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.

The Envelope, Please Part II: Forecasting the 2014 Edgar for Best First Novel by an American

I On Monday, I showed you the nominees for the 2014 Best Novel Edgar. It's now time for discussing the Edgar nominees for Best First Novel by an American. I'll tell you right off the bat that this will be a tough one to predict.

Before I get to that, though, I want to express a wish for opening this category to non-Americans. Americans can vie for the Crime Writers Association's John Creasey Dagger for best new crime writer of the year, and two of the nominees we'll talk about today, Roger Hobbs and Becky Masterman, were longlisted for that Dagger. At the very least, the Mystery Writers of America should add another Edgar category: Best First Novel by a Non-American. This would be a friendly thing to do especially after the Man Booker Prize people were magnanimous (some would say misguided) enough to open their prestigious competition to American authors in 2014. Let's not be stuffier than the Brits!

I'm climbing off my soap box now and getting down to the business at hand.

The nominees for the 2014 Edgar for Best First Novel by an American are:

The Resurrectionist by Matthew Guinn (W.W. Norton)
Ghostman by Roger Hobbs (Alfred A. Knopf)
Rage Against the Dying by Becky Masterman (Minotaur Books)
Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews (Simon & Schuster/Scribner)
Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight (HarperCollins)

Here are the Read Me Deadly equivalents of the little Oscar film clips:

Matthew Guinn's The Resurrectionist involves two men whose lives are linked by the same South Carolina medical school. Nemo Johnston, a pre-Civil War slave, is purchased by the school and ordered to procure cadavers for its anatomy classes. In the 1990s, white medical resident Jacob Thacker, MD, is obligated to handle public relations for the school's dean, when the bones of dissected slaves are unearthed in the basement of the school.
 
A big Atlantic City casino heist goes haywire in Ghostman, by Roger Hobbs. The feds are circling. One robber is dead, while another is wounded by who knows who and has disappeared with the $1.2 million. The heist's organizer calls in a debt from "Jack," a criminal's criminal, and tells him he has 48 hours to fix things before the money's dye pack explodes and GPS starts beeping.

In Becky Masterman's Rage Against the Dying, 59-year-old Brigid Quinn, an FBI special agent who worked serial killer cases undercover, has been forced to retire. She has married an ex-priest and is living in Tucson, Arizona. Then the Route 66 killer, involved in the disappearance of her protégée, is captured. But there's some doubt he's the right man.

Beautiful Dominika Egorova is coerced into becoming a professional seductress (a "sparrow") for Putin's Russian intelligence service. Her assignment is to compromise ambitious rookie CIA spook Nathaniel Nash, in order to identify a Russian mole for the FSB. Sparks fly between the two and they engage in deceitful games of "spy vs. spy" in Jason Matthews' Red Sparrow.

Reconstructing Amelia, by Kimberly McCreight, involves the efforts of Kate Baron, litigation attorney and single mom, to reconstruct the last days of her high-achieving 15-year-old daughter, Amelia. Amelia fell to her death from the roof of her private school after being accused of cheating. Suicide? Or something else?

Prediction: Ai-yi-yi. I cannot believe I volunteered for this job of forecaster. Over the past few days, I've been thinking about these books and reading about their writers. I can see how they wrote these particular books but, unfortunately, it doesn't make it easier to pick the winner. I've been changing my mind hourly.

Becky Masterman

It's been a year since I read Becky Masterman's Rage Against the Dying but I remember the dread I felt reading the beginning like it was yesterday. Serial killer Gerald Peasil coolly sizes up his next victim, a white-haired "hot granny" rock hunting in the dry river bed. But this isn't the typical book that starts with a crime that the rest of the book solves by the ending. Tough as old leather Brigid Quinn, now married to a man who knows nothing of her former FBI career, isn't the typical protagonist. And the investigation that drags her back into the Route 66 case isn't typical, either.

I'm not a fan in general of serial killer books but I really liked Masterman's twists on the standard plot and her unusual characters. She's a former editor of forensic medical texts and she manages to be authentically creepy without going over the top. Rage Against the Dying has been nominated for four other crime fiction awards this year and she's seriously in the race for this one.

Roger Hobbs

Roger Hobbs takes another fairly predictable plot (the heist gone wrong) and standard characters (criminals who have fallen out) and turns it into an adrenalin-charged tour de force in Ghostman. It's not that the book is a stripped-down juggernaut, though. The narrator, a professional criminal we know as "Jack Delon" who specializes in making things disappear, goes into pages-long digressions about his craft. There were times I felt the coziness of a mentor relationship with Jack, reading all of these explanations. It's easy to see that Hobbs, a former rifle range instructor and recent college grad, must be a natural-born scholar.
  
Hobbs writes with such assurance and Jack's narrative voice is so unusual that this book is a rare first. It was awarded the 2013 Steel Dagger Award for best thriller by the Crime Writers Association and was named a finalist for two other awards in addition to this Edgar nomination. It's in the running for sure.

Kimberly McCreight

Kimberly McCreight's lawyer-single mother Kate Baron had my sympathy in Reconstructing Amelia, although I felt I knew her less well than her teenage daughter Amelia, a bright student who is close to her mother. Amelia is brought to life through her first-person media posts and texts, which appear in alternating chapters and provide the gist for Kate's research. Kate is allowed to sit in on a detective's interviews and I had a hard time swallowing this, especially surprising coming from lawyer/writer McCreight. Better was the Brooklyn setting and the depiction of the special hell high school creates for some students. This is a popular book that wasn't quite to my taste. I could be wrong but I don't see it winning.

