Review of Vidar Sundstøl's The Land of Dreams

The Land of Dreams by Vidar Sundstøl

Over time, I have enjoyed reading authors who slip with ease into a different nationality and convince me to the core that they are native born. Donna Leon always comes to mind when I think of this skill. She is American by birth, but she demonstrates that she has a Venetian heart in her Commissario Guido Brunetti mysteries. Eliot Pattison is an American lawyer and author who has me totally convinced he is Chinese when he writes about investigator Shan Tao Yun, who began his fictional life imprisoned in a Himalayan labor camp after he displeased his superiors. I can't overlook Marylander Martha Grimes, who speaks with a distinctly British accent in her 22-book Superintendent Richard Jury of Scotland Yard series.

So I was exhilarated to come across The Land of Dreams, by Vidar Sundstøl (University of Minnesota, 2013). This is the first installment of his spine-chilling Minnesota Trilogy, and it is the flip side of what I was talking about. It is a book written by a Norwegian, telling an American tale with a Norwegian twist.

This is an account that begins on an ordinary summer day in the life of Lance Hansen, a U.S. Forest Service cop who patrols the area known as the arrowhead of Minnesota; the area located in the northeastern part of Minnesota on the north shore of Lake Superior, and it's so called because of its pointed shape.

Lance is better known to the locals as a historian and a genealogist with a great fount of knowledge about the origins and backgrounds of the local citizenry, who are predominantly Norwegian. Lance himself is of mixed ancestry, both Norwegian and French Canadian. He is a divorced man in his early 40s, who lives a solitary life. He sees his son, Jimmy, on alternate weekends and drives around with a picture of him taped on his steering wheel.

Baraga's Cross

There has been a report of a tent pitched illegally by Baraga's Cross on the shore of Lake Superior, and when Lance first gets there he comes across a lone white sneaker––and then a man covered in blood, whom Lance thinks is dead.

The man is actually in shock and when he speaks it comes out as gibberish, but Lance recognizes a Norwegian word–love. The man leads him to another man who had been bludgeoned to death. They are both nude.

Because this is federal land, the FBI agent, Bob Lecuyer, is in charge of the case. Eirik Nyland, a detective from the Norwegian police, also joins the team––bringing with him some Aquavit and lutefisk, which he has been assured is what everyone will expect as a gift from Norway.

This team approach is a good thing, because there has not been a murder in the area in recorded history. But Lance knows of the last man who disappeared in this same area about a hundred years ago. His name was Swamper Caribou, a well-respected medicine man of the time.

He was Ojibwe (known generally to the Europeans as Chippewa), and from what Lance has been able to piece together of the history, he is certain that Caribou was murdered, most likely by one of the small Norwegian community that existed at the time. But the secret of just what happened to Swamper Caribou has never been revealed.

Sundstøl spins a tale of Norwegian noir meeting Minnesota makeup––and by that I mean those qualities of Lance's that keep him evaluating all the threads tying his family, his community and his past and future together. He tries to balance what he knows with what he can tell.

There are some portions of this book that are somewhat historical and some that are entertaining travelogue, because the author incorporates real local eateries, bars, and activities such as a July Fourth celebration.

St. Urho

I loved being distracted by little historical vignettes, such as the one about a small town named Finland ensconced deep in the forest, which is inhabited by Finns, naturally. The first Finns who came to this beautiful area of the Baptism River Valley, uninhabited up until then, settled in. These early immigrants then sent home glowing reports to lure their friends and families to the north shore of Lake Superior. It was a fact that these letters contained not a single word of truth. The reality was that the land wasn't good for anything but growing potatoes, and even then there was no way to get the crops to market except piece by piece up and down steep slopes to Lake Superior.

Despite this, the Finnish community persists to this day and their main claim to fame is St. Urho's Day. Every year on March 16, the day before some minor saint is celebrated for driving snakes out of Ireland, St. Urho is celebrated for driving the grasshoppers out of Finland by saying "Grasshoppers, grasshoppers go to hell." According to Eirik Nyland, the people in Finland have never heard of St. Urho.

