A Thanksgiving Sampler

Thank God we're talking about test driving,
not our own disastrous driving tests.

A friend and I have been tasting champagne this weekend, because that's what Hubby and I have been asked to bring to Thanksgiving dinner. After we methodically worked our way through several bottles, we felt festive enough to sample pumpkin pie coupled with various flavors of ice cream she had in her freezer. We agreed on the Veuve Clicquot Brut Yellow Label and concluded it's best to stick to a good vanilla.

The holiday season is full of figuring stuff out: the gift for your best friend, the guest list for your winter potluck, how to ship cookies to your far-flung kids. You also need to find some books to read to keep yourself sane. An excellent way to ensure a book matches what you're in the mood for is to stock up on a variety. Let's test drive some possibilities.

During the winter holidays, one hones one's cloak-and-dagger skills hiding gifts at home and diplomatic talents charming colleagues at the office party. Surely, this is the season for reading espionage.

Something British and cynical might hit the spot. Former BBC correspondent Adam Brookes has followed up his compelling Night Heron (Redhook/Hachette, 2014) with Spy Games (Redhook, September 2015). Freelance journalist Philip Mangan is a decent guy with more than his fair share of restlessness and curiosity. After a dabble into espionage necessitated his fleeing Beijing, Philip is in Addis Abba, investigating the Chinese presence in Ethiopia. Then three things happen: an MI6 asset dies in Hong Kong, Philip barely escapes a café bombing, and he is offered some classified Chinese military documents. Thus are Philip and Trish Patterson, his MI6 handler, drawn into a power struggle that is playing out primarily in Ethiopia; Oxford, England; and Chiang Mai, Thailand.

It's not necessary to read Night Heron first, but I'd suggest you do that simply for the pleasure of understanding exactly why MI6 isn't thrilled to find "Philip Mangan," "China" and "spy" again in the same equation, and why Philip is feeling a bit cross about it, too. At 437 pages, Spy Games could benefit from some tightening up; however, if you like an intricate plot woven with separate threads, colorful characters, and beautifully drawn exotic locations, this is for you.

If you're feeling in the mood for dueling American and Russian intelligence agencies, sex used as an espionage tool, and very sadistic villains (brace yourself), check out books written by an espionage insider, former CIA agent Jason Matthews. His writing feels very up close and personal in its focus on the characters' lives and personalities and their elaborate spycraft.

In 2013's Red Sparrow (Scribner), Matthews introduces the CIA's young hot-shot, Nate Nash, and the beautiful Russian agent, Dominika Egorova, whose job it is to get him to divulge the identity of a Russian traitor (see Sister Mary Murderous's review here). Dominika is a synesthete who perceives people surrounded by a colored aura; at the appearance of her black-haloed boss, former Lubyanka prison torturer Alexei Zyuganov, I pulled the covers over my head.

Dominika is back in Russia in Palace of Treason (Scribner, June 2015). She's climbing the ranks of the SVR, much to the chagrin of the scheming Zyuganov, and maneuvering to avoid exposure as she passes information to the Americans. Meanwhile, there's a mole at CIA headquarters passing secrets to the Russians, which creates a very pleasant symmetry (don't you think?), and jacks up the suspense. I was surprised and pleased to see Russian President Vladimir Putin appear as a minor character, as wily and enigmatic as we Westerners find him in real life. Palace of Treason can be read as a standalone, but you'll want to read Red Sparrow, too. One can never find enough good spy yarns––especially those with lovesick agents and recipes.

With all the demands of the holidays pressing, you might appreciate the comfort of an offbeat mystery with a strong sense of place, such as Tarquin Hall's Vish Puri series, featuring the Most Private Investigators Ltd. agency in Delhi, or Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Botswana.

Vaseem Khan's quirky first book, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra (Redhook, September 2015), is the opening book of such a proposed series. Inspector Ashwin Chopra's heart condition has forced him into early retirement after more than three decades on the Mumbai police force. During his last day, Chopra learns of a young man who apparently drowned in a puddle. The Inspector is warned off opening an inquiry and returns home to find a baby elephant, Ganesha, bequeathed to him by his uncle.

