Books for the Ides of April

I know I'm not Thomas Paine, facing the American Revolution, but I can still say these are the times that try men's souls: the overwork and overworry of tax season. As she related on Saturday, Sister Mary Murderous has been taking refuge in a flood of good TV dramas. My zonked outedness at the end of the day and subsequent middle-of-the-night awakenings have cast me into reading one book after another. I mean, I must achieve a suspension of disbelief somehow, if not in sweet dreams, then in a work of fiction––and I'm not talking about our tax returns! The books below are all timely for the Ides of April.

Maybe one of these days we'll see a greedy Owen Laukkanen villain cheat on his taxes. So far, they've been too engrossed with kidnapping (The Professionals), armed robbery (Criminal Enterprise), and running a murder-for-hire operation (Kill Fee) to bother. In The Stolen Ones (G. P. Putnam's Sons, March 2015), we watch a criminal hierarchy involved in the despicable crime of trafficking women. The man at the top is called the Dragon. His financial demands and reputation for ruthlessness put tremendous pressure on Brighton Beach's Andrei Volovoi, whose truck drivers deliver the shipping containers of victims to their final US destinations. Like all of Laukkanen's villains, Andrei considers himself a regular American businessman. Andrei likes to think that any eastern European woman dumb enough to fall for the trap presented by the American dream deserves the box and whatever comes after.

Then one of Andrei's drivers kills a curious sheriff's deputy and Irina Milosovici, who speaks only a smidgeon of English, escapes from the truck's container. Her beloved younger sister, Catalina, remains trapped with others in the box as the truck drives away. [Note to self: Never be reincarnated as a Laukkanen criminal caught in the middle between cops and worse criminals, although Andrei rises––or perhaps the better word is "sinks"––to the occasion.] What ensues is one of the writer's patented three-ring circus thrillers that also examines a serious social issue. Point of view and setting get juggled between the scrambling bad guys, the separated but feisty Milosovici sisters, and an engagingly mismatched duo of good guys: Kirk Stevens, a veteran in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and Carla Windermere, a hotshot FBI special agent. Tension in The Stolen Ones is already the high-wire sort, but Owen Laukkanen, crafty as usual, yanks and twists the wire. Put this guy on your thriller writers must-read list. I feel like I've popped a Xanax when I hear he's working on another.

After a difficult session with the calculator, take a break with the soothingly cynical company of an Italian crime solver. Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen, Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti, and Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano come to mind. Add to these Timothy Williams's Commissario Piero Trotti of the Polizia di Stato in northern Italy. The fourth series book is Black August (originally published in 1995 by Trafalgar Square Publishing; re-released by Soho Crime, January 2015). Trotti is a bit like Ian Rankin's Edinburgh cop, John Rebus, whose life revolves around his work, although Trotti's vice of choice is hard candy rather than the bottle. Like Rebus, Trotti is honest and efficient, but his methods are out of the Dark Ages. He alienates people and can't work on a team.

When the questore, who's read Machiavelli's The Prince, warns him to get out of town on vacation rather than join the Rosanna Belloni murder case, Trotti interprets this to mean the questore really wants him to investigate. This is convenient thinking. Rosanna, a retired headmistress whose corpse is found, battered beyond recognition in her bedroom, is an old friend whom Trotti met 20 years earlier when her student, Anna Ermagni, was kidnapped. With this book, you look at the nature of friendship, professional loyalty, and the mental health system, much more pleasant than checking your Form-1040 figures.

I'll tell you right off the bat, screenwriter Daniel Pyne's novel, Fifty Mice (Blue Rider Press, December 2014), isn't for everybody. For one thing, it's noir of the paranoid variety and deals with themes of reality, memory, identity, and fate. For another, it opens with the kaleidoscopic images and confusion of Jay Johnson's abduction off a Los Angeles Metro train, and what's going on in Jay's subsequent Kafkaesque situation only becomes clear to him and the reader over the course of the novel.

When Fifty Mice begins, Jay is 30-ish something and engaged to be married. He currently works in telephone sales, although he previously worked with data obtained from experiments run on laboratory mice, and he still hangs out at his friend Vaughn's lab. This brings us to yet another reason this book isn't for everyone. Laboratory mice have never been as sympathetic as they are in the tidbits Pyne throws our way. They are in about as much control of their tiny, tragic lives as is Jay, because the outraged Jay finds himself trapped in a Witness Protection program on Catalina Island, off the coast of California, an unwilling possessor of a new identity for God-only-knows-what reason. Jay is clueless, but the feds don't believe that for a moment. It will be to Jay's advantage to figure out, uh, something. After reading these reasons for not recommending this book to every reader, those who will enjoy this memorably original noir know who you are.