Some other parts of the book make us travel to some deeply troubled parts of the human heart and we may have to wait for our spirits to be lifted until the second part of the trilogy, The Dead, is translated by Tiina Nunnally. She does a wonderful job with The Land of Dreams.

While you are waiting, I recommend another taste of Minnesota which is just the opposite of noir, more like happy time. Take a side trip to Lake Wobegon (from the Indian "I waited all day for you in the rain"), Garrison Keillor's hometown, where the women are strong, all the men are good looking and the children are above average. Or slip down to St. Paul, where Keillor opened a bookstore in 2006 called Common Good Books and browse a bit there.

Keillor wrote this sonnet for the bookstore opening:

A bookstore is for people who love books and need
To touch them, open them, browse for a while,

And find some common good – that's why we read.

Readers and writers are two sides of the same gold coin.

You write and I read and in that moment I find

A union more perfect than any club I could join:

The simple intimacy of being one mind.

Here in a book-filled room on a busy street,
Strangers—living and dead—are hoping to meet.

skål

Review of Owen Laukkanen's Kill Fee

Kill Fee by Owen Laukkanen

People who say Kill Fee (Putnam, March 20, 2014) is implausible have a point. It's true that few already wealthy American businessmen will risk their necks moonlighting in violent crime, no matter how lucrative. But let's just assume only one greedy man among our wealthiest 1% seeks to fill the unmet demand for professional murder. That man could be much like Owen Laukkanen's Michael Parkerson, and he makes a dilly of a villain.

Parkerson is a dutiful husband and father at home, and an amoral executive who deals with "dollars, in and out" at his daytime workplace. He kids around with his secretary and attends a board meeting, even while sneaking in minutes on killswitch.com, the website forum for gun enthusiasts in which he anonymously and carefully handles orders for murder. Most of the time, Parkerson, who hates messes, manages to keep his own hands relatively clean. He does the organizing and planning while the dead-eyed "assets" do the actual work. (The despicable ways in which Parkerson recruits, trains, and manages these assets make a heck of a social statement.) Killswitch is several years old, and Parkerson is making a killing (sorry!) in profits. Things start to go wrong when Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere witness Parkerson's asset, Malcolm Lind, shoot billionaire Spenser Pyatt outside a hotel in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Stevens, of Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and Windermere, a hotshot special agent for the FBI, have appeared in Laukkanen's terrific earlier books, The Professionals and Criminal Enterprise (see reviews here and here). They make an odd pair: Stevens is middle-aged, white, paunchy, and balding, while Windermere is young, black, and gorgeous. Because they work so well together at the exciting job of chasing criminals, they're attracted to each other. This is in spite of Stevens' happy home life as the father of two and husband of Nancy, a beautiful lawyer, and Windermere's fondness for Stevens' family. I am willing to buy this, but the extent to which they think about and discuss it in Kill Fee gets in the way of the plot and doesn't seem credible.

This is only a minor flaw, because Laukkanen writes thrillers whose action I can only liken to the completely head-spinning time I drove home from college in a Triumph Spitfire with a dachshund and a cat loose in the car. Shifting points of view crank up the tension: in Kill Fee, we follow Parkerson, unwilling to dismantle his profitable business, frantically trying to fix one Killswitch mess after another; several assets, including Lind, who attempts to avoid capture, yet stay on schedule, while trying to decide what to do about a pretty young Delta employee seeking to befriend him; and Stevens, Windermere, and her FBI colleague, Mathers, hot on the trail of the assets and trying to sniff out the man behind them.

This three-ring circus is made even more nerve-racking by the plot twists Laukkanen tosses in, his willingness to harm his characters, and the competing emotions generated by his villains. For the most part, they are ordinary Joes and Janes, who take to crime because they decide they need a lot of money, and then they find themselves in over their heads. Their human frailty, which Laukkanen emphasizes by showing how exhausted and beleaguered they are, makes us root for them despite our simultaneously rooting for them to be stopped. That said, I had little sympathy for the dastardly Parkerson, although no one could ever call that guy lazy, and a lot of sympathy for the assets, ordinary Joes in over their heads for other excellent reasons.

