Caught in a Web

I like spiders, but I have no desire to see them doing a number on some poor victim caught in a web. The very idea of a trapped animal disturbs me; yet, I do like books in which people are ensnared, and they're forced to muster every shred of courage and resourcefulness they possess to extricate themselves.

Of course, some of the best fictional "no way out" predicaments involve espionage, and former CIA operations officer and veteran thriller writer Charles McCarry can spin a tangled web of deceit with the best of them. His 2013 book, The Shanghai Factor, doesn't feature series protagonist Paul Christopher, a highly skilled and saintly American agent. Instead, we have a cynical, unnamed 29-year-old narrator, who graduated from an elite college and served with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. Nameless spent months in a hospital recovering from a bomb injury, and it's not clear how much he cares whether he lives or dies. He is now in Shanghai, working as a sleeper agent for "Headquarters" (possibly the CIA).

Espionage for such a spy can proceed like dripping molasses, and Nameless spends 2-1/2 years doing little more than avoiding fellow westerners, improving his Mandarin, and frolicking in bed with a beautiful and mysterious Chinese woman named Mei. Things pick up when Nameless notices tag teams of Chinese following him, and he's grabbed and assaulted. But it's after he's called home to speak to Luther R. Burbank, chief of Headquarters Counterintelligence, whose job is "to finger the bad guy inside every good guy and banish the sinner to outer darkness," that the wheels within wheels really begin to turn. Burbank plays mind games with Nameless before offering him the chance to be "the agent of his own fate." In other words, Luther wants Nameless to act as bait to lure, and then hook, their adversary. When Nameless accepts, Burbank shoos him back to China. Soon Nameless is traveling between Shanghai, New York City, and Washington D.C., plying his tradecraft, meeting lovely women, and playing such subtle espionage games, it's difficult to tell who he, and the enigmatic others, are really working for—the Chinese intelligence agency (Guoanbu) or the American Headquarters.

The Shanghai Factor is a mostly cerebral, rather than a high-octane, espionage thriller. It contains complex characters, vivid writing, and witty observations. The plot's action takes place during periods of tense quiet that are punctuated with spine-chilling moments of danger. There's an overall atmosphere of ambiguity and menace. Living as a spook under cover in hostile territory leads to justifiable paranoia. Nameless says, "You can never be a fish swimming in their sea, you are always the pasty-white legs and arms thrashing on the surface with a tiny unheeded cut on your finger. Meanwhile the shark swims toward the scent of blood from miles away." Watching the valiant Nameless use his brains to navigate perilous waters, in which no one can be trusted completely, makes a very satisfying read.

Not all of the pitfalls crime fiction writers devise are outside their characters' skins. Some poor protagonists are victimized, not only by evildoers, but by their own minds as well. This is the case for narrator Bryan Bennett in The Worst Thing, a 2011 standalone thriller by Aaron Elkins, well known to many of us as the author of the Edgar Award-winning "Skeleton Detective" series, featuring forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver.

We meet Bryan, his wife Lori, and his Odysseus Institute boss, Wally North, at a restaurant, where they're celebrating Bryan and Lori's tenth wedding anniversary. Shoving aside his dessert, Wally offers Bryan and Lori a trip to Reykjavik, Iceland. He wants Bryan to present their corporate-level kidnapping and extortion seminar to the executives of an Icelandic fisheries corporation, GlobalSeas. GlobalSeas CEO Baldur Baldursson, who previously escaped a clumsy kidnapping attempt by members of Project Save the Earth, specifically asked for Bryan, the former hostage negotiator who created the crisis management and security policies program.

Lori is thrilled by the idea, but Bryan refuses. He explains to us that "each life has a defining moment, an episode that shapes and colors, for good or ill, all that follows." Bryan's defining moment came more than 30 years ago. When he was five years old, he was kidnapped in Turkey and held, chained in a dungeon, for two months. As a result, Bryan struggles with claustrophobia, nightmares, and occasional nighttime panic attacks. He's also convinced that he'll get himself kidnapped again. Sitting in a cramped airplane cabin and speaking to a group in Iceland about kidnapping is definitely not something Bryan wants to do.

He does it, however, for Lori's sake, setting into motion a terrific twisting-and-turning chain of events, in which the determined kidnappers writer Elkins has already kindly introduced to us get a chance to meet Baldur, Lori, and ... Bryan.

I don't mean to imply that The Worst Thing is a comic caper in the style of Donald E. Westlake, because it has some thought-provoking themes. Bryan conveys the long-term consequences of traumatic events, the troubling nature of memory, and the debilitating nature of panic attacks and their treatment very clearly. Despite these serious subjects, this book is fun. Colorful villains and sympathetic nice guys, unusual settings, a nice sense of irony, and sly plotting are all here. Elkins knows how to tell a story, and suspense builds to a nifty surprise ending. The travails of brave Bryan Bennett in Iceland would make a great hammock read this summer.