I still have some experimenting to do with my income taxes. I wish you the best with your own.

Winter Preview 2014-2015: Part Three

After looking at lists of books arriving this winter, I'm adding "increase reading speed" to my New Year's resolutions. I figure I'll make the big, concerted effort beginning January 1, 2015. In the meantime, since I'll be reading so rapidly in the future, I need to get my hands on more books so I won't run out early next year. Yes, it's imperative I obtain many more books.

I love thrillers set in exotic places, and one of my favorite settings therefore is present-day China. Its fascinating history and status as both a US trading partner and competitor make it a natural fit for a thriller or espionage novel. Some recent books located there include Adam Brookes's Night Heron, in which an old British intelligence asset surprisingly resurfaces (see review here), and Kirk Kjeldsen's Tomorrow City, about an American whose criminal past catches up with him in Shanghai (reviewed here).

In addition to a China setting, I enjoy books that use a villain's underhanded dealings to drag in an innocent bystander and force him or her to play a high-stakes game without knowing the rules. You can often count on a virtuoso display of ingenuity as that person rises to the occasion and wiggles out of danger while saving the world.

We might have to worry about Luke Slade, though, because he's the bystander in what's described as a noirish political thriller, Last Days in Shanghai (Counterpoint, December 16), by Casey Walker. Noir isn't always kind to its characters. Luke is in his second day of a week-long business trip to China with his boss, U.S. Rep. Leonard Fillmore (R-Calif.) (AKA "Leo the Lyin' "), when his boss disappears on an alcoholic bender. Luke doesn't want to no-show at an already scheduled meeting about an important development deal, so he travels to the Chinese province alone. Somehow Luke walks out of the mayor's office with a bag full of American cash. When the mayor is murdered, Luke is the primary suspect. As he ricochets between Shanghai and Beijing with no idea of what's going on, his lost boss may be the least of Luke's worries.

Like Last Days in Shanghai's Casey Walker, M. O. Walsh is a first-time author. His My Sunshine Away (Putnam Adult, February 10) is southern literature, similar to Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides, addressing themes of memory, family and coming of age.

Walsh's adult narrator looks back to the summer of 1989 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He is 14 and obsessed with Lindy Simpson, the beautiful 15-year-old girl who lives across the street. When Lindy is raped, he is one of four suspects. No one is ever charged and the crime changes Lindy, the suspects and the neighborhood forever. The book follows the suspects as they change from boys into young men. The narrator's memories of the 1980s and '90s (Jeffrey Dahmer, the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion) reportedly create such a clear picture of growing up in Baton Rouge, the city also becomes a main character.

After a day spent getting ready for the holidays, I'm ready to collapse into my own mini-holiday with a book like Marjorie Eccles's The Firebird's Feather (Severn, December 1), set in 1911 London. As England prepares to crown King George V, a suffrage movement brews and Russian refugees raise money for their own revolution. Kitty Challoner is 18 years old and preparing for her society debut when her Russian-born mother, Lydia, is shot off her horse in Hyde Park. Murder tends to uncover secrets and Lydia is revealed to be more complex than a wealthy society matron. Her relationships with the suffragettes, a handsome younger man and Russian underground give DCI Gaines and DS Inskip plenty to investigate. The amateur sleuth Kitty has the inside track, however, especially when her father's pistol is discovered missing from the safe.

A wealthy British family in an age of social transition, a touch of romance and a wide range of suspects make The Firebird's Feather look good for an evening by the fireplace.

With its gritty writing and a cast of oddball lowlifes, Tom Cooper's The Marauders (Crown, February 3) may be a lifeline for readers who miss Elmore Leonard and Donald E. Westlake. It's set in the Gulf Coast town of Jeannette right after the BP oil spill. The disaster opens the floodgates for cockeyed money-making schemes by local miscreants. Chief among them is Gus Lindquist, a pill-popping drunkard with one arm, who hopes to find the treasure of long-gone pirate Jean Lafitte. The locals' plots to rip each other off predict not everyone will come out alive.