As a policeman, Chopra was an incorruptible officer who prided himself on treating everyone equally. So he can't get the screams of the dead youth's mother––that her family is too poor for his death to be adequately investigated––out of his head. Chopra decides to look into it on his own. He must keep this a secret, because his wife, Poppy, would object, and he doesn't want his former police colleagues thinking he's one of those unfortunate people who have no life outside work. Chopra balances caring for little Ganesha, whose abilities are not entirely realistic, with a criminal investigation that takes him through various Mumbai neighborhoods. This allows the reader to glimpse a fascinating city through the eyes of a man who loves it, even though he regrets some aspects of its modernization. The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra is a little too consciously charming for my taste, but I wanted to tell you about it because many readers love it for its charm, and you might, too.

Tomorrow we'll look at a few more holiday reads.

Espionage and Horror to Go

I'm on the train, traveling to northern California. This morning, I casually glanced at my watch and was horrified to discover I had 20 minutes to shower, iron my clothes, pack, fill the hummingbird feeder and bird bath, and water houseplants before I absolutely had to leave for the train station. (I'd say the birds and plants came out better than I did.) The book I grabbed as I burned rubber out the door is Fear: A Novel of World War I (trans. from the French by Malcolm Imrie; New York Review Books, May 2014). It's based on author Gabriel Chevalier's experiences on the front lines in The Great War and was originally published in 1930. Already in my handbag were Neely Tucker's The Ways of the Dead (Viking, June 2014), featuring Washington, DC investigative reporter Sully Carter, who digs into the killing of a judge's daughter and wonders if cold-case murders are related to it; and Rachel Howzell Hall's Land of Shadows (Forge, June 2014), with hard-as-nails Los Angeles homicide detective Elouise Norton looking into the death of a Jane Doe.

If you're traveling this Fourth of July weekend, I hope your preparations are less frenzied than mine this morning. You need to get a move on if you don't yet have a book to pack.

On Monday, I told you about Terry Hayes's thriller, I Am Pilgrim, and Lenny Kleinfeld's R-rated hardboiled black comedy, Some Dead Genius. While those two books make great reading anywhere, Josh Malerman's Bird Box (Ecco/HarperCollins, May 2014), is ideally read at night under the covers with a flashlight. It's an unsettling horror thriller set in a decimated dystopian world where people barricade their houses, cover their windows with heavy blankets, and wear blindfolds when venturing outside because seeing something––nobody knows exactly what––inexplicably drives people to deadly violence against themselves and others. Needless to say, this doesn't make anyone eager to answer a knock on the front door.

When the book opens, single mother Malorie has spent the four years since the birth of her two children, Boy and Girl, training them to use their ears and to obey her without question. She decides it's time to leave their Detroit house near the river and row a boat 20 miles downstream to what might be greater safety. Of course, they must do this blindfolded. As they feel their way to the river and make their perilous journey, we intermittently learn Malorie's backstory. The incessant high tension makes the ending somewhat anticlimactic, but holy Toledo, by the time I got there, I was so wrung out, I barely cared! This book about trust and adaptability was written by the lead singer and songwriter for the rock band The High Strung. (Is this fitting or what?) I wouldn't recommend it to someone who feels let down if ultimately all questions aren't fully answered.

Last year about this time, I enjoyed a terrific spy novel, Red Sparrow (Scribner, 2013), written by ex-CIA agent Jason Matthews (see Sister Mary Murderous's review here). Now, former BBC correspondent Adam Brookes gives us the benefit of his familiarity with China in a stellar book of espionage, Night Heron (Redhook/Hachette, May 27, 2014).