International Waffle Day

Yes, folks, March 25th is International Waffle Day. Observing this holiday means eating waffles for breakfast or waffling about decisions or issues. Or reading books in which characters do these things.

Andrew Pyper: Lost Girls (2000). An astonishingly fun and thought-provoking read narrated by a cynical, cocaine-snorting, and Keats-spouting Bartholomew Crane of Toronto's criminal law firm Lyle, Gederow & Associate (better known as "Lie, Get 'Em Off & Associate"). Teacher Thom Tripp is accused of murdering two teenage girls, whose bodies haven't been found, and Crane travels to the decrepit North Country town of Murdoch to take on his defense. There, Crane's usual disregard of the truth and own little-remembered past get a workout as he investigates his client's bizarre story of the girls' disappearance at Lake St. Christopher.

This literary legal mystery/psychological suspense/thriller is Canadian lawyer Pyper's debut novel. It has a nice touch of the frightening supernatural and an entertainingly acerbic lawyer/sleuth. Lost Girls was a New York Times Notable Book and won the 2000 Edgar and Arthur Ellis Awards for Best First Novel.

Peter Guttridge: City of Dreadful Night (2010). Whether you'll enjoy this complex and compelling book, the first in Guttridge's Brighton series, all depends. Can you handle a plot's coincidence and the ambiguity of a tale left dangling at the end? If you can, and you like gritty British police procedurals set in the present, but that take a look at an unsolved real-life crime in the past, this may be something for you.

An armed police raid at a house in Brighton and Hove, a seaside resort in East Sussex, England, goes wrong, and four people are killed. Chief Constable Robert Watts is forced to resign, and his marriage ends when his affair with DS Sarah Gilchrist, who participated in the raid, becomes known. Despite his superiors' warnings to back off, Watts digs into the web of political and criminal relationships behind the botched raid and the deaths in its aftermath. Meanwhile, a diary related to an unclosed 1934 case, in which parts of a woman's body were discovered in trunks left at Brighton railroad stations, surfaces and may involve Watts's father, a former cop, and the father of Watts's old friend and government fixer, William Simpson. Helping Watts investigate are DS Gilchrist; a young reporter named Kate Simpson, who is William Simpson's daughter; and James Tingley, Watts's old MI5 friend. I'm looking forward to seeing these characters again in the next series book, 2011's The Last King of Brighton.

Rex Stout: Too Many Women (1947). Private eye extraordinaire Nero Wolfe considers Archie Goodwin an expert on young women. So when the president of Naylor-Kerr, Inc. asks Wolfe to investigate rumors about Wally Moore's hit-and-run death that are distracting his employees, Wolfe sends Archie to work undercover as an efficiency expert in the engineering firm's warehouse, which is full of beautiful young women. Although Archie goes through these obstructive women like a dolphin goes through waves, Wolfe doesn't decide to close the investigation before several more people die. It's an enjoyable mystery, as well as an interesting look at women in the post-WWII workforce.

Stout's Nero Wolfe books form an utterly charming traditional series, a slice of Americana set from its beginning in 1934 with Fer-de-Lance, to its conclusion, A Family Affair, in 1975. (An omnibus of earlier novellas, Death Times Three, was published in 1985.) Its main characters––Nero Wolfe, a gourmet food-, books-, and orchids-loving brainiac of a detective who refuses to leave his Manhattan brownstone on business, and Archie Goodwin, his competent right-hand man of action––are supported by a great cast of regulars who include Wolfe's household help, several New York City cops, a band of self-employed detectives hired by Wolfe, the doctor next door, and Archie's lovely inamorata, Lily Rowan. Stout supposedly published his first drafts, and the writing has a casual elegance and spontaneity that's fun to read.

Philipp Meyer: American Rust (2009). Sister Mary Murderous had no sooner reminded me of this book when I saw Meyer's The Son appear on Publishers Weekly's list of most anticipated books for Spring 2013. I'm not waffling when I say this: American Rust is wonderful.

It's set in the same economically devastated Pennsylvania country as K. C. Constantine's first-rate Mario Balzic series (see Maltese Condor's review of Constantine's The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes here). Buell's steel mill is shuttered, and many people have moved away. Isaac English and his older sister, Lee, were the smartest kids in their high school. When Lee goes to Yale, Isaac is left to take care of their disabled father. Now Lee is married and gone for good, and Isaac is desperate to leave Buell for his dream of studying astrophysics in California. Early one morning, Isaac packs his books into a backpack, robs his father's desk of $4,000, and walks to the house of his best friend Billy Poe. Billy is a none-too-smart, hot-tempered ex-high school football star on probation for assault. The two set out on foot. A chance meeting with transients in an abandoned factory where Isaac and Billy take shelter from a snowstorm leaves a man dead and Isaac's dream in pieces.