I also liked the people chasing Parkerson and his killers: Windermere, an attractive, ballsy woman who calls the shots; Stevens, a problem solver whose love for his family and fear of flying can't extinguish his excitement about the job; and Mathers, a young FBI agent who shows he can manage something other than Minnesota nice.

Like The Professionals and Criminal Enterprise, Kill Fee is teeth-rattling suspense and top-notch entertainment. It would be a perfect companion for a vacation or a long train ride, because you'll want to devour it in one or two gulps. After I read it, it made my day to hear Laukkanen is working on the fourth in this series. I can hardly wait.

Review of Owen Laukkanen's Criminal Enterprise

Criminal Enterprise by Owen Laukkanen

Maybe you're familiar with "Minnesota nice," the stereotypical well-mannered behavior of people born and raised in the state of Minnesota. It means you're self-deprecating. You do polite things like taking at least an hour to say goodbye and refusing offered food three times before accepting it even if you're half-dead starved. You avoid fuss and confrontation.

Owen Laukkanen

Canadians have their own stereotypical behavior, which combines well with that of Minnesotans. I can picture the talented Canadian writer Owen Laukkanen climbing off his moose after a snowy morning ride and eating pancakes hosed with maple syrup before sitting down and wrestling with his own Canadian niceness in order to write about crime. Then Laukkanen can wrench his middle-aged Minnesota BCA Agent Kirk Stevens away from his home––where he makes nice with his legal-aid lawyer wife Nancy and their kids––to team him up with beautiful young FBI Special Agent Carla Windermere, a high-octane workaholic who fishtailed her car into Minneapolis-Saint Paul from Miami.

In Laukkanen's terrific 2012 debut, The Professionals (see review here), Stevens and Windermere collaborate on a well-publicized case––the Pender gang's multi-state kidnapping spree. Criminal Enterprise begins a year later. Stevens has promised Nancy he'll do no more cowboying and is working cold BCA cases. He's trying to convince himself that the sense of accomplishment from solving one matches the thrill of working with Windermere, but he's not succeeding. While Stevens pursues an old case involving a murdered man and his missing wife, Windermere is longing for the competent, easy-going Stevens. Her current FBI partner, Bob Doughty, pulls rank and tosses a wet blanket over her attempts to solve the armed bank robbery on "Eat Street" in Minneapolis.

The bank was robbed by a ski-masked couple: a woman carrying a sawed-off shotgun and a blue-eyed man who brandished an assault rifle. The man cruelly pretended to shoot a teller before he and his partner leaped into a waiting Toyota Camry and were driven away. Your typical bank robbers tend to be amateurs or impulsive degenerates; the Eat Street robbers' weapons and behavior lead Windermere to believe they could be pros.  She begins to examine previous open-case robberies to see if she can detect a pattern and identify a suspect.

On the surface, Carter Tomlin looks like a bad bet for bank robbery. Tomlin is an accountant who lives with his wife Becca and kids in a big Victorian on Summit Avenue, the luxurious Saint Paul neighborhood in which Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald once lived. Tomlin over-leveraged himself to buy into the American dream, and when he is laid off from the job he's held for 20 years, it's a catastrophe. Tomlin has always believed a man provides for his family. In times of adversity, real men don't complain, they deal with it.

Tomlin deals with it by free-lance accounting and burning through savings. Desperate, he walks into the bank to talk to a loan officer, but then Tomlin has an epiphany. He walks out, buys a cheap disguise at the Walmart next door, and robs the bank instead. The take isn't much so Tomlin obtains some weapons, picks up a couple of partners, and tackles bigger targets. And, guess what? He doesn't feel emasculated any more. In fact, Tomlin feels like a god when he's holding a gun, and he begins to live for the adrenaline rush of committing crime. What do they say about addicts? They require increasingly higher-dose fixes.

Before you dismiss Tomlin as a completely unbelievable character, think about what criminologist Richard Wright, who wrote Armed Robbers in Action, says about self-reinforcing behavior: "Once somebody takes an action, in this case a shootout, then you're off and running. After that events take on a logic of their own, especially when you have these self-enclosed systems of self-reinforcing behavior. None of them make sense except in relation to one another."