After a 20-year incarceration, Li Huasheng, also known as Peanut, escapes a high-security Chinese labor camp and makes his way to Beijing. There, Li approaches freelance British journalist Philip Mangan with an offer of top-secret information and the admonishment to tell his superiors that the night heron is hunting. Mangan passes this message on to a friend in the British embassy, and it rings a bell at the UK's Secret Intelligence Service headquarters. A plot is thus set in motion to steal Chinese missile secrets. We alternate between Li, Mangan, and British operatives in China and the SIS in London, with a few stops in the United States thrown in. The atmosphere is full of foreboding. When one assesses the interests and resources of the global espionage-industrial complex, various factions in the British SIS, and Chinese state security, the odds don't look good for the inexperienced Mangan and the decades-out-of-touch Li. I was struck by the role personal motives and frailties play in state affairs and grew to care so much about Brookes's characters, I had to fight off my impulse to peek at the ending. I wasn't as successful resisting the appetite for Chinese food this book inspired. Now I must wait for Brookes's next, Midnight Blind, due out in the UK on March 12, 2015.

Have a good weekend.

Review of Tomorrow City by Kirk Kjeldsen

Tomorrow City by Kirk Kjeldsen

After a robbery goes spectacularly wrong, a young American ex-con flees to Shanghai and goes straight, until his past drags him kicking and screaming back into crime.

In a nutshell, that's what Tomorrow City is about, but that synopsis gives you little sense of the power of Kirk Kjeldsen's fictional debut. I read this bleak and beautiful book in one sitting, repeatedly brushing off my husband's reminders that we were late with "just a few more minutes, I'm begging you." It's not easy creating a criminal with whom a reader empathizes, but Kjeldsen pulls this off. His Brendan Lavin, a criminal with a conscience, joins the ranks of criminal protagonists such as George V. Higgins' Eddie Coyle, W. R. Burnett's Cesare "Rico" Bandello, and Out of the Past's Jeff Bailey.

Brendan's mother took to heroin when her husband abandoned her and her young child. Growing up, Brendan was good at getting into things, working "with the grace and efficiency of a vaudevillian escape artist on stage." He started robbing warehouses and 16-wheelers with a crew, but one job went wrong, and he was arrested and sent to Rikers Island. To reward him for his silence, his old mates sent him cigarettes and protection money. Now that he's out, Brendan considers them even. He's working hard, running a New York City bakery, but when he can't pay his bills, he decides to pull just one more robbery.

It's a disaster, and Brendan needs to run. He's always been a tabula rasa; it's as easy for him to slip into another identity as it is for him to slip into a locked house, safe or car. Brendan has heard that everything is like the Wild West in China, so that's where he goes.

For 12 years, life is good. Brendan is married to Li and has a little daughter, Xiaodan. In Shanghai, he can hide his bakery in plain sight, where he's unlikely to be spotted, and still do good business. Unfortunately, "unlikely" proves too likely, and Brendan's past becomes his present and what looks like his future.

Writer Kjeldsen is an assistant professor in the cinema program at Virginia Commonwealth University, although he lives in Shanghai. His love and knowledge of the city is evident, and his writing is cinematic and poetic. No matter how far a man runs, sooner or later Fate will have him twisting and turning in her hands, and I read Tomorrow City with that delicious sense of growing dread dear to us fans of noir. My only criticism is that I wish Kjeldsen's characters were more fleshed out; when you're reading this good a book of 200 pages, you wish there was more. Still, it's a wonderful debut, and I'm putting Kjeldsen on my list of go-to authors.

Note: I received a free review copy of Tomorrow City, published by Signal 8 Press in 2013.

Shanghai photo by Bruno Barbey/Magnum

My Native Land

Independence Day baubles, bangles and beads are catching my eye everywhere I go. Already travelers are grousing about how long it will take them to get to their July 4th celebration. It is a memorable day, and in my family our annual ritual is to rewatch 1776, the musical.

When I was growing up in a far-away place, the Fourth of July was not exactly a day like any other, but of course it was not a holiday and I went to school as usual. But since I was an American citizen, through my parents, and there were many others like me we did celebrate. Our heritage was important to us and when we sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" we sang all four verses and we knew all the words. In fact, we knew all the words to a few other patriotic songs as well. We stayed connected while in our home away from home.

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land?
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand? (Sir Walter Scott)

There are American expats all over the place, and these days we like to remember our members in uniform among them. Martin Limón reminds us about the US Army in Korea in Slicky Boys.