Meyer has been compared to John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, and William Faulkner. American Rust is about the unraveling of the American Dream. With beautiful prose, Meyer examines the price of loyalty and the constrained choices suffered by the working class. The book's characters––especially Isaac; Billy's self-sacrificing mother Grace, who earns minimum wage sewing wedding dresses for the wealthy and has her own dreams of returning to college; and Grace's lover, the sheriff––are three-dimensional enough to break your heart.

Lachlan Smith: Bear Is Broken (2013, Mysterious Press/Grove). Leo Maxwell has just received notice that he passed the California bar exam. He hopes the days of being called "Monkey Boy" by his 12-years-older brother, Teddy, are now a thing of the past. Teddy hasn't even congratulated Leo when they walk into a San Francisco restaurant to have lunch before closing arguments in one of Teddy's trial cases. Teddy is a highly successful criminal defense attorney, beloved by San Francisco's criminal class, but reviled by its cops and prosecutors, who insist that his success must be based on bribes and perjury. Leo and Teddy are waiting for their order when someone walks up behind Leo, shoots Teddy in the head, and disappears into a waiting car. While Teddy lies in a coma, Leo tries to understand his enigmatic brother, who was responsible for him after their mother died when Leo was 10 years old. Just how much of a rogue is Teddy? Leo now deals with Teddy's ex-wife, investigator, and clients. He also decides he can't trust the cops to adequately pursue the attempted murderer, so he will investigate himself. Leo opens Pandora's box.

Like Canadian writer Andrew Pyper, Lachlan Smith is a lawyer, and following his legal sleuth in the courtroom and in his sleuthing is enlightening as well as entertaining. Bear Is Broken is much less literary than Pyper's Lost Girls, and Leo is much less cynical than Pyper's Barth Crane, but both books involve a young lawyer's coming of age and evoke a tragic past. In this debut novel, Smith writes with unusual clarity and assurance as Leo shuffles a deck of likely suspects and plays a game of Solitaire. Smith slows the denouement a bit with a few too many details, but this by no means spoils the book's worth. I really liked it for its close and compassionate look at the tragic consequences of crime and at a San Francisco attorney who learns about himself and the nature of family loyalties. I'm happy that this is the first book of a proposed series.

On this important day, when we honor waffles and waffling, especially in crime fiction, be sure to get your fill of both. You may need to decline a second serving of breakfast, but there's nothing to stop you from being a glutton in your reading.

Review of Walter Mosley's All I Did Was Shoot My Man

All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley

Today is a national holiday. We pay respect to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., the American clergyman and Nobel Peace Prize winner who advocated nonviolent civil disobedience in the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. I wish he were alive today to see Barack Obama sworn in for his second term as United States President.

Walter Mosley
photo by David Burnett

I think about the course of the Civil Rights Movement when I read books by Walter Mosley, whose characters deal with racism. Mosley is best known for his Easy Rawlins series, set in Los Angeles, but he has several other excellent series, stand-alone books about crime, and other fiction. The Mosley book I read most recently is All I Did Was Shoot My Man, fourth in the Leonid McGill series. It was published in 2012 by Riverhead Books/Penguin Group (USA) and is a 2013 Edgar Award for Best Mystery finalist.

The childhood of book narrator Leonid Trotter McGill was disrupted when his anarchist father abandoned his New York City family to fight in a South American revolution. LT's mother died of a broken heart. His brother Nikita took to crime and is now in prison for robbery. LT, an ex-boxer, was once an expert in altering evidence to contaminate a criminal investigation. He planted evidence, changed phone records or forged documents to direct suspicion to an innocent party. Sometimes the people LT framed went to prison, but most often he created enough doubt for the district attorney to drop the case. He is now trying to give up his bent life and is working as a private investigator for his own agency. He has valuable resources in both criminal circles and law enforcement. Before last year, he even had his own Javert in the form of Carson Kitteridge, a cop whose mission was to bring LT, suspected of "everything from contract murder to armed robbery, from kidnapping to white slavery," to justice. Kitteridge still has his eye on LT and gives him a hard time, but he and his colleagues have finally backed off.

When All I Did Was Shoot My Man begins, LT is trying to help Zella Grisham, freshly released from prison. One day, Zella had gone home sick from work to find her boyfriend Harry Tangelo in bed with her best friend, Minnie Lesser. Zella grabbed a gun and shot Harry three times. Harry survived and the court would probably have been lenient had someone not called the police to suggest they check Zella's journal in her padlocked storage unit. In the unit was evidence linking her to the $58 million robbery of Wall Street's Rutgers Assurance Corporation. Zella insisted she knew nothing about the robbery. LT knows she's innocent because he'd been hired to plant the evidence. LT felt bad framing the pregnant Zella, so he subtly altered the false evidence. Eight years later, LT got a windfall from a grateful client and called attorney Breland Lewis to suggest the planted evidence be reexamined. As a result, Zella left prison.