This high-voltage thriller practically deserves a warning label on its cover. What with watching Tomlin befriending Stevens, Windermere trying to get the goods on Tomlin, a guy with a personal beef tracking Tomlin, Tomlin turning into a bad-ass criminal who makes ever-crazier decisions; and wondering whether Tomlin's partners in crime, Tricia Henderson and Dragan Medic, can be trusted––I'm not kidding, at one point I found my butt hovering a few inches above the chair, I was that amped up. Take your heart or high-blood pressure medication before you read Criminal Enterprise.

Oh, but before you do, don't neglect to read The Professionals first. It's not necessary to understand Criminal Enterprise, but do it because these books are so much fun. They look at issues such as the toll of juggling personal and professional lives, the impact of an economic downturn, the strain of leading a double life, and relationships between men and women and between parents and their children. There's an interesting chemistry between Stevens, a good cop and family man, and Windermere, a glamorous and gutsy FBI special agent. In addition, the writing is so crisp you can almost hear it crunch between your teeth, and the action builds to a jaws-clenching finish. Don't take my word for it. Pretend you're from Minnesota or Canada and be nice to yourself by reading Laukkanen.

Note: I received a free advance review copy of Criminal Enterprise. It will be published on March 21, 2013 by G. P. Putnam's Sons. I'm thrilled to learn that Laukkanen is now at work on his third Stevens/Windermere book.

The Kindness of Strangers

After several months of arduous sea travel, the sailing ship Mayflower, filled with pilgrims looking for a new way of life, found its way into Plymouth harbor. This was in the cold November of 1620, and there was an even colder winter ahead. These hardy souls spent the next few months huddled in the holds of the ship, losing more than half of their members before the spring came. The few that were left made their way onto land and began making themselves a new colony. When they were at their most vulnerable, they met with strangers from the local people who aided them in putting down roots.

“Who ever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” said Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, when she was at a desperate point in her life.

Several of my favorite characters owe their current existence to the kindness of strangers. One of these I have been following for about 15 years. This is the unusual character Kathy Mallory, who debuted in Mallory’s Oracle by Carol O'Connell. Kathy was a waif of about 10 or 11, living on the streets with razor blades in her pockets for protection, keeping on the run from the victims she robbed to stay alive and finding safe places to sleep. She had the face of an angel and a heart that was growing harder by the day. Then a kindly cop, Lou Markowitz, and his loving wife, who gave her a home and unconditional love, rescued her.

Over the course of the series, Kathy morphs to Mallory and enters the police herself. The reader gets to see Mallory mostly through the eyes of all those who care for her, but she essentially is a mystery that is slowly revealed over all the books. There are her partner, Riker, her boss, Coffey, her friend, Charles, and several of Markowitz's poker buddies––whom she used to fleece regularly. They all have specific thoughts about what kind of person Mallory is, but the reader knows that they all have it a bit wrong.

In The Chalk Girl, O'Connell’s terrific book that was published by Putnam early this year, Mallory is back at the NYPD after a three-month hiatus, which she spent driving around the country. Her boss, Lt. Coffey, has kept her deskbound in her time-out corner until the day the rampaging rats ran in Central Park. There have always been rats in the park, and the animal and the human vermin types abound there, but on this day, due to unusual circumstances, they are moving en masse through a particular part of the park––the Ramble––and they are delighted to find several dead bodies to augment their frenzy.

Among all the frightened, running, screaming populace at the park, there is a small red-haired child who looks like a sprite, wandering around trying to find someone to help her. But she is filthy, smelly, maybe bloody, and even grown-up people back away from her. Finally, amid all the mayhem and murder, Mallory is released from her constraints to help find the girl, because if there is one thing she knows, it is being young, alone and frightened. There are a few other reports about this child coming in. She appears to be unusually affectionate and is running up to people with arms outstretched as if looking for a hug. When Mallory finds her, she is the first to open her arms and gather the rather disreputable child to her chest. This seems to be quite a departure for the usually pristine detective, but it was not the surprise to me that it was to Mallory's fellow police officers.