George Sueño and his partner, Ernie Bascom, are both grateful to the army. What for? For George it is because he has a real life, money coming in, and a job to do. He and Ernie are CID investigators for the 8th United States Army in Seoul, Korea. They wear suits and do important work, something George never thought he would do growing up in East LA. Ernie's Chicago youth also left much to be desired.

8th Army PX

After work, these two friends and partners spend their free time in Itaewon, a seedy part of town filled with bars and businesswomen. On this occasion, they do a favor for one of the girls they meet and it results in the death of a British soldier. It turned out that he was a little shady, and as the CID investigators they need to find his murderer before they themselves are in hot water for perhaps leading him to his death.

Part of the investigation reveals connection to a widespread systematic thievery of the American enclaves. After the devastation of the Korean War 20 years before, people were desperate and starving. In the middle of these wastelands were American military settlements surrounded by barbed wire, and these were the only places with food, clothing and shelter. The people would barter with the GIs for the wealth they held, be it so small as a used bar of soap. Others were more aggressive, using thievery. "Slick boys" is what the GIs called them, and the Koreans softened it to "slicky boys." Many were exactly that; boys of 6 to 10 years old. They would slip through the wire and take anything that could fit in their pockets.

Itaewon

In George Sueño's time, they seemed very organized and he wanted to find out just how much. What he found impressed him, because in a way there was a certain honor, since the losses to the American compounds were always kept just below what the US Government allotted for. No greed was permitted. In this way, they also hid from investigations.

As Sueño's investigation proceeds, he feels that he is becoming wrapped in the tentacles of a giant squid. There are more brutal murders and the partners find far-reaching fingers in the pie, such as the North Koreans, the Korean Police, and the Korean and the US Navy. The case is dragging them down to the depths of evil. On the surface, at least part of the problem is the loss of military secrets.

Sueño has to lower himself to abide by the dictates of common thieves, but this did not really bother him. He was from East LA and he had been fighting his way up from the bottom all his life. His strength in his relations with the Koreans is that he is one of the few who bothered to learn the language, to learn about the culture and to understand the desperate circumstances that force people into certain ways of life.

Martin Limón takes us to a Korea that is fascinating, exciting and complex. He uses a bit of the history of the people he writes about to make us appreciate a very different culture that has suffered for the last centuries.

Peter May writes an excellent China series featuring an American pathologist who gets involved in unusual murders. The Fou4th Sacrifice is the second of the series.

In Beijing, one does not have to look far to find a contradiction or a contrast. There is one on every corner. The nearest street vendor might well be a learned ex-university professor who has been transformed by the cultural revolution into a producer of wonderful jian bing, a breakfast pancake, as well as riddles for Li Yan, a senior detective with the Beijing Municipal Police as he rides his bike to work.

"If a man walks in a straight line without turning his head, how can he continue to see everything he has walked past? There are no mirrors involved." asks Mei Yuan.

Today Li Yan has been called to what appears to be a ritual killing. A man had been beheaded, as he knelt with his hands tied behind his back with a silk cord. He has a placard around his neck with an apparent nickname on it, scored through by a single line and the number three. He is the fourth victim found in these circumstances.

The main difference is that this man is an expat American. He has returned to China after many years of living and working in the United States at a prestigious university and has taken a lowly job at the US embassy, going through visas. Another part of the mystery is that he is found at an apartment of his own, not the one given to him by the embassy.

US Embassy, Beijing

The American Embassy has requested that Dr. Margaret Campbell assist in the autopsy of the sacrificial victim. The Chinese are not especially happy about this, but they accept with good grace because Margaret Campbell has helped them before. They know that she sees things with a different and perceptive eye, which gives them a distinct edge in solving the crime. Li Yan, on the other hand is perturbed because he has had feeling for Margaret that developed during a previous case and had been warned that he must avoid any kind of a relationship with her.

Margaret does the postmortem on this last murder victim and does indeed open new avenues of investigation. She also begins to pursue a new relationship with an American archeologist working in China who is intent on soothing the feeling Li Yan has trampled. The American Embassy is interested in assisting in the investigation and wrangles Margaret onto the investigating team as well.