Zella's freedom rekindles the robbery investigation by the police and Rutgers Assurance. LT becomes involved when Zella asks him to find the baby she gave up for adoption and to track down Harry so she can apologize. Although LT doesn't know who masterminded the robbery, he and his own family are threatened when people peripherally connected to the crime begin dying.

Mosley is a fine writer and storyteller who uses the backdrop of crime to examine his fully-realized characters. LT is compassionate and capable of self-scrutiny. His struggles with his temper and the past, and his attempts to do the right thing by others, are woven into his investigation. Even before this new danger, his family was unraveling. His wife has tried time and again to find another man so she can leave him. Currently, she drinks herself into a stupor. His oldest son, gentle Dimitri, has moved out to live with the dangerous Tatyana Baranovich. Daughter Shelly is dating a much older man. LT has talked his hip youngest son, Twill, into joining his detective agency, and sets him to work on an investigation involving a rich man's son who has fallen in with bad companions. A lover who left LT wants to return, and there's a chance his father didn't die in that South American revolution after all. There are many balls for LT to juggle in All I Did Was Shoot My Man.

On the day that we remember Martin Luther King, Jr., I wish we could say racism was a thing of the past. Unfortunately, we can't but I like what LT says about it:

I'm a twenty-first-century New Yorker and therefore have little time to contemplate race. It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It's just that I rarely worry about those things because there's a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every moment of every day. 

Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done.

This book, with its complex story line and memorable characters, is a very satisfying read.

Book Review of Colson Whitehead's Zone One: A Novel

Zone One: A Novel by Colson Whitehead

C'mon now, trust me. I know this is a blog primarily about crime fiction, but don't forget, tonight is Halloween, and I've got just the ticket. It's literary fiction set in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan after a pandemic Last Night devastated the world. The dead are people who were killed outright or turned into vehicles of the plague.

Zombies!

Buffalo, New York, is the cradle of reconstruction. The goal of the provisional government there is to clear New York City of the undead, zone by zone, and then move on to other cities. In addition to running this military campaign, the government aims to boost the morale of survivors, "all fucked up in their own way; as before, it was a mark of one's individuality." Psychotherapist Dr. Neil Herkimer coined the buzzword PASD (post-apocalypse stress disorder) and put it at seventy-five percent of the surviving population; the rest have a preexisting mental condition, so one hundred percent of the world is mad. In addition to shipping out "Living with PASD" pamphlets, the government conducts an "American Phoenix Rising" propaganda campaign, complete with sponsors and the anthem "Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme from Reconstruction)."

So much for the survivors. Skels (short for "skeletons" or zombies) come in two types: the rabid flesh-eating predators and the much-slowed and pathetic stragglers, who are trapped in their former abodes. After Marines deal with the rabid skels, crews of civilian volunteers, directed by military officers stationed at "Fort Wonton" in Chinatown, sweep out the stragglers. Currently, Zone One (a region created by barriers south of Canal Street) has been cleared by Marines, and the sweepers are moving through it. We follow one such sweeper, a former Starbucks employee nicknamed Mark Spitz (the full name is always used), whose defining trait is his mediocrity:

His most appropriate designation [in high school] would have been Most Likely Not to Be Named the Most Likely Anything, and this was not a category. His aptitude lay in the well-executed muddle, never shining, never flunking, but gathering himself for what it took to progress past life’s next random obstacle.

Mark Spitz and his fellow sweepers, "seemingly unsnuffable human cockroaches," are protected by not-overly-great weapons and protective clothing and good luck, and they operate in war-like conditions. They swap stories of past lives and use black humor as they dispatch the undead. Occasionally, someone looks like someone Mark Spitz had known or loved. He doesn't consider himself a mere exterminator, but rather an angel of death ushering stragglers on their stalled journey. Of course, not all of the undead Mark Spitz encounters are stragglers; his bad habit of flashing back to happier pre-Last Night times while struggling with skels trying to rip off his flesh nearly levitated me from the bed in anxiety. And the infested subway tunnel would have made a George A. Romero fan happy.

Zone One, published in 2011 by Doubleday, has enough gore to keep a horror fan fairly satisfied, but the wit, imagery, references to pop culture, and wordplay will please everyone. It's surprisingly funny and tender:

Mark Spitz had seen the park unscroll from the windows of the big skyscrapers crowding the perimeter, but never from this vantage. No picnickers idled on their blankets, no one goldbricked on the benches and nary a Frisbee arced through the sky, but the park was at first-spring-day capacity. They didn’t stop to appreciate the scenery, these dead visitors; they ranged on the grass and walkways without purpose or sense, moving first this way then strolling in another direction until, distracted by nothing in particular, they readjusted their idiot course. It was Mark Spitz’s first glimpse of Manhattan since the coming of the plague, and he thought to himself, My God, it’s been taken over by tourists.

