When You're Too Tired to Sleep

What do you do when you fall into bed exhausted and then can't get to sleep? After rejecting ideas too masochistic (scouring out the bathtub, ironing) and even worse (lying there and making a mental list of where you've gone wrong since first grade, pondering our current US Congress), you should reach for a book or a DVD and the remote. Which one all depends on how you feel.

Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins

If work has you feeling imprisoned and you've got a life sentence with those in bed beside you: your spouse, snoring and snorting in his sleep, and your dog, who won't stop licking his privates: Break out with George Clooney in O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, if you're hankering for a Coen brothers movie with bluegrass music, or Out of Sight, if you're more in the mood for an escaped Clooney pining after Jennifer Lopez, who plays a dedicated US marshal in a movie based on the Elmore Leonard novel. Perhaps you like the idea of the prison being a World War II German POW camp, and your thoughts about the escapee run to the more the merrier, and include Steve McQueen on a motorcycle; if so, fire up The Great Escape. You could watch a cult favorite, The Shawshawk Redemption, featuring unconventional prisoner Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), and his buddy, the prisoner/entrepreneur, Red (Morgan Freeman).

Or, crack open Michael Robotham's Life or Death (Mulholland, March 2015), for a look at another enigmatic prisoner, Audie Palmer, who climbs out of a Texas prison the night before he's due to be paroled. Audie had admitted his involvement in an armored truck robbery that led to the deaths of four people. He was sentenced to 10 years, but the missing $7 million was never recovered. Weaving in and out with Audie's back story are the efforts to find him by pint-size FBI Special Agent Desiree Furness; the sheriff, who as a deputy shot Audie in the head during the robbery; and a prison buddy named Moss. Aussie author Robotham's storytelling kept me turning pages, but some British substitutions for their American counterparts (such as bank "queue" rather than "line") were a little distracting. More distracting are the length of Audie's sentence (c'mon, this is Texas, not Scandinavia), the fact Audie even survived in the joint, given the particulars, and the ease with which he escaped; however, these quibbles weren't enough to keep me from enjoying it. This isn't one of those pulse-pounding thrillers; it's the kind that makes you want to know what happened in the past and how things would end, and, no, I didn't peek.

For when you're so tired, you're feeling less than human––in fact, you're wondering if you're lower on the mammal totem pole than your dog: Empathize with Jax, a mechanical servitor who longs for freedom in Ian Tregillis's The Mechanical (Orbit, March 2015), a hybrid of steampunk, fantasy, and alternate history set in the early 1900s. The book opens with the public execution of some Catholic spies and the destruction of a rogue mechanical man. In the 17th century, the work of scientist Christiaan Huygens led to the development of a Dutch army of automata powered by alchemy and clockworks. These "Clakkers," capable of independent thought, but enslaved through a built-in hierarchy of obligations called "geasa" to their masters and the Queen on the Brasswork Throne, allowed the Netherlands to become the most powerful nation in the world.

There is now an uneasy truce between the Netherlands and the remnants of its opposition in New France (in Canada). In the capital of Marseilles-in-the-West, spy-in-charge Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord has her hands full with a dangerous Game of Thrones-like situation. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, her small espionage network is disappearing. One of her spies, Luuk Visser, a Catholic priest working undercover as a Protestant pastor, gives Jax an errand and then, oh man, you really must read this book for yourself. Everyone is passionate and scheming away like mad. I've never read anything quite like this cinematic novel, and I bet we'll see it eventually on the big screen. It tackles free will, what it means to be human, identity, loyalty, the meaning of faith and religious freedom, and revenge and redemption. Tregillis doesn't shy away from harming his characters, so you can't assume anyone is safe. Some people may find Berenice's foul mouth offensive, and there are a few scenes I found genuinely disturbing. Some scenes drag a little bit, but these flaws are minor. I'm glad there are two more coming in the Alchemy Wars trilogy because this book was great reading on a sleepless night.