To give you an idea of Cooper's writing style, here's an excerpt:

His arm was missing. Lindquist was positive he’d left it in his pickup two hours before. He wasn’t in the habit of misplacing his thirty-thousand-dollar myoelectric arm or of leaving his truck unlocked, catchwater bayou town where everybody knew everyone or not.

A few other pickups sat under the bug-flurried sodium vapors. Nothing else but cypress lisping in the night breeze, a bottlefly-green Buick bouncing on the blacktop past Sully’s bar. But Lindquist kept looking wild-eyed around the oyster-shell parking lot as if his arm had wandered off on its own volition. As if he might find it standing next to the blue-lit tavern sign, thumbing a ride.

Lindquist went back into Sully’s. Sully was wiping the bar with a hand towel and peered over the top of his wire-frame glasses. At one of the back tables three men were gathering cards and poker chips, and they looked up too.

Lindquist stood in the doorway, lips pressed in a thin pale line, some dark emotion building behind his face like a storm front. “Somebody took my arm,” he said.

When work or my relatives get on my nerves, The Marauders is the sort of book I need.

It's fate. I recently watched Phase IV, Saul Bass's 1974 sci-fi movie featuring ants that have undergone rapid evolution to form a hive mind and begin to take over the world, starting in the Arizona desert. On January 20, I can read Robert Repino's much wackier, complicated and violent vision of a postapocalyptic hive mind in Mort(e) (Soho), written from an animal's point of view. Sebastian, a house cat whose best friend is the neighbors' dog, changes his name to Mort(e) and joins the revolution against human oppressors after giant ants boil out of the ground under the direction of ferocious ant queen Hymenoptera. She's had it up to here with human self-centeredness and she releases a pheromone that gives all animals self-awareness, a high intelligence and the ability to walk on two legs. This is not a good thing for us humans.

It sounds like a very messianic and anthropomorphized mashup of The Matrix and Braveheart and a hoot to read. You might want to think about Mort(e) before shoving your dogs and cats off the bed or laughing at Fluffy the next time she chases a piece of string.

Before Patricia Highsmith wrote her Tom Ripley books, she wrote a great book of psychological suspense, Strangers on a Train. It begins on a train (d'oh!) with a chance encounter between architect Guy Haines and psychopath Charles Anthony Bruno. Guy wants to divorce his unfaithful wife, Miriam, and marry Anne. Bruno hates his father and suggests he and Guy "exchange" murders to avoid suspicion by the police. Guy doesn't take the creepy Bruno seriously––a mistake when Bruno kills Miriam and then demands Guy return the favor.

The Kind Worth Killing (Morrow, February 3) is Peter Swanson's re-imagining of Highsmith's classic. His strangers, rich businessman Ted Severson and gorgeous and mysterious Lily Kintner, meet in an airport bar. After a few martinis, Ted is joking he'd like to kill Miranda, the wife he suspects of unfaithfulness, and Lily tells him she'd be glad to help. Ted doesn't realize the kind of woman he's dealing with. Before long, a relentless detective, Lily, and Ted are engaged in what I imagine is an extremely tricky game of cat and mouse. (They're probably too busy playing their dangerous games to appreciate Mort(e) isn't also involved.)

By the way, Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, starring Farley Granger, Ruth Roman and Robert Walker, would make a nice winter evening's entertainment.

I didn't mean to make this a cat-and-mouse-themed post but, as serendipity would have it, the next book I want you to see is Daniel Pyne's Fifty Mice (Penguin/Blue Rider, December 30). Pyne, a noir author (Twentynine Palms) and notable Hollywood screenwriter (the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, with Denzel Washington), is interested in paranoia and the manipulation of memory.  

Fifty Mice is the story of Jay Johnson, a Los Angeles Joe Schmoe, troubled by some trauma he can't completely remember. When he's abducted off his Red Line Metro train, he's convinced his kidnappers have the wrong guy. He comes to in the hands of federal agents, who make it clear he's suspected of something. A fake identity, background and cover family are forced onto Jay and he's sent to Catalina Island, off the California coast. Among other protected witnesses under federal guard there, Jay tries to patch his memories together and arrive at the truth.

Have a happy Thanksgiving tomorrow. To take your mind off any overindulgence at the dinner table, you could watch a movie with an amnesia theme: Spellbound, Memento, Mulholland Drive, The Bourne trilogy, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dark City, Total Recall. . . . Don't forget the popcorn.

On Friday, Sister Mary Murderous will tell you about some of her winter picks. I've peeked and you shouldn't miss them.