Author Colson Whitehead

Mark Spitz is as nostalgic for pre-Last Night NYC's inanimate objects as he is for its people. As he sweeps through office spaces, he sees how little some interiors have changed despite the great unraveling outside of them. When he was a child, he loved to look out his Uncle Lloyd's apartment window. Some buildings he saw met the fate of the wrecking ball, and new buildings grew themselves out of the rubble, "shaking off the past like immigrants." In this new era, it's dangerous to dream about the past, and hope is "a gateway drug." Mark Spitz believes that he has successfully banished thoughts of the future. If you aren't concentrating on how to survive the next five minutes, you won't survive them. Without hope, Mark Spitz, that average Everyman survivor, sweeps to his fate.

Book Review of Jerome Charyn's Under the Eye of God

Under the Eye of God
by Jerome Charyn

God knows this book comes just in time. I've stared so long at Nate Silver's New York Times political blog, his stats dance before my eyes. The devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy boggles my mind and hurts my heart. A good break is sitting in the tub with Jerome Charyn's Under the Eye of God, a book swarming with the shenanigans of warring politicians and the plumb-crazy powerful.

Here's the scoop: A bare-knuckles presidential election is over, and the Democratic ticket of baseball czar J. Michael Storm and New York City Mayor Isaac Sidel has won. Since this is a Charyn novel, J. Michael and Isaac are hardly sprawling in comfy chairs sipping a glass of bubbly to celebrate "the slaughter of '88." Nope.

J. Michael, the President-elect, is facing a political Sandy of his own. He's holed up in the Waldorf while one mistress after another surfaces with demands to be paid off or else. The media are sniffing his crooked real estate deals and the phony corporation he'd formed with his wife Clarice. (Did you know our Constitution is silent on what happens if scandal derails a President after election but before confirmation by the electoral college? Strictly speaking, he's not really the President-elect at all.) Luckily for the Democrats, they have pictures of the defeated Republican incumbent, President Calder Cottonwood, pissing in the Rose Garden, and if the Republicans don't stop harping about Casanova (er, J. Michael), Democrats will play a little hardball. The Democrats have also bugged the White House. (Ah, but the crafty Republicans know about it and talk accordingly.) Cottonwood has plans for a smear campaign charging Isaac with Lolita tendencies because of his friendship with the President-elect's 12-year-old daughter, Marianna.

The Democratic Party's chief strategist has decided the hugely popular Isaac needs to distract from J. Michael's bad press by hitting the road on "some kind of quixotic quest." So Isaac is tossed into a tour bus bound for Texas. Also aboard is the President's former astrologer, who can chart Isaac's stars. While the Secret Service checks out weirdos in the San Antonio hotel bar, a Korean War vet yells he's the eye of God and tries to shoot Isaac; however, Isaac thwarts him. Isaac suspects that President Cottonwood has just tried to have him killed.

Isaac returns to Manhattan, where he seeks the comfort of the Ansonia––"a universe unto itself, forlorn, complete, with an astonishing silence where Isaac could listen to iron and glass and marble breathe." It was the only address worth having for tenants such as Caruso, Babe Ruth, and Arnold Rothstein, the king of crime. Rothstein's former protégé, David Pearl, helped Isaac's father win a contract to supply the Army with gloves. David also enjoyed the company of the 10-year-old Isaac, who could "see with his ears, like a detective." Isaac finds the ex-boy venture capitalist still living at the Ansonia. Also there is a stunningly beautiful woman named Trudy Winckleman, going by the name of Rothstein's mistress Inez, hanging out with the world's richest men in the basement, and living in Inez's old rooms. Isaac is captivated, just as David hoped. David is moving heaven and earth in his attempts to ensure Isaac disappears or gets kicked upstairs. Vice President Sidel couldn't hurt him, but Mayor Sidel could. Isaac would stop at nothing to protect New York City.

*****

For those poor souls  who have yet to meet Isaac Sidel, Under the Eye of God is a good place to start. It's the eleventh book in this unusual noir-ish series about the New York City cop turned commissioner turned mayor turned Vice President-elect; however, it stands on its own, and it's actually an easy introduction to Charyn's writing style. While it's hard to describe exactly what that style is, maybe I'd call it funky and sly. In musical terms, it's a jazz riff. It's not exactly postmodern stream-of-consciousness writing, but the journey is at least as important as the destination. If you seek a nonlinear plot, look elsewhere. I read Charyn's Isaac books in a purposefully relaxed way so I can go with the rhythm of the prose, and I keep a Wikipedia window open on my computer for looking up the many cultural references and names of famous architects, artists, political figures, criminals, and writers (NYC Mayor Seth Low, Tammany Hall's Big Tim Sullivan, and artist Mark Rothko are just a few).

Charyn is a literary writer who adores words, and his writing is very vivid ("His mouth sat crooked on his face, as if someone had sewn it there"). He often employs nicknames or descriptions in lieu of names, as if repeating a name is simply too boring. So rather than repetitions of "Isaac Sidel," it's the Big Guy, the Citizen, Citizen Sidel, the May baby, the Commish, the catcher of criminals, the philosopher clown, etc. Other characters are named in similar fashion.

