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.

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.

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.