If you'd rather watch a robot than read about one, there are the Terminator movies with our former California governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a cyborg sent back from a future in which machines rule the world. I'm telling you, Schwarzenegger was born to play this role. Blade Runner, based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, features Harrison Ford as Los Angeles cop Rick Deckard, who is called back to duty in 2019 to track down and kill rogue replicants. James Cameron's Aliens has a cyborg on hand when Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver was born for this one) returns to the planet of Alien. Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie, Robocop (forget the re-make), is about a Detroit cop, killed in action, who returns to the force as half-human/half-robot. (And they say Humpty Dumpty couldn't be put back together again.) There are many more of these movies worthy of the time it takes to pop corn and wash it down with a Coke, such as the charming animated flick, The Iron Giant; Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope (thank goodness there's no Jar Jar Binks)....

Say you're in that half-asleep/half-awake state when your identity feels like a mirage, so you could really get into something to do with spies: Of course, you can't go wrong with another viewing of The Third Man, set in Allied-occupied Vienna and starring Joseph Cotten as pulp western writer Holly Martins and Orson Welles as his childhood friend, Harry Lime. We could argue whether it's the best-ever espionage movie. In Éric Rochant's 1994 film, Les Patriotes (The Patriots), Ariel Brenner (Yvan Attal) leaves his home in France for Israel on his 18th birthday. There, he joins Mossad and loses his idealism in a morally fuzzy world. Naval commander Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) takes up with Susan Atwel (Sean Young), the mistress of US Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman), in 1987's No Way Out. Susan's murder cues the spinning of a web of deceit. This is a re-make of a terrific 1948 movie, The Big Clock, with Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, and Maureen O'Sullivan. In the German movie, The Lives of Others, it's 1984, and Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is compelled to launch an investigation of the celebrated East German playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) by a man who has designs on Dreyman's girlfriend. Don't you love wheels within wheels? 

Make sure you leave the butter off your popcorn if you decide to watch your spies on the page instead of on the screen. Don't waste time piddling around when you're tired; go straight to the British novels. What is it about MI5 and MI6 that makes seeing them under the microscope so diverting? We'll think about that while we cringe at some of these British writers' disdainful depictions of the CIA "cousins" as demanding and inept, throwing around cash, bigfooting joint operations, and screwing them up because they think about short-term payoffs rather than long-term consequences.

I kept a stiff upper lip about the cousins and enjoyed Charles Cumming's A Colder War (St. Martin's Press, 2014). It's the second series book about Thomas Kell, an MI6 agent disgraced during the Witness X affair, whom we first met in the 2012 Steel Dagger winner, A Foreign Country (see review here). Kell has now once again been hauled out of the cold, this time to investigate the death of Paul Wallinger, head of the SIS station in Turkey, in an airplane crash. MI6's Amelia Levene thinks three recent intelligence disasters point to a mole in the SIS or the CIA.

Yeah, looking for a mole is nothing new, but Cumming does a good job with it. He takes his time; there are close to 400 pages. Notable are the clarity of the writing, use of locations, and the charm of the descriptions. It was a pleasure to learn what Tom is reading and to see what's on his shelves. Cumming once worked for MI6, and I liked his knowledge about how the agency works (the extent to which personal relationships affect spying is interesting) and his familiarity with spycraft. The life of a Cumming spy definitely isn't for everybody. Their careers ruin their family relationships and make keeping their stories straight––to themselves, as well as everyone else––almost impossible. They are betrayed by ass-covering superiors and ambitious colleagues, and they need a good night's sleep and sweet dreams as much as anybody. At least a gorgeous young woman falls into bed with Tom, a lonely man in his mid-40s. You might roll your eyes at this, but, hey, while Tom's no James Bond, he's not John Gardner's cowardly Boysie Oakes of The Liquidator fame, either. I'm looking forward to seeing Tom again on a night I can't sleep.

I'll Take Genre Benders for Wednesday, Alex

Today, we're going to talk about benders. We'll skip our wild drinking sprees and car accidents and look at a couple of recent books that bend the boundaries of historical fiction. Later this week, I'll show you some other genre straddlers.