Matthew Guinn

Matthew Guinn's slave, Nemo Johnston, is a memorable character. He takes easily to his night job of supplying cadavers for a Columbia, South Carolina medical school. He robs African-American cemeteries of their dead and even creates his own corpses on occasion. By day, he's a skilled surgeon/teacher in the school's anatomy lab (you can imagine some of the gruesome scenes) although he isn't compensated accordingly. His story is more interesting than that of the Xanax-addicted young doctor who faces a moral dilemma when he's asked to cover up the 1990s discovery of the African-American bones in the medical school's basement.

Guinn's novel is uneven but still a good southern gothic. I'll look forward to his next but I think this isn't his year.

Jason Matthews

Some of the best British espionage writers actually worked in intelligence and now there's an American espionage writer, Jason Matthews, who was a spy for 30 years. It's a joy to read his book, Red Sparrow, filled with an insider's knowledge of spycraft.

His Russian "sparrow," Dominika Egorova, is lovely and I rooted for her even though I'm an American. I also liked the target of her training and charms, newly minted CIA agent Nathaniel Nash. Their dialogue was perfectly done. I agree with Sister Mary's criticisms (see her review here) but the shortcomings of this book are minor. A terrific book nominated for two other awards and this Edgar. Of these five books, I liked it the most. Well, maybe. I can't decide.

And now we're down to it. It's between Matthews, Masterman and Hobbs. It wouldn't surprise me if any of them won but I'm going with Masterman. I think the Mystery Writers of America will be pleased to honor a female writer who created an unusual female protagonist and breathed new life into a novel about serial killers, Rage Against the Dying.

Pickin' the winner out of the hat: Becky Masterman's Rage Against the Dying

Rollin' the dice, winner high: Matthew Guinn's The Resurrectionist

Okay, I gave it a shot. Three shots, actually. Maybe the pick of Masterman twice is prophetic. Now please tell me who you think is going to win this Edgar.

Review of Jason Matthews' Red Sparrow

Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews

Who says the Cold War is over? Sure, the Berlin Wall came down, the USSR is fractured, and Russia is no longer a communist state, but that doesn't mean the US isn't watching Russia very carefully––and vice versa.

Vladimir Putin, that old KGB operative and apparently now President-for-Life, has plenty of tricks up his sleeve––and I'm not talking about this week's news that he purloined Bob Kraft's Patriots Super Bowl ring. Vlad the Cad plans for Russia to return to being a superpower, and for that he needs excellent intelligence on the US government. Even more important for right now, he needs somebody to find out who is passing Russian secrets to the CIA's young agent, Nate Nash.

Enter Dominika Egorova, the former ballet dancer, turned into a spy by her conniving uncle, Ivan Egorov. Egorov, the slime, sends Dominika to "sparrow school," where Russian intelligence trains agents in the most effective techniques to seduce their targets. Nate is Dominika's target, and their dance begins. The first half of the story details this slow seduction and the development of Dominika's position within the Russian security apparatus.

It's unusual for espionage fiction to feature a female agent, but this is Dominika's story. She begins as a fervent nationalist, naïvely trusting that the servants of the motherland share her honor and devotion. Her own uncle's callously manipulative actions are just her first clues that Russian intelligence is a dangerous place. Dominika has some special help maneuvering through this snakepit. She has a form of synesthesia that gives her the ability to see colored auras around people that clue her into their real character or state of mind.

The second half of the story raises the stakes, as both sides play a no-limit game of Mole Hunt. The Russians need Dominika to get Nate to reveal their mole, while the Americans are in hot pursuit of someone highly placed in government who is funneling secrets to the Russians. Author Jason Matthews, a retired longtime CIA agent, constructs a fiendishly clever plot, filled with characters painted in all shades of gray (or, for Dominika, yellow, brown, red, blue and purple), including one especially colorful love-to-hate villain.

Particularly for a debut novel, this is just a bang-up tale of modern espionage, with all the appeal of an old-fashioned Cold War yarn. Matthews does commit a few rookie errors. He uses too much alliteration in character names, he's not great with physical descriptions (what's a "willowy smile"?), Dominika's synesthesia can get a little gimmicky, and some plot elements rely on stupid mistakes.

More troublesome is Matthews' depiction of all FBI agents as jumped-up beat cops, and incompetent ones at that. I don't have any inside knowledge of the FBI, but the law of averages alone would suggest that it can't be 100% incompetent. No, this smells like a dramatization of the well-known animosity between the two agencies, told by a biased party, and it interferes with the story. Relatively speaking, though, my criticisms are nits. Matthews is a powerful storyteller and this is first-rate espionage fiction.

I don't want to forget to mention one of the most unusual aspects of the book. Every chapter ends with a recipe. Sure, we've all seen that plenty of times in cozy mysteries, but this is a first for me in serious espionage fiction. I've even made copies of some of the recipes and already prepared one of the dishes (a delicious soubise).

I hope Jason Matthews continues Dominika's story in future books––and keeps his readers stocked with new recipes.

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