• Agent Running in the Field by John LeCarre **** (of 4)

    August 7, 2024

    Nat, a middle-aged British spy, is called home from his duties running agents on the continent of Europe. Reunited with his wife Prue and about to be put out to pasture by the agency, Nat is at loose ends when he is befriended by Ed Shanahan. Ed is young, idealistic, and seeks out Nat at his club in order to challenge Nat, the club’s reigning badminton champ.

    Adding to Nat’s malaise and reinforced by Ed’s tirades, Britain is careening toward Brexit and America is reeling under Trump’s anti-Europeanism. Nat and Ed, serving as spokesmen for LeCarre, the aged Europeanist,let loose on the state of affairs. Britain’s foreign secretary is described as a “fucking Etonian narcissistic elitist without a decent conviction in his body bar his own advancement”. Trump is “Putin’s shithouse cleaner.”

    In vintage LeCarre, agents cross, double cross, and triple cross one another. Ascribing veracity is a agent runner’s most difficult task. The agencies that run spies (German, Russian, British) are all bureaucratic hell-holes. Can Nat sort out one more case of covert actions that threaten to undermine Europe’s post Cold War alliances? If you have a chance to listen, LeCarre is an expert reader of his own audiobooks. Published when LeCarre was 88-years-old, this was his last book.

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  • The Maid by Nita Prose ** (of 4)

    July 12, 2024

    Molly the Maid is what we used to call “on-the-spectrum.” She does not read body language or comprehend social cues. She is 25 years old and very smart. Repeatedly, she asks herself if a smile is genuine or not; are people laughing at her or with her. Like in a fairy tale, she has no mother but is raised by a fairy godmother of a grandmother. Molly loves being a maid, “May I bring your room to a state of perfection?” she asks as she rolls her trolly into a client’s room in the archetypal Regency Hotel.

    Above all else, Molly is an exceedingly decent person, which is why it is supposed to feel so bad when she discovers a wealthy hotel client dead in his bed. When questioned by police, Molly’s proclivity to perceive all inquiries literally–even snarky and sarcastic asides–quickly land her in hot water. The mystery of how the dead man died is eventually worked out. Unfortunately, the trope of a maid who takes everything literally (unless, somehow, her insight is helpful to the investigation) begins to feel like a grown-up version of the children’s book series about Amelia Bedelia. When Amelia Bedelia is asked to pick up her feet when she walks, she uses her hands to pick up her feet. Molly does just about the same, which after a while starts to outweigh her essential goodness.

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  • The Secret Hours by Mick Herron *** (of 4)

    May 18, 2024

    This is Herron’s prequel to his successful Slow Horses series, which is one of those rare compilations that is better on screen (Apple +) than it is to read. The spies in this book (a couple of whom will appear in previous books for which this is the recently published prequel) are working in Berlin just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Espionage is in chaos as old countries disintegrate, new ones are formed, and spies no longer protected by an Iron Curtain seek to settle old scores.

    MI5’s lead operative is laying a Berlin trap for a former Stasi agent who killed one of his best East German sources. Details of his operation emerge in front of a present day tribunal ordered by Great Britain’s PM. The Prime Minister has established a task force to search for historical illegalities perpetrated by MI5. It’s a publicity stunt that is accurately and hysterically recounted. Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, lifelong bureaucrats, trudge through the tedium of hearings everyone knows are never going to amount to anthill of dirt.

    The spycraft is slow, and the hearings slower, but the office dialogue and repartee among spies who feel like they are punching a clock, and occasionally punching one another, is priceless.

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  • Red Queen by Juan Gomez-Jurado ** (of 4)

    April 25, 2024

    Antonia Scott is a genius at penetrating the minds of dastardly criminals. She is also a morbid recluse with no sense of smell (is this important for us to know?), gorgeous, and without social skills. John Guiterrez is assigned to be her partner by an unseen handler called MENTOR. John is overweight, or just strong, gay, a good guy, without a partner, and disgraced by the police department for a dubious infraction. And the criminals they pursue are unspeakably heinous.