Let's start with Hermione Eyre's first novel, Viper Wine (Hogarth/Random House, April 14, 2015). The UK cover on the right features van Dyck's portrait of Venetia, Lady Digby, a real woman so famed for her beauty during the reign of Charles I, she inspired Ben Jonson's poetry and caused common folks to run alongside her carriage in the hopes of glimpsing her. If you look closely at the book's cover, you can see that a cellphone has been slipped into Venetia's hand. Some other modern products (I am not kidding when I tell you Spam––the pink, edible variety, not the annoying email––is one of them), famous people (i.e., Groucho Marx and Naomi Campbell), and discoveries show up in Eyre's book. Occasionally, these appearances are somewhat jarring or confusing, but I found most of them amusing. Elements of fantasy, magical realism, and time travel feature in this witty book of historical fiction. The writer herself even steps into the pages.

The US cover

Eyre gives us her take on the lives of Venetia and her husband, the unconventional Sir Kenelm Digby. Kenelm was an alchemist, explorer, and intellectual who collected books and corresponded widely. He was besotted with his wife and crushed by her mysterious death at age 32. In Viper Wine, Kenelm receives messages from the future through a blipping obelisk. While the wheels in Kenelm's head are whirling madly, Venetia spends her time on a hell-bent quest to regain the youthful freshness of her beauty. Kenelm's protestations that she is still beautiful (still!) only make things worse. Maybe I should have been more understanding, but my patience wore thin. I wanted to yank Venetia out of the book and shake her til her teeth rattled. Instead, I gawked as Venetia visited charlatan physicians in Eastcheap, I learned pre-Botox beauty recipes that made me very glad my drugstore stocks Neutrogena, and I witnessed events such as an early submarine excursion under the Thames. This original novel is not for everyone, but is written for readers who appreciate well-researched historical fiction and are looking for something different. I'll be interested to see what Eyre does next.

The death of the beauteous Venetia opens Viper Wine. Benjamin Percy's The Dead Lands (Grand Central Publishing, April 14, 2015) opens this way: "She knows there is something wrong with the baby."

Thus begins a post-apocalyptic tale set 150 years after an airborne flu (H3Ll) killed millions. The flu was so deadly, other countries launched nuclear weapons against the US in futile attempts to try to stop it. The resulting radiation accounts for the wasted Dead Lands inhabited by nightmarish beasts, such as hairless wolves and gigantic spiders, outside the Sanctuary created in what used to be St. Louis, Missouri. The 40,000 Sanctuary inhabitants believe they are the world's last human survivors. They are surrounded by a high wall of plaster, mortared stone, and metal cars.

One of the wall's sentries is Wilhelmina “Mina” Clark, a hot-headed young woman who feels not sheltered, but imprisoned in the Sanctuary. There, society has taken a backward turn, and water is running out. The new mayor, Thomas Lancer, and his sheriff, the genuinely creepy Rickett Slade, have created a society based on fear. One day, something happens to inspire Clark, oddball museum curator Lewis Meriwether, and their small band to escape and head for Oregon. It isn't clear how much the expedition members can trust each other. The Sanctuary's mayor schemes to stop them, but the Dead Lands could kill them first. Meanwhile, back at the Sanctuary, Lewis's museum assistant, Ella, and her friend, Simon, a thief, put their heads together.

All this is told in a very rich prose that you will eventually get caught up in, as I did, or find too much. Here's a sample:

"This morning, as the sun rises and reddens the world so that it appears it might catch flame, Clark stands at her sentry post atop the wall. Around it reaches a burn zone of some seventy yards. Beyond this grows a forest with many broken buildings rising from it, black-windowed, leaning messes of skeletal steel and shattered stone. The remains of the St. Louis Arch, collapsed in the middle, appear like a ragged set of mandibles rising out of the earth. In the near distance, where once the Mississippi flowed, stretches a blond wash of sand."

Then, too, if you've read a lot about Lewis and Clark, as I have (in the Pacific Northwest, references to the Expedition are everywhere), you might be taken aback by Percy's eccentric portraits of the Expedition members' namesakes. Along with tamping down these intrusive thoughts, I had to ignore the voice of my scientific knowledge reminding me Percy's Dead Lands creatures are very unlikely results of radiation-caused mutations. If you don't have fixed expectations and can get past the scientific implausibilities, the journey's logical inconsistencies, and the nature of Percy's re-imagined historical characters, you might enjoy this mashup of historical and dystopian fiction, horror, fantasy, sci fi, and adventure thriller. I did, and now I'm amusing myself by mentally casting characters for a potential movie. I can't get a handle on the actors yet, but the Coen brothers would have to direct.