Another stress is placed on Li as his sister abandons her daughter and leaves her with him as she goes off to a secret location to have a forbidden second child, a boy. Li loves the little girl and is grateful that she does not suffer from a new Chinese syndrome known as "the little emperor"––quite commonly seen nowadays as the one child allotted to Chinese families is quite doted upon and very spoiled. These children are acting like––oh no!!––Western children. But at the same time, they are also growing up without cousins, aunts, uncles or extended families. The young men are increasing in preponderance, as girls are not wanted because they are seen as not being there to help in the parents' old age.

The answer to the street vendor's riddle is that the man is walking backwards. Just as to solve this crime, the investigators have to look to the past for clues to solve a murder that is based very much in the present.

Elizabeth Peters has a series involving another expat American. While it doesn’t capture the imagination like the Amelia Peabody series does, it is a lot of fun.

In Street of the Five Moons, corn on the cob and fireworks are theoretically not on the menu. Doctor Vicky Bliss is an art historian from the Midwest, specializing in medieval art and working at the National Museum in Munich. She is tall and eye-catching, so she has had to fight an uphill battle to have herself considered a brain rather than a beauty.

As the book opens, a dead man has been found on the streets of Munich, with a rare jewel sewn into his clothing. It appears to be an artistic masterpiece called the Charlemagne Talisman, one of the treasures of the museum. Except it really isn't. It is a near-perfect copy.

The important questions are, who made the copy and where did it come from? The next questions are, how was someone able to copy the piece so very perfectly and what was the purpose for it? Was someone planning to steal the museum's treasure and replace it with the copy?

These are the questions that appeal to the spy persona in Schmidt, Vicky's boss, and to Vicky herself. Schmidt convinces Vicky to take on the task of tracing the copy and finding out who made it––and what that person is up to. The beginning of the trail takes Vicky to Rome, to the Street of the Five Moons. It is here that she meets John Smythe, a mysterious man, and the fireworks begin.

Wherever you live may there be fireworks in your future!

Note: Versions of these reviews may appear on Amazon, Goodreads and other reviewing sites under my user names there.

The Ides of March

The Ides of March are upon us, to misquote the Bard, William Shakespeare. It was the time when one of the most famous murders of all time took place in Rome. On March 15 in 44 BC, Julius Caesar was stabbed to death at a meeting of the Senate. The Romans did not number days of a month in order from the first through the last day. Rather, they counted back from three fixed points of the month: the Nones (5th or 7th, depending on the length of the month), the Ides (13th or 15th), and the Kalends (1st) of the following month. The Ides occurred near the midpoint of the month, and in March it is the 15th.

Brutus, Cassius and others, urged on by as many as 60 conspirators, committed the dastardly deed.  Their motive was disillusionment over the path Rome was taking. Although Brutus was Caesar's close friend, he felt that Caesar had become a tyrant who was a danger to the Republic.

Disillusionment has been the driving force behind many a fictional hero as well. In The Eye of Jade, by Diane Wei Liang, we are introduced to Mei Wang, a PI in Beijing.

Private detectives are banned in China, but Mei Wang, who once had a stable job in the Ministry of Public Security, thought that there was a need for the services she could provide. In Beijing there are many small crimes that the police will not involve themselves with, and in the new millennium, divorce is becoming more commonplace; factors that allowed Mei to find independence as a businesswoman. All she had to do was market herself as an Information Consultant.

One of Mei Wang's earliest memories is of her life in a labor camp with her father, an intellectual and idealist condemned to hard labor for the rest of his life. One day, her mother came and took her away. She would never see her father again.

She lived a hardscrabble life with her mother, Ling Bai, who struggled to put food on the table for Mei and her younger sister, Lu. Later, Mei Wang went to university, after which she got a job––and an apartment that went with it––at the Ministry of Public Security, a higher echelon of the police department akin to Scotland Yard.

She became disillusioned with her work at the MPS and left there, although her family was aghast at her decision to leave the security of a government job and all the perks that went with it. Her mother felt she was throwing away her future; what mattered in China was not money, but power.

