absence that takes up space. Winter wants the soul and bores into the body to get it.” Before this book is through quite a few souls fall to the cold, the wolves, and the people.

Richard Ferrone’s narration perfectly fits the other-worldliness of the Alaska Natives and the care with which residents of the far north must operate in their unforgiving environment. Giraldi is the fiction editor of Boston University’s literary magazine Agni.

****The Whites

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crime scene tape

(photo: wikimedia)

By Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt, narrated by Ari Fliakos. This crime thriller received a splashy reception, in part because of the puzzlement over Price’s transparent attempt to write it pseudonymously (which even he gave up on), but more because—whatever name he adopts—the publication of one of his gritty novels is an event crime fiction aficionados celebrate. Price is the author of Clockers, Bloodbrothers, The Wanderers and numerous screenplays, as well as award-winning episodes of The Wire.

What has made Price so successful, as Michael Connelly points out in a New York Times review, is his belief that “when you circle around a murder long enough you get to know a city.” Says Connelly, Price is an author who “considered the crime novel something more than a puzzle and an entertainment; he saw it as societal reflection, documentation and investigation.”

The book’s title refers to the unsolved but unforgotten cases a tight group of young police officers confronted during their careers. Think the elusive target Moby Dick, not a racial reference.

They had all met their personal Whites, those who had committed criminal obscenities on their watch and then walked away untouched by justice . . . .
No one asked for these crimes to set up house in their lives, no one asked for these murderers to constantly and arbitrarily lay siege to their psyches like bouts of malaria.

At the time of the novel, most members of this formerly closeknit group are out of the NYPD because of injury, other opportunities, or sheer burnout, but Sgt. Billy Graves is still on the force. Billy knows his friends’ “Whites” like he knows his own badge number, and when they start dying in violent circumstances, he has to ask himself . . . Meanwhile, his family is the target of an unnerving and escalating series of threats, which he urgently needs to figure out.

The book, told from the point of view of both Billy and his antagonist, is full of characters from diverse backgrounds and ethnicities, yet all are believable as individuals. The writing never falters and contains, as Connelly says, “a fierce momentum.” A favorite line of mine, about a witness smoking dope in his apartment, had him “blowing out enough smoke to announce a Pope.”

With recent events in Ferguson, North Charleston, Baltimore, and elsewhere, it isn’t good timing for a cop-as-hero book, and this novel’s moral dilemmas force Billy and the reader to consider the role of policing in our society and the differences between policing and justice.

Fliakos’s narration is excellent. Despite the large number of characters, I was never confused about whose voice I was hearing.

****Bloodmoney: A Novel of Espionage

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Pakistan street scene

Street scene, Pakistan (photo: r12a, Creative Commons license)

By David Ignatius – narrated by Firdous Bamji. A friend recommended Ignatius to me, and I was lukewarm about the first book of his I read (The Director), but I’m glad I came back for a second try.The story in this 2012 spy thriller concerns a super-secret CIA offshoot working in Los Angeles under deep cover as a pseudo music-biz operation called the Hit Parade (a name the CIA officers use without apparent irony). But something is amiss, because a key undercover asset disappears from the streets of Pakistan, followed by the assassination of three more agents in postings around the world. It’s up to officer Sophie Marx to try to discover the truth, the compromises, the torturous path of violence and deception that instigated and supported the Hit Parade’s enemies.

This plot is more persuasive than that of many thrillers, with startling authenticity enabled by Ignatius’s journalistic career. (He is an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post and writes about foreign affairs.) The NPR review quotes one of the book’s great lines: “Americans did not like lying to others. It made them uncomfortable. Their specialty was lying to themselves.”

As important, the characters are well-drawn. I was happy to see the crusty old CIA hand Cyril Hoffman reappear in this book. He’s a devil, but an entertaining devil. And he’s ours. Mostly. I especially liked Ignatius’s characterization of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence chief, General Mohammed Malik, trying to make sense of the Americans.