The little girl's name is Coco, and she has been looking for her uncle Ben. She says that he has turned into a tree and it turns out that he is indeed suspended by ropes to a tree––and he is not quite dead. Coco is a remarkable child with distinct qualities and Mallory knows that the little girl will be a good witness to help solve this incident and the cases of other similar hanging victims who had been left to die gruesomely. Mallory's friend, Charles Butler, who is a psychologist, is much more worried about the child's state of mind.

Ben is hospitalized in critical condition, his body shut down due to his ordeal, and while there the police guard him. It was a nice change of cliché when the astute policeman at the door of the hospital room is never caught napping or on break when unwanted and possibly dangerous visitors show up. But Ben was not long for this world and though the police are looking for what tied these victims together, Mallory looks for a money angle because she believes it's the motive for most murders.

The story moves along at an exciting pace, as pieces of the past intersect with bits of the present. The pictures of the crime change like the inside view of a kaleidoscope, with all the little facets falling into different patterns as the case moves along. The people involved are among the wealthy––and among the drug-ridden––as well as people in authority. The images become clear and the accounts are melded beautifully and then balanced.

Mallory's relationship with Coco is very revealing and I am sure that many have interpreted it in different ways as did the people who considered they knew her. My take is that it began as the kindness of a stranger who could be depended upon and then turned deeper than that.

Two other series come to mind that reflect this theme. One is Elizabeth Gunn's, about an aptly-named Jake Hines, a man of many bloodlines. Jake began his unpretentious life in a dumpster, found by a pot-smoking janitor, who took him to a motel clerk, who promptly wiped the coffee grounds out of his eyes and called Health and Human Services. He owed his childhood to the foster parents of Minnesota, and it wasn't until he was a little older that he was a little grateful because he knew that other places were a lot worse. Jake is now the newly appointed Chief of Detectives for the town of Rutherford, Minnesota.

These are fast-paced police procedurals with an excellent cast of characters, who work well as a team. This is somewhat reminiscent of Dell Shannon's Lt. Luis Mendoza, albeit in a scaled-down town. I am drawn to the dermatologist/coroner who learned English while he was on the run from a work camp in the Soviet Union. He is hard to surprise, because murderers supervised his adolescence.

In Nury Vittachi's series that begins with The Feng Shui Detective, we meet Mr. C. F. Wong, a Feng Shui master who takes on a world-weary cast-adrift 17-year-old Joyce McQuinnie. Wong, living in Singapore, speaks English, but he considers Joyce's to be speaking a bizarre and incomprehensible sub-dialect of the language. It had taken him a while to learn that her term for no was "As if" and it was another breakthrough to find that "What ever" meant yes.

The adventures of these two are always humorous and both parties benefit from the kindness of a stranger.

At Thanksgiving, many people donate their time collecting and delivering food to worthy families, and many take time from their own plans to serve in soup kitchens. My hat is off to all the strangers who can be depended on for acts of kindness at this time of year.

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

Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

It's official. I'm a Baby Doc (my husband). A mean TSA agent (my kids). All this because I'm supervising the packing for our lake vacation trip. I'm feeling very misunderstood, much like some characters in books I've been reading.

You can bet no Wall Street guy has won a recent popularity contest. Grove O'Rourke, a top broker at Sachs, Kidder, and Carnegie, says some people think of Jack London's book when they hear "the call of the wild." He associates that phrase with his job, because stockbrokers yap and fight all day. As Norb Vonnegut's The Trust opens, O'Rourke is on the phone with his head under the desktop, trying to hear Palmer Kincaid, his old mentor and biggest client. Kincaid needs O'Rourke's help. By the time O'Rourke arrives in Charleston, South Carolina, Kincaid has died in a solo night-boating accident.

A Thousandth Man

Kipling wrote a poem about Solomon's one man in a thousand, who will stick closer than a brother when "the whole round world is agin you." Kincaid's 33-year-old daughter, Claire, tells O'Rourke her dad thought of him as his thousandth man. That's why his will asks O'Rourke to join Claire and JoJo, Kincaid's much younger second wife, on the board of the Palmetto Foundation, a conduit for philanthropists. The threesome has no sooner authorized a $25 million transfer to the Philippines, at the request of a priest from the Catholic Fund, when O'Rourke gets a phone call from lawyer Biscuit Hughes. Hughes is representing some people in Fayettesville, North Carolina, who are outraged that a huge adult superstore has moved into their neighborhood. The XXX-superstore's unlikely owner? The Catholic Fund.