One day, a Mr. Chen Jitian made an appointment to see her. She knew him better as Uncle Chen, a great friend of her mother's. He told a story that began in the winter of 1968, when the Red Guard was terrorizing the country. These roving bands of "patriots" invaded homes and stores. They even ransacked museums, destroying relics and burning everything by building great bonfires and feeding them with all the artwork, documents and records.

Jade Seal

Now, in the present, some of these artifacts are surfacing. It appears that someone had stolen some things before everything was destroyed. Most notably, an ancient ceremonial bowl was found to have been sold to an antique dealer. Uncle Chen is looking for a jade seal he thinks was taken from a museum at the same time as the bowl and asks Mei to find it for him. When Mei finds the person who sold the bowl, she finds a dead body. Now the game is afoot, and Mei backtracks through recent history to find the connections that will lead her to the stolen artifacts––as well as to a new understanding of her own past.

Mei is enterprising and energetic as she pursues the jade seal's journey through the years, but she is conflicted about what she also discovers about her own past life. It takes an illness in a loved one for her to try to reconnect some of the fractured pictures of what really happened to her family.

This is an interesting book that is the start of a series, and I recommend it to all who like stories with a backdrop of history and a fascinating locale.

Donna Leon's Friends in High Places begins on a Saturday at this time of year. While lolling on his sofa and reading about ancient Persia, Guido Brunetti, a Commissario of the Venice police, gets a visit from a bureaucrat in charge of finding and recording changes made to historical buildings. The Brunetti apartment appears not to exist, according to the paperwork, and this is just the first conundrum to be solved in this ninth mystery of the excellent series by Leon.

A few months later, Brunetti receives a call from the same man, Franco Rossi. He is asking for help, but before he can make his problem known he is found dead in such as way to suggest an accident. Brunetti knows better.

A side story is the problem with the drug scene that is now appearing, and involves Brunetti's boss's son. Brunetti knows that this boy should be punished and wants to conduct a proper investigation, but he is aware that he would be signing his death warrant if he proceeds.

Brunetti asks himself and his wife to speculate on how they have both changed since they were young college students, when they were liberal and wanted to change the world. Now they are both increasingly disillusioned about how they adapt to the way things are and always have been in Venice.

This book is worth reading because of the strong writing of the highest order, and the way the lives of Brunetti, his wife and children are a part of the plot itself. All of us have to compromise to live in this world, and to do the next right thing is the challenge. Brunetti does this well.

Disillusion is not a stranger behind the Iron Curtain, and it walks hand in hand with Arkady Renko in Red Square, by Martin Cruz Smith.

Red Square is set in Russia in the year 1991. It is a sequel to Gorky Park and Polar Star and features Investigator Arkady Renko at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As the social and economic structures of the Soviet Union break down, Arkady Renko has been reinstated as an Investigator in the police force. He is trying to clear up a nest of illicit traders when his chief informant dies in a horrific fireball. At the late informer's flat, his fax machine keeps asking the apparently meaningless question, "Where is Red Square?"

The question does not pertain to a location, but to a painting by Kazimir Malevich, which has resurfaced on the black market after being lost since World War II.

Smith has created a remarkable character in his redoubtable Russian policeman Arkady Renko, the rejected son of a famous Russian military officer who became a brutal wartime hero of the Communist Party. Renko is a brilliant investigator with a skeptical and independent point of view. Having earlier sacrificed himself for his dissident lover, Irina Asanova, suffering imprisonment and exile for helping her escape, he returns to Moscow on the brink of political and social dissolution. It appears that corrupt officials and black marketers run the country, while organized crime has replaced the Party as the controlling force in Russian society.

Smith brings all of these elements together in this story, which covers two weeks in August 1991, a time leading up to the attempted coup of August 21, in which right-wing elements intended to wrest control from reformist President Mikhail Gorbachev. There is an informative backstory describing the history of the Chechens and their relationship with Russia. The suicide of Renko's father brings a personal note to the chronicle.

The trail of Renko's murder investigation leads both to the Russian mafia and to criminal connections in Munich. Renko has been listening to Radio Liberty on a borrowed radio and has heard Irina's voice. When circumstances seem to fit, he gets himself to Munich and finds Irina. Renko finds that his perceived duty to his homeland conflicts with his personal desires; that by solving the case (which has now cost the life of a fellow investigator), he may again lose Irina.