The Bronx

As in all Isaac Sidel books, New York City is a character, as well as a setting. The focus in this particular book is on the Bronx and Manhattan's Ansonia. Charyn grew up in the Bronx and attended Columbia University. He is familiar with the history, politics, and geography of New York City; the arts; and the sports of baseball and ping pong. This knowledge is seamlessly woven into his crime fiction. In Under the Eye of God, looking past the lunatic actions of the characters, one sees the serious issues of partisan politics, corruption, conspiracy theories, violence, urban blight and renewal, the power of the insanely wealthy, the powerlessness of the poor, and the kind of personal relationships that haunt us. This is a superb series, and this topical book is a gift from the gods.

Notes: Isaac and the crazy cast of Charyn characters are being made into an adult animated drama series called Hard Apple. The team behind it is the award-winning animators of Waltz with Bashir, the Cannes Film selection that also won a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Film.

Here's a mini-documentary about writer Jerome Charyn.

I received a free copy of Under the Eye of God, published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media, and due out today. The French translation of Under the Eye of God is also coming out in France. (The French are die-hard Isaac Sidel fans. They can read a review in Le Figaro here.)

"Go to Heaven for the Climate, Hell for the Company" (Mark Twain)

Use your imagination to populate this picture of Heaven

Mark Twain must have spent a lake vacation with my family, our friends and miscellaneous pets. As soon as we got out of the cars and smelled the water, we all ran completely wild. It was so much fun. There is nothing like spending time with friends and family you love. The books I read during the past few weeks have characters with special relationships, too. Let me tell you about some of them.

Author Edward Conlon's dad, grandfather and uncle were cops. Conlon graduated from Harvard, but his blood runs cop-uniform blue and he became a NYPD detective. Red on Red is his first novel and it's a doozy; a literary book you don't have to be a mystery fan to love. It's about two NYPD detectives, protagonist Nick Meehan and "Espo" Esposito, who became partners five months earlier. Nick, desperate for a transfer, agreed to take a look at Espo for the Internal Affairs Bureau. The two men are very different, but a close relationship or good partnership doesn't have to begin with a likeness, a shared past or shared tastes. It can begin with unlikeness that leads to thrilling epiphanies of jokes and actions one wouldn't have thought of but the other one did. During the first night a reader spends with them, they discover an unidentifiable woman hanging from a tree in the rain at Inwood Hill Park. The mysterious witness who called the cops and the odd scene appeal to Nick, who likes cases with "funny things or lucky things, glimpses of archaic wonder and terror, where life seemed to have a hidden order, a rhyme." They are also called to the scene of a shotgun victim, probably the result of a drugs turf war, that the aggressive and competitive Espo will handle. Espo and Nick accidentally cause a death to round out their shift. Fabulous characterization, setting, plot, humor and insight. I can't recommend this 2011 book, nominated for an Edgar First Novel, highly enough.

William Landay's Defending Jacob is set among the Barber family. Andy Barber couldn't believe his luck when Laurie, his dream girl, married him. He's happy at home and at the DA's office in Newton, Massachusetts, where he's been the top assistant DA for more than 20 years. When 14-year-old Ben Rifkin is found, stabbed to death on his walk to school, Andy expects to prosecute the case. These plans are turned upside down when Andy's son, Jacob, is accused of the crime. Jacob says he is innocent and Andy insists that it's his duty as a father to believe him. Laurie, reeling from the criminal charges against Jacob and the flabbergasting revelations from Andy, isn't so sure. This book has been described as a Greek tragedy. I'll say. It's both thought-provoking and suspenseful. Author Landay is a former district attorney and a Dagger Award-winner for Mission Flats. Defending Jacob, published in 2012 by Delacorte, is his third outstanding non-series novel. If you like books by Scott Turow, you'll like this one.

Austalian writer Garry Disher's Port Vila Blues was originally published in 1995 and will be re-released by Soho Crime tomorrow. In a nutshell, here's the scoop. Wyatt, a cool-headed career thief, has once again joined forces with his old crime-planner and trusted friend, Jardine. Six months earlier, Jardine was grazed by a bullet above his ear, suffered a stroke and hasn't been the same since. He directs Wyatt to a house with a stash of cash. Along with the cash, Wyatt finds a diamond-studded Tiffany brooch. He and Jardine then seek a fence. Unknown to them, the brooch was stolen before. When its original thieves hear it's turned up again, they assume someone among them is cheating the rest. This is not a comfortable state of affairs because they are very enterprising and ruthless corrupt cops. They set out to investigate their fellow friends-in-crime and Jardine and Wyatt. Port Vila Blues, the fifth in the Wyatt series, is set in various cities of Australia and on the island of Vanuatu. I'm not sure why it reminds me of those old Spy Versus Spy cartoons in Mad Magazine. It's not a book of espionage. Maybe because of the murderous scheming and betrayals among colleagues and friends. Chasing the determined crooks are determined cops. The book's ending makes me anxious to read others in this series, especially the next, The Fallout.