It's obvious O'Rourke needs to stop answering the phone. But let's not pursue this unhelpful line of thinking. Better for us to listen to Santa Esmeralda play "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on O'Rourke's behalf, because the shit now hits the fan. Everyone is angry at the good-intentioned O'Rourke. FBI hard-ass Agent Izzy Torres. His manipulative SKC boss Katy Anders. Claire, who resents his distrust of Father Ricardo. And Manhattan girlfriend Annie, since Claire was a high school-age O'Rourke's Daisy Buchanan and O'Rourke is staying in Claire's Charleston guesthouse. Because Santa Esmeralda's version of this song is heard in Kill Bill: Volume 1, it's especially appropriate. O'Rourke's investigation of the Catholic Fund spawns a kidnapping and scenes that would fit right into Quentin Tarantino's movie.

Author Vonnegut, a distant cousin to Kurt Vonnegut, worked in wealth management and has written fiction and nonfiction about Wall Street. The Trust, published last month by Minotaur Books, is the second Grove O'Rourke book after Top Producer. Vonnegut's characters, even those who wear designer clothes and behave with southern wile and charm, carry out a rip-snortin' plot. O'Rourke begins a little buttoned down, but circumstances and the company of the rumpled Biscuit jerk him out of his cordovan loafers. The financial shenanigans are explained in terms even people who can't balance a checkbook can enjoy. While I recommend you read this snazzy thriller, I must issue a stern reminder. Humans aren't the only ones misperceived. Great Stuff Big Gap Filler is grossly misunderstood by one of The Trust's memorable villains. Read labels, people!

The characters in Pete Hautman's Mrs. Million don't only not understand each other. They don't even understand themselves. After middle Grabo sister Barbaraannette Quinn wins $8.9 million in Minnesota's Powerball lottery, she's as surprised as everyone else when she stands in front of the microphone and announces a $1 million reward for the safe return of her missing husband Bobby. Six years earlier, Bobby had set out fishing from their Cold Rock home and never returned.

Barbaraannette admits that the dumbest thing she's ever done is marrying Bobby and the second dumbest is offering big money for his return. Other than knowing how to have a good time and looking good in and out of his clothes (the guy is "hung like a racehorse"), there hasn't been much to admire about Bobby.

A co-misunderstanding of the color red

Now that he's worth all that money, everyone wants the award, including Bobby himself, who saw Barbaraannette make her announcement on TV. He and his Arizona girlfriend, Phlox, decide she'll claim the reward, so they head to Cold Rock. Unfortunately, they barely make it past the Taxidermy & Cheese Shoppe before Bobby is spotted by a couple of former business partners whom he cheated out of some money. Also figuring in the plot are a good-lookin' but not real smart young sociopath, Jayjay Morrow, fresh out of prison but not out of ideas for turning a fast buck; André Gideon, a finicky professor who lusts after Jayjay; Barbaraannette's sisters, who are nothing like her, and their mother, Hilde, who likes to escape from her assisted-living home by stealing a doctor's car; and Art Dobbleman, a very shy banker who's had a crush on Barbaraannette since high school.

Mrs. Million is the fifth book in a series about a group of small-town Minnesota gamblers, but it's only linked to the series by a mention. Hilde likens gambler Sam O'Gara, Barbarannette's father, to her missing husband Bobby. This book is similar in flavor to Carl Hiassen's Lucky You, which also involves a lottery winner's travails. Like Hiassen's heroines, Hautman's Barbaraannette has more determination and smarts than her sweetness might suggest. And like Hiassen's book, it's very entertaining. A good book for vacation reading.