    Which is to say the book (apparently well-loved around the world) is tolerable if it is read as a comic book without pictures. Antonia Scott is the smartest person in all of Europe. Mentor works for a shadowy European consortium of crime-fighters who operate outside of and above the law. Criminals slink through shadowy underground tunnels. Confrontations appear in word-panels that burst with gore and the equivalent of starburst “POWS” and “OOFS.” For the full (not so pleasant experience) listen to the audiobook. The reader has only two distinct voices: angry and angrier.

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  • A Line in the Sand by Kevin Powers ** (of 4)

    December 11, 2023

    A recently executed body shows up on a beach in Norfolk, Virginia, home to military bases and private military contractors. As the police and a local newspaper reporter investigate, both the murderee and murderer are enveloped in a secret world of caught up in black-ops and shady deals being made between politicians in D.C. and private companies to whom the U.S. government is outsourcing its 2004 nwar in Iraq. The coded language used by police and military personnel feel like they are being recorded without translation and their authenticity is appealing. Likewise, the hunt for the killers is genuinely suspenseful

    Readers tend to love or hate Kevin Powers’ writring style (Check out the entry on Powers in Wikipedia to see what reviewers thought of his first book on the Iraq War.) The New York Times review loved A Line in the Sand:

    First and foremost, “A Line in the Sand” is a stunning novel. Kevin Powers provides what any discerning reader desires the most — complex and flawed characters, precise use of language, succinct description and believable dialogue.

    I put myself in the not-so-impressed with Powers camp. His characters all have names like Tim, Sally, and John and his dialogue carries the same lack of originality, in my opinion. His characters are simple and inconsistent. Sally, the reporter, is a hopeless alcoholic mourning the loss of her brother in the Iraq war. She starts drinking when her morning alarm rings and continues on her way to work in the morning. She is prone to inconsolable crying. Once her editor gives her free reign to investigate the murder case, however, she doesn’t remember to drink a drop of alcohol for the remaining 80 percent of the book. As Dave Eggers said about Powers writing, he never misses an opportunity to insert an adjective. Characters don’t just look up in exasperation, they look up at the sky. Usually they look up at a blue sky in exasperation. I found myself doing the same.

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  • Birnham Wood by Eleanor Catton *** (of 4)

    November 23, 2023

    The premise is simple enough. A guerilla environmental group in New Zealand, calling itself Birnham Wood, illegally plants gardens on vacant properties. As you would expect, the group is anti-Capitalist, barely operating on a shoestring budget, shares its produce with low income families, and is mostly run by women: visionary, competent, egalitarian, and occasionally, passively catty. Their ethics are challenged when an American billionaire looking to construct a doomsday bunker for himself in New Zealand offers to bankroll Birnham Wood on property he has just purchased on the edge of a National Park.

    Should Birnham Wood take the money and after four years of insolvency finally enjoy stability and national recognition for their good efforts? Are they just being used as a publicity screen for a screwball capitalist bully? Are the billionaire’s intentions reliable or is greenwashing the sale of New Zealand real estate to foreigners a fair tradeoff? Can a non-profit with no hierarchical structure and some strong personalities hold itself together?

    It’s a little weird that the author tells us many things that characters are thinking that they do not even know about themselves, but page after page, intentions, whether overt or handed to us by the writer turn darker and what begins as enviros versus the rich spins into something much deeper.

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  • All the Sinners Bleed *** (of 4)

    October 27, 2023

    Nobody captures underlying racial tension in the contemporary south, wrapped in a crime thriller, as well as S.A. Cosby. His leads–this is Cosby’s fourth in a series of unconnected novels taking place in rural Virginia–are invariably upstanding Black men facing entrenched, and typically barely concealed, white hostility.

    Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in a coastal Virginia community. His predecessor was a Black-beating, omnipotent, Old School sheriff who barely lost to Titus in the last election. Crown faces underlying bigotry from the town’s whites and progressive Blacks see Crown as having sold out to an untrustworthy police force. In the opening pages an active shooter is in the local high school. There is, in subsequent scenes, a march by Confederate sympathizers to the statue in the middle of town commemorating rebel war heroes, an outspoken pastor of a local Black Church planning a countermarch, a serial killer, and a child porn ring. Titus Crown’s allegiances to family, community, law, and justice are yanking him in impossible contortions.