Let's Do the Time Warp Again

Doing the Time Warp in The Rocky Horror Picture Show

To do a mind flip and a time slip, you don't need to be a left-and-right jumping, pelvic-thrusting Transylvanian in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. You can stay in your comfy chair and pick up one of the unusual books below. None of them are for everybody. They zig-zag between past and present in an examination of identity and perception or betrayal and redemption.

For someone who wonders if a house can haunt people as well as be haunted by them: The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai (Viking, July 2014). Marxist academician Zee Devohr, of the wealthy "Devohrcing Devohrs," moves into the carriage house of her mother's family estate, Laurelfield, with her husband Doug, a struggling grad student who needs peace and quiet while writing his dissertation on poet Edwin Parfitt. He can't seem to get his ideas onto paper and then is further distracted when another couple also moves into the carriage house. Doug's thoughts turn larcenous when he discovers Laurelfield was once an artists' colony and that files pertaining to his dissertation may be in Laurelfield's locked attic.

This is one of those books you read as if you're opening a Russian nesting doll. It's full of twists and surprises, some of them so small or unexpected that an inattentive reader won't catch them all. When you register one, it feels as if you're in on a little joke between you and the writer that excludes some of the characters. How often do you have a chance to experience this when you read? The many characters are introduced and wander through chapters titled 1999, 1955, 1929 and 1900. After reading this clever book, you'll change the way you think about interpreting history, look at unidentifiable people in old photos and view objects that have been in your family for generations.

If you like putting together those gazillion-piece jigsaw puzzles of a herd of zebras or enjoy the process of not knowing what the hell is going on and getting clued in, bit by frustrating bit: Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (FSG Originals, 2014). The Southern Reach is a secretive governmental agency that sends expeditions into the mysterious Area X, a pristine wilderness in Florida, maybe, created by something strange and contained by unusual borders. Annihilation (see review here) involves the all-women twelfth expedition: a biologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist and a psychologist. Authority details the attempts of Control, the Southern Reach's interim director, to take charge of his agency. Acceptance concludes this trilogy's look at human identity with a visit to Area X by Control and someone connected with the twelfth expedition.

These three books must be read in order and even then your imagination will have its hands full. When I read Acceptance, I wondered if I'd unknowingly taken something that was affecting my mental processing. Fun. These books are fascinating sci-fi/detective sleuthing/dystopian fiction for the right reader.

Like your British espionage to be more than a frantic boiling of nifty gadgets, cold-blooded spies and hot babes? Try Gerald Seymour's 464-page The Dealer and the Dead (Thomas Dunne, February 2014). In 1991, some men and boys in the Croatian village of Vukovar wait for an arms dealer's promised shipment. It never arrives and they are slaughtered by the Serbs. Almost two decades later, a Vukovar farmer's field is cleared of land mines. An unearthed body reveals the arms dealer's identity: Harvey Gillot, a wealthy Englishman famous for the reliability of his word. The surviving Croatian villagers have long memories and are now bent on revenge.

Seymour outdoes himself this time with his many, and I mean many, characters, few of whom approach likability. If you appreciate a slow-burning, multi-threaded story that ultimately kicks into high gear, give this book about redemption and the shadowy world of arms dealing a shot. Or, pick up Seymour's 2013 book, A Deniable Death (reviewed here).

And now, I'll do the time warp and pick up Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2014). It slips time in its story about two friends, one of whom betrays the other. I'm enjoying Rahman's exploration of how well we can know the world and ourselves.