Although the plot of this detective novel is complex and carefully constructed, Smith's primary interest is in the character development of his subtle protagonist. Renko is a tormented hero, a man of conscience. Revenge for the death of his informant and for other deaths sits quietly on his mind as well. Smith's portrayal of Renko's navigation through a collapsing world is compelling and draws one into the empty stores of Moscow, the endless lines, and into the lives of the suffering Muscovites.

The biggest mystery to me is why this painting––of which there are apparently two versions––is worth five million dollars. Who can say what it is supposedly valued at today?

All those years ago, it is said that Caesar was handed a warning note as he entered the Senate that day but did not read it. After he entered the hall, Senators holding daggers surrounded Caesar. Casca struck the first blow, hitting Caesar in the neck and drawing blood. The other Senators all joined in, stabbing him repeatedly about the head. Brutus struck a low blow and wounded Caesar in the groin, and Caesar is said to have remarked in Greek, "You, too, my child?" For some reason, today the quote is delivered in Latin as "Et tu, Brute?"

In the end, no purpose was served and the Republic collapsed in civil war and the era of the Roman Empire began. Disillusionment indeed.

Note: I have reviewed or will post reviews of some of these books on Amazon, Goodreads and other sites under my user names there.

I've Got a Secret

A secret shared is a secret lost. And this goes double for spies. That's the message I take away from two books I just read, Charles Cumming's A Foreign Country and James Church's A Drop of Chinese Blood. Both Cumming and Church have intelligence agency experience (Cumming with MI6 and Church (a pseudonym) with the CIA in Asia) and their sophisticated books simmer with secrets, mysterious disappearances, double dealings, betrayals, conspiracies and hopes of redemption.

A Foreign Country opens in Tunisia, where ex-pat Jean-Marc Daumal mourns for his 20-year-old British au pair, Amelia Weldon, with whom he was having an affair. Now her passport and belongings are missing and she has disappeared. As much as he loved Amelia, he wonders if what had bound them together was "a shared aptitude for deceit."

Flash forward thirty-some years to the present. Philippe and Jeannine Malot, an elderly vacationing French couple, are killed on the beach in Egypt. A "target" called HOLST is kidnapped in Paris. Thomas Kell (age 42, estranged from his wife and forced to retire from MI6 months earlier) receives a phone call from MI6's Jimmy Marquand. Amelia Levene, who's due to take over as chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service in six weeks, is missing from Nice. It's possible she's only having an affair, but maybe not. Kell is the only one who really knows what makes Levene tick. If he finds her quickly without attracting attention, all will be forgiven and Kell can come in from the cold.

The past is never far from the present for this book's characters. Take Kell for example. His entire personality grew out of a talent for the clandestine. He can't remember who he had been before the tap on the shoulder to join the SIS at twenty and he hasn't been able to create a successful life since retirement. All he knows is "the calling of the secret world." Kell despises the increasingly corporatized atmosphere within SIS and the attention his former superiors paid to their own personal advancement. He likes Levene and sees her as the "last roadblock preventing SIS from turning into a branch of the Health and Safety Executive," even though the male-dominated agency is nearly allergic to a female chief. Kell tracks her down and when he does, he discovers the game of hide and seek is only beginning.

Cumming puts his SIS experience to good use. MI6 gossip and traditions, interrogation techniques (Kell has interesting comments about the CIA in Afghanistan), interactions between intelligence agencies and increasingly tech-heavy spycraft feel authentic and are woven tightly, with clear writing, into a labyrinthine plot. How easy for spies now to snap photos with camera phones, conduct research online, communicate via cell phones and email and use GPS devices for traveling and tracking. But how difficult to avoid detection, crack encrypted passwords, manage with no cell phone reception and escape being captured or killed! Whereas a spy's methods and equipment have changed, the personal toll of a career in espionage hasn't. I really liked the complexity and insights of major characters Thomas Kell and Amelia Levene. The villains are nasty, but Cumming makes them three-dimensional humans. The settings in France, Tunisia and England are well described.