I'm enjoying sharing my misunderstood state with some fictional characters. I'm now reading a good book of British espionage, Dead Spy Running, by Jon Stock. It's the first of a trilogy involving Daniel Marchant. (The second, Games Traitors Play, was published in March 2012 by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's.) The book begins when Marchant, who's been suspended from MI6, is running a London marathon. The US ambassador to England is also running. Marchant notices a fellow runner with a belt of explosives strapped around his waist running behind the ambassador's group. It's set to go off when he drops below a certain pace. Like his late father, Stephen Marchant, head of MI6 until he was forced to resign in disgrace, Daniel's intentions are suspected by his intelligence colleagues. Yet Daniel is determined to clear his father as well as himself.

Great British espionage deserves a great British band. I'll leave you with the Animals singing "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood."

Going Pro: Owen Laukkanen's The Professionals

The Northern Lights

My love of Canada dates back to one winter night when I was a kid growing up in Washington state, and my dad pointed out the northern lights. A country north of us, closer to that beautiful sky, had to be pretty darn wonderful, I thought.

Canada is home to some great crime fiction writers: Louise Penny, Giles Blunt, Peter Robinson, Alan Bradley, William Deverell, Robert Rotenberg, Gail Bowen, Howard Engel, Inger Ash Wolfe (pseudonym of Michael Redhill), Eric Wright, Jon Redfern, Linwood Barclay. Yesterday I was pleased to meet another Canadian, Owen Laukkanen, who was neighborly enough to introduce me to four fresh University of Washington graduates in his 2012 thriller, The Professionals, published by Putnam.

If Marie, Pender, Mouse and Sawyer had graduated with a UW degree in engineering or a science, their lives would have taken a different tack. But maybe not. Mouse scored an internship at Microsoft, but he is a hacker at heart and too much of an anarchist to settle down in an office. The four friends all needed money, but they couldn't see themselves waiting tables or selling insurance. What started off as a joke about robbing banks became a conversation about the Pender method of crime. Forget the Hail Mary approach, he argued. Big crimes attract big crowds. Police, feds, and TV cameras. Ultimately, jail or death for the criminals. It was better to go for lower numbers, but higher volume. How about kidnapping mid-level executives with enough cash and the families to pay a "reasonable" ransom? It's an inconvenience at those stakes, not a crime, he said. Those victims would just want to see things return to normal. Pender's five-year plan involves staying professional and avoiding greed. Moving their kidnappings around. In five years, if they stick to "low-risk, no-violence" kidnappings, they can retire to the Maldives for a life of sipping drinks on the sand.

The five-year plan has three years to go when The Professionals begins. These kids have their kidnapping routine down cold. The $60,000 ransom still presents sticker shock to their victims; they cannot believe it is so low. All is going well until one victim, back home in Minnesota, decides to call the cops, and veteran Kirk Stevens of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is assigned to the case. When his investigation crosses state lines, Stevens calls the FBI and becomes temporarily attached to the Bureau. The kidnappers aren't aware that Stevens and FBI Agent Carla Windermere are fishing for them. Pender and his friends have a more immediate problem: they've kidnapped the wrong guy. As he's told them, they've just made the biggest motherfucking mistake of their lives. There are bigger pros than the kidnappers in the criminal pond. The Mob is now after them, too.

It's difficult to believe that this book is Laukkanen's debut. His voice is very assured, and his pacing is immaculate. From the moment the book begins––a Chicago victim-to-be checks his watch on the train and dreams of hot lasagna and cold beer, the Bulls game, and a little fun in the master bedroom later––until the end, it's a corkscrewing ride of look ma, no-hands thrills. This book is chock full of surprises. A very clever plot. Great plot twists. Sensational characters.

Owen Laukkanen (photo by Colin O'Connor)

Stevens and Windermere are appealing protagonists. He is happily married to an attorney and has a couple of kids; she has a boyfriend unhappily living in Minnesota who may not last far into this proposed series. That would make plenty of Minnesotans happy because Windermere is exceedingly attractive as well as a terrific investigator. She and Stevens have such a good time on the trail chasing these kidnappers and such an easy chemistry that despite Stevens' fear of flying and homesickness for his family, he wishes the case would never end. I felt the same way. I wanted Pender and his friends to succeed, but I didn't want Stevens and Windermere to fail. How did Laukkanen pull this off? I cannot wait for his next, although The Professionals will be a very tough act to follow.