Mostly the narration is fine, but Bamji puts a slight whine in Sophie’s voice that’s not just annoying, but inconsistent with her dogged character.

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****Death of A Spy

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Central Asia

Nakhcivan (photo: wikimedia)

By Dan Mayland – Met this author at a conference and thought I’d give one of his books a test-drive. Quite engaging. Glad I read it. Especially intriguing was the setting—countries near and around the Caspian Sea: cities in Azerbaijan and its remote state Nakhchivan, Tbilisi (Georgia), and Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan). Any book with maps at the front tells me the author has taken care to keep readers oriented. Sometimes it where you are really matters.

The protagonist, the likeable Mark Sava, a former CIA station chief in Azerbaijan is living in Kyrgyzstan, running a spies-for-hire business, when a former mentor and colleague is found dead in Tbilisi. This is something he has to take care of and should be an easy deal—contact the family, get the body on the way back to the States, “do this right,” he tells his wife. But once in the dead man’s hotel room, Sava knows something is seriously wrong. This was a hit, one whose roots are somewhere in his own past.

Soon his errand of mercy blossoms into a full-blown catastrophe involving Russian spies, a mysterious new Nakhchivan airfield, Sava’s former lover, and security officials from Azerbaijan who must stay a step ahead of their country’s own deteriorating politics.

Mayland has spent considerable time in the region where his Mark Sava thrillers are set (this is the fourth). His website includes “extras,” more maps and photos of places featured in this book. His dedication to authenticity has been rewarded by glowing reviews and Amazon best-seller status in the espionage category in both the US and UK.

Capturing the Thrills

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security cameras, street corner

(photo: takomabibelot, creative commons license)

Among the workshops at the Liberty States Fiction Writers’ annual conference last weekend were two directed specifically to writers—and readers—of thrillers, led by highly-rated author Melinda Leigh and featuring Dan Mayland (espionage) and Ben Lieberman (financial thrillers). The first was on “Technical Difficulties”—and the three experts described how the ubiquity of cell phones (especially their GPS capabilities), public and private security cameras, and increasingly sophisticated facial recognition software make it harder and harder for urban bad-guys to evade discovery. (Here’s an example of the many websites and articles focused on defeating facial recognition technology.) While security and cell phone cameras were key to finding the Boston Marathon bombers, they are a black hole for story ideas, if authors want to write an accurate and believable modern-day thriller or crime story.

Similarly, a photo posted on social media may well have embedded geotags that reveal where it was taken—at the crime scene, at the perpetrator’s home, at his/her favorite hangout. This explains, I think, why so many mysteries are set in past decades—even centuries—or in small towns, where such capabilities don’t impose plotting impossibilities for their creators. I’ve had to let a protagonist’s phone battery run out, for example—imperfect, maybe, but we’ve all done it.

Understanding how such technology works, in order to construct a plausible 2015 plot requires research, and, like many authors, I’ve confessed to really loving the research I do for my books. These presenters’ second workshop—“The Thrill of Thrillers”—discussed restraining the impulse to put all that research in the actual book. Technothrillers (of the Tom Clancy/Frederick Forsyth/Michael Crichton variety, to which I am addicted ) are an exception. Too much background research slows readers down, and when they’re skipping over as much as they’re reading, face it, the thrill is gone!

Another advantage of leaving any type of too-detailed information out is, of course, that the reader can imagine a technology (likewise torture) that is more vivid, scary, or powerful (or gruesome) than the author can. You need just enough to jump-start their own creativity.

A side issue: I noticed how Amazon’s author pages for Leigh, Mayland, and Lieberman provide “Customers also bought books by . . .” information, and there is almost 100% gender concordance between the authors’ gender and that of the other authors customers reportedly purchased. Is that true? I like books by men AND women, if they are well done, and most other readers I know are the same. So, do these lists reflect real reader preferences, or just Amazon’s marketing assumption? Signed, Wondering . . . See this related post.