Shawn Maguire is ex-CIA. He was kicked out for his violent behavior, his insufficiently brown-nose-ish attitude and his drinking. He's now living in rural England so he can be near the grave of his wife. Other than attending meetings for sex addicts and running out of money, he's not doing much. An arms dealer asks him to look into the disappearance of Darius Osmani, whom the CIA suspects of being a Middle Eastern terrorist with information about a nuclear device. Although he hopes to be reinstated in the CIA, Maguire agrees to accept this freelance job. He heads to Paris, where he meets Osmani's beautiful wife, Danielle Baptiste. This isn't a thriller of blood-pressure-raising action, although Maguire and Danielle track Osmani, who's being flown from one black hole to another, courtesy of the CIA. Instead, it's a look at Maguire's history as a CIA operative in the Middle East during the war, CIA renditions and the short-sighted American practice of throwing money at problems and taking a hand in other countries' elections. The flashbacks within flashbacks can get a little confusing. Maybe that's appropriate. In Gerard Macdonald's The Prisoner's Wife, published in May 2012 by Dunne/St. Martin's, it's confusing to figure out who's a friend and who's an enemy, because sometimes it depends on the time and place. I enjoyed the quietly beautiful writing and Maguire, an appealing and complex protagonist. I hope to see him again soon.

There you go. I enjoyed my time at the lake with family and friends. After reading these books, I realized how lucky I am not to worry about which friends might sell me out or try to kill me. I don't suspect my kids of any serious crimes and I doubt my husband will drop a bomb on me. Now I hope you'll read these books in a heavenly place and the hellishly good company of the fictional characters will kindle your enjoyment.

Home again and needing a vacation

Set Your Brain a-Spin: Read Blue Eyes by Jerome Charyn

Have you ever jumped rope with your brain? Juggled with it or bounced it on the floor like a basketball? All these games involve finding a comfortable rhythm. Reading a book by an author who's very creative, playful, and energetic can be a challenge, but once you settle into the book's rhythm, it can be extremely rewarding. Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace have written books like this. So has a man who's been called the James Joyce of the police novel, Jerome Charyn.

Charyn was born in the Bronx in 1937. By the time he entered Columbia University, he had stuffed his head with comics and movies. Charyn taught at major American universities before teaching film at the American University of Paris, where he is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Not only is Charyn an award-winning novelist, he is a tournament table tennis player. After hanging out with his brother, an NYPD homicide detective, Charyn wrote a dazzlingly inventive 10-book crime fiction series set in New York City that has achieved a cult-like status. The series features Isaac Sidel, a Jewish NYPD captain who becomes the city's deputy police commissioner and mayor. It's difficult to describe the books in this surreal series; they really must be experienced, beginning with the first book, written in 1974, Blue Eyes.

Manfred "Shotgun" Coen is the blond, blue-eyed man of the book's title. The son of a Bronx egg shop owner, he was orphaned when his parents stuck their heads in the oven. He's now a divorced homicide detective who lives in NYC, rather than on Long Island like his fellow cops. He loves playing ping pong in his undershorts and gun holster, spicy Cuban food, and magenta socks. (Man, I can't tell you how strange it seems to distill Charyn's jazz score of words into straightforward sentences like this.)

Coen was taken up after his police academy graduation by the police commissioner's whip, Deputy Chief Inspector Isaac Sidel. When gambling charges send Sidel into disgrace, Coen is assigned to find the missing Caroline Child, teenage daughter of a prominent theatrical producer. His assignment dumps him into a battle between Sidel and the Guzmann crime family, who moved their operations from Peru to the Bronx because Papa Guzmann "didn't trust mechanical things," including handguns. Once in the Bronx, Papa opened a candy store where his numbers runners and pickup men busy themselves in the back, while, in the front, Papa dishes up ice cream to tribes of cross-eyed girls "who thumped the stools and wailed with pleasure when Papa brought over a big jar of maraschino cherries." Perhaps Papa's son César, once Coen's closest boyhood friend and now a gambler and whorehouse kingpin, kidnapped Caroline, and she's at work as a prostitute in Peru.

Coen is a good man whose investigation delves into morally ambiguous or immoral places inhabited by weird characters who will make your head spin. Here's a sample: Coen's favorite stool pigeon is Arnold, a club-footed Puerto Rican whose dream is to visit The Dwarf, a notorious lesbian bar frequented by Caroline Child's cousin Odette, a gorgeous pornography queen employed by César Guzmann. Odette has an obsessed bantam-sized fan named Chino Reyes. Reyes is a taxi bandit who steals Arnold's special shoe to wear himself and would like to kill Coen for touching his face.