Espionage and Horror to Go

I'm on the train, traveling to northern California. This morning, I casually glanced at my watch and was horrified to discover I had 20 minutes to shower, iron my clothes, pack, fill the hummingbird feeder and bird bath, and water houseplants before I absolutely had to leave for the train station. (I'd say the birds and plants came out better than I did.) The book I grabbed as I burned rubber out the door is Fear: A Novel of World War I (trans. from the French by Malcolm Imrie; New York Review Books, May 2014). It's based on author Gabriel Chevalier's experiences on the front lines in The Great War and was originally published in 1930. Already in my handbag were Neely Tucker's The Ways of the Dead (Viking, June 2014), featuring Washington, DC investigative reporter Sully Carter, who digs into the killing of a judge's daughter and wonders if cold-case murders are related to it; and Rachel Howzell Hall's Land of Shadows (Forge, June 2014), with hard-as-nails Los Angeles homicide detective Elouise Norton looking into the death of a Jane Doe.

If you're traveling this Fourth of July weekend, I hope your preparations are less frenzied than mine this morning. You need to get a move on if you don't yet have a book to pack.

On Monday, I told you about Terry Hayes's thriller, I Am Pilgrim, and Lenny Kleinfeld's R-rated hardboiled black comedy, Some Dead Genius. While those two books make great reading anywhere, Josh Malerman's Bird Box (Ecco/HarperCollins, May 2014), is ideally read at night under the covers with a flashlight. It's an unsettling horror thriller set in a decimated dystopian world where people barricade their houses, cover their windows with heavy blankets, and wear blindfolds when venturing outside because seeing something––nobody knows exactly what––inexplicably drives people to deadly violence against themselves and others. Needless to say, this doesn't make anyone eager to answer a knock on the front door.

When the book opens, single mother Malorie has spent the four years since the birth of her two children, Boy and Girl, training them to use their ears and to obey her without question. She decides it's time to leave their Detroit house near the river and row a boat 20 miles downstream to what might be greater safety. Of course, they must do this blindfolded. As they feel their way to the river and make their perilous journey, we intermittently learn Malorie's backstory. The incessant high tension makes the ending somewhat anticlimactic, but holy Toledo, by the time I got there, I was so wrung out, I barely cared! This book about trust and adaptability was written by the lead singer and songwriter for the rock band The High Strung. (Is this fitting or what?) I wouldn't recommend it to someone who feels let down if ultimately all questions aren't fully answered.

Last year about this time, I enjoyed a terrific spy novel, Red Sparrow (Scribner, 2013), written by ex-CIA agent Jason Matthews (see Sister Mary Murderous's review here). Now, former BBC correspondent Adam Brookes gives us the benefit of his familiarity with China in a stellar book of espionage, Night Heron (Redhook/Hachette, May 27, 2014).

After a 20-year incarceration, Li Huasheng, also known as Peanut, escapes a high-security Chinese labor camp and makes his way to Beijing. There, Li approaches freelance British journalist Philip Mangan with an offer of top-secret information and the admonishment to tell his superiors that the night heron is hunting. Mangan passes this message on to a friend in the British embassy, and it rings a bell at the UK's Secret Intelligence Service headquarters. A plot is thus set in motion to steal Chinese missile secrets. We alternate between Li, Mangan, and British operatives in China and the SIS in London, with a few stops in the United States thrown in. The atmosphere is full of foreboding. When one assesses the interests and resources of the global espionage-industrial complex, various factions in the British SIS, and Chinese state security, the odds don't look good for the inexperienced Mangan and the decades-out-of-touch Li. I was struck by the role personal motives and frailties play in state affairs and grew to care so much about Brookes's characters, I had to fight off my impulse to peek at the ending. I wasn't as successful resisting the appetite for Chinese food this book inspired. Now I must wait for Brookes's next, Midnight Blind, due out in the UK on March 12, 2015.

Have a good weekend.

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 Jan Wallentin's Strindberg's Star

Strindberg's Star by Jan Wallentin, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles

What is it about Scandinavians that give their crime fiction that certain flavor? The cohesiveness of their communities? A willingness to examine ugly facets of human nature in a matter-of-fact way? Their stoic acceptance of the cold? Whatever it is, we're lucky to see more of their books translated into English. One of the newest translations is Strindberg's Star by Jan Wallentin, a best seller in Sweden, France, and Germany. It's a genre-straddler that combines components of a