    All the Sinners Bleed is a page turner, but also tries to incorporate too many current events in one book. Cosby holds it together, but fewer yanks on a single sheriff in such a short period would have still gotten the point across and felt closer to reality.

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  • Gangland by Chuck Hogan *** (of 4)

    June 12, 2023

    Based on the true story of Tony Accardo, Al Capone’s protege, the undisputed mob boss of Chicago in the 1970s. Accardo’s mob runs all of Chicago’s organized crime including a significant portion of the city’s police force and courts. Until, that is, another mobster breaks into Accardo’s home, stealing just enough valuables to send a threatening message. Accardo turns to Nicky Passero to set matters right, by whatever means necessary.

    As mobsters start appearing in trunks, Passero finds himself in a moral quandary, as he himself also is being squeezed by an FBI agent trying his darnedest to work up the Outfit’s ladder to nab the mob’s capo. Passero also has misgivings about how far his trust in Accardo can go and how many murders he can perpetrate in order to stay in the Outfit’s good graces.

    At first the Italian mobsters feel stereotyped, but as their personalities blossom and the suspense builds, Chuck Hogan brings people, place, and an era into irresistibly vivid focus.

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  • Ultra by Rachel Maddow **** (of 4)

    December 7, 2022

    Not a book or, at least, not yet a book, but a podcast.

    The genius of the production is that it is ostensibly a recounting of the hidden history of American duplicity and sedition during WW II, during which members of Congress in collusion with right-wing nationalists tried to abrogate American democracy, overthrow the Constitution, and install a fascist President.

    Armed insurrectionists, whipped up by pro-Nazi, virulently anti-Semitic, extremely popular media hucksters attacked Congress, American industries, and Jews.

    An American munitions plant blown up by Americans who supported the Nazis in WW II.

    Congressmen used their political privilege to distribute Nazi propaganda (while being paid by the Nazis to do so) to tens of thousands of their constituents.

    Do those look like ordinary Congressional waves to the crowd to you?

    Every episode of this podcast is a masterpiece of storytelling and revelation of a chapter in America’s past most of us were unaware of. The value of the U.S. Justice Department’s ability to withstand overwhelming political pressure becomes paramount (powerful Senators forced the Justice Department to end its investigations of the events outlined in Ultra). The actions of journalists and ordinary citizens committed to protecting democracy cannot be overstated.

    The consequences of right-wing politicians willing to condone insurrectionists, remain silent, or lie following acts of violence against Jews, Blacks, and law enforcement officials instigated by their rhetoric is horrifying. The direct line from what was then called America First to today’s MAGA is self-evident.

    I challenge you to listen to the first episode, and resist listening to the next one.

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  • The Neon Rain by James Lee Burke *** (of 4)

    August 19, 2022

    Dave Robicheaux is a Cajun detective, poet, and philosopher with no patience for corruption or injustice. When a young Black woman floats to the surface, face down, of a bayou Robicheaux uses for fishing he reasonably concludes foul play led to her death. Just as quickly the coroner determines she drowned following a drug overdose, suggesting that a young very poor Black woman hooked on drugs and trying to climb in society as a sex worker is not worth additional effort on anyone’s part.

    Robicheaux cannot let it go. While he moves up the food chain of pimps, hustlers, and local dons, he gets wrapped up in what turns out to be an international arms smuggling operation that is much more credible than it sounds summarized here in just a couple of sentences. The book is the first in what would become an exceptionally long writing career for James Lee Burke, dated to the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. Nevertheless, it is evident from the start why Burke would enjoy such a successful career. Robicheaux’s descriptions of bayous and waterways of southern Louisiana, race and class relations in New Orleans, and doubts and desires of men and women trying their best, all rise from the page in steamy, evocative images that are indelible.

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