A Foreign Country is Cumming's fourth stand-alone book and was published in 2012 by St. Martin's Press. It comes after last year's The Trinity Six and won 2012's Steel Dagger Award. Fans of John le Carré or Olen Steinhauer should enjoy it.

Cumming's Amelia Levene is a beautiful woman but, according to A Drop of Chinese Blood's Major Bing Zong-yuan, Fang Mei-lin is the most beautiful woman in the world. For weeks rumors have been flying that she might show up in the far-flung Chinese town of Yanji, where Bing is director of the Ministry of State Security operations on the China-North Korea border. Bing's MSS superiors in Beijing have been happy with his record of controlling corruption and keeping Yanji as clean of North Korean operations "as could be expected." They've recently sent special couriers warning him that he's responsible for Madame Fang's safety. When she arrives, she refuses to talk to Bing and surprises him by her intimacy with his Uncle O, a wily police detective in Pyongyang until he left North Korea in a hurry and came to stay with Bing. O is supposedly working as a private investigator, but he spends most of his time in his workshop at Bing's home making plans for bookshelves. O and Madame Fang go out for the night and the next day O says they'll meet again. Instead, she disappears over the river into North Korea.

Sudden disappearances aren't out of the ordinary in Yanji. A year before Bing arrived, his MSS predecessor vanished without explanation. After taking all their cash, Bing's wife drove off with a Japanese pastry chef in Bing's car. Lieutenant Fu Bin, a Third Bureau spy planted in O's special bureau, left unexpectedly. Now, Du Hwa, a young woman whose cherry-red lips and dress make Bing long for fruit, tells O that her father, a master forger and counterfeiter, is missing and she insists O must find him. It's a very urgent matter because some body pieces, assumed to be Mr. Du, have arrived and are being stored in her brother's restaurant freezer.

Yanji, China is close to the northern tip of North Korea.
It isn't considered a plum assignment for an MSS bureau chief.

Unfortunately, in the wake of Madame Fang's disappearance, O is compelled to join his nephew on a Beijing-ordered escort-and-recovery mission (dropping them in Ulan Bator, Mongolia before shipping them to North Korea) that is so mysterious and complicated these two men, responsible for carrying it out, must form multiple hypotheses to try to understand it. As O explains, with more than one hypothesis, "you don't end up stuffing all the evidence into one bag, whether or not it fits." The bigwigs in Beijing exert enormous control in many disturbing ways and this draws both satirical comments and apprehension from Bing, the book's narrator. The stunning amount of scheming by the various criminals and agents made me dizzy. Happily, O, Bing or someone else explained (or more often postulated) what the hell people were thinking and doing so I was able to keep up. It's not the first time a book has convinced me I don't have the guile to be a spy but I'm really not cut out to spy for China or North Korea. Or Mongolia, for that matter.

I don't want to give you the impression that because of its complex plot this book is no fun. It's very fun. The characters and settings are drawn extremely well. How often do you get to peek at an honest Chinese MSS agent's life on the North Korea border, sit at a table of Kazakh agents in an Irish bar in Ulan Bator or ride in a shipment crate with three men and a corpse on a train to North Korea? In addition to all the characters' entertaining maneuvering, the long-suffering Bing and uncooperative O have a sparring relationship that reminds me of Rex Stout's Archie and Nero Wolfe––if you throw in a smidgen of Kung Fu's Master Po befuddling his student Grasshopper. Although I must give Bing credit. He operates by the seat of his pants much of the time but he's a smart guy who knows more than he lets on. After all, his dad was O's brother. As for O, it's impossible for Bing, and us, to know exactly what O's "retirement" means.

It looks as if the four-book Inspector O series, which is set in North Korea and begins with The Corpse in the Koryo, is finished and a new series, set in China and featuring Major Bing and his uncle O, begins with A Drop of Chinese Blood, published by Minotaur Books in 2012. It helps if you've warmed up your noggin with the Inspector O books but it's not absolutely necessary. If you like Martin Cruz Smith, give this book a whirl. I loved it.