Watching these bizarre characters interact is a unique experience in crime fiction. It requires a reader to sit back and relax while being pelted with confusing argot, characters' multiple nicknames, and mystifying behavior. Reading Charyn is a bit like distance running: pretty soon you hit "the wall," and then it's wonderfully peaceful floating. I assure you, without special effort, you've learned the slang. Characters' identities have become clear. Their behavior is still crazy, but you can follow it. The plot frolics madly along, and your brain is dancing to its rhythm. If you're looking for a different reading experience that stretches your mind into pretzels, Charyn is definitely your guy.

Now, all 10 Isaac Sidel novels are being re-released as e-books and on-demand by Open Road and Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press:

In addition, Blue Eyes is in development as an adult animated series by HBO/Canal+. Take a look here at the concept pictures:

http://tropicaltoxic.blogspot.com/2010/12/hard-apple-in-development.html

For the animated series Hard Apple, based on the Isaac Sidel books

If you're lucky enough to speak French, you can read Charyn's graphic novel for the second book in the series, Marilyn the Wild. Here's an article (in French) that gives you a peek at the graphics:

http://www.actuabd.com/Jerome-Charyn-Quand-je-suis-romancier-je-suis-a-la-fois-le-scenariste-et-le-dessinateur

Marylin la dingue de Jerome Charyn et Frédéric Rébéna
Ed. Denoël Graphic

Curiosity: Not Just a Cat Killer

A curious John Glenn peers inside Friendship 7

Curiosity belongs not only to cats; it belongs to humans too. It leads people to explore shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean and to venture deep inside caves. Fifty years ago yesterday, it led John Glenn to climb inside the alarmingly small Friendship 7 capsule and to orbit the world three times. In Reed Farrel Coleman's Hurt Machine, curiosity leads a cancer-stricken Moe Prager to stick with a case even when the woman who hired him tells him to quit.

The hurt machine of Coleman's title is a garden variety human. The narrator, ex-cop and retired PI Prager, explains, "No matter how hard we try not to do it, we seem to inflict hurt on one another as naturally as we breathe." Prager's friend, Auschwitz survivor Israel Roth, says that hurt and pain are God's way of letting you know He loves you. Prager isn't so sure. He doubts God's existence. He's been thinking about such things since his oncologist diagnosed a malignant stomach tumor and told him it might be good to get his house in order. Prager's daughter Sarah is getting married in a few weeks and he doesn't want to ruin her happiness. He decides to put off chemotherapy and telling his family and friends until after her wedding.

Prager is just walking into a pre-wedding party when ex-wife and former detective agency partner Carmella Melendez appears. She's not an invited guest. She took her son Isaac to Canada when she walked out on Prager years ago. That broke Prager's heart. Now she wants him to investigate the murder of her older sister Alta. Alta was a New York Fire Department EMT. She and her partner, both off-duty, outraged the NYFD and nation several months earlier when they declined to help a dying man at an expensive restaurant. Carmella and Alta were estranged at the time of Alta's death but Carmella wants answers. She believes the police aren't trying hard to find Alta's killer because they feel she deserved killing. Carmella investigated on her own, but has now hit a dead end. She wants Prager to continue.

Currently, Prager helps his brother with their retail wine business but he's not emotionally invested. All he has done is invest money and gone along for the ride. When he is gone, he worries, all that will be remembered is that he had been a shopkeeper. "Does anyone dream of being a shopkeeper? Does anyone dream of dying as one?" he asks. He agrees to take Carmella's case.

If Prager hadn't already realized, this case quickly shows him that the solution will be tough. Witnesses are nonexistent, contradictory or purposefully unhelpful. Alta's NYFD colleagues are hostile and her partner refuses to talk. Prager looks and feels like death not only approaching but well warmed over, but he keeps plugging away. All the while he reflects on life, his past cases, his former NYPD colleagues, his friends and his enemies. On occasion, he crosses the line between reflection and self-pity but not so often or so far that I felt like closing the pages on his investigation.

Prager's inquiry into Alta Conseco's murder provides a good look at the power structure of the NYFD and how an ex-cop turned private eye goes about his job, following leads and collecting favors owed. Prager is an old hand at the detective game. He describes and sizes up people well. He's very familiar with New York's neighborhoods. Now possibly nearing the end of his life, he's not the only one with regrets. The more time I spent with him the more I regretted that I haven't yet read the previous books in this mystery-awards-laden hardboiled series beginning with Walking the Perfect Square. It isn't necessary to have read the previous books, but it is well advised. Prager's reminisces provide details of previous cases and what happens to old acquaintances.

In Hurt Machine, Prager's life may be winding down, but this means he actually understands how little he understands. "What I wanted was to know things before I died, to know things for sure," he says. When the book ends, his curiosity, at least about this particular case, is satisfied. My curiosity was satisfied and so was my desire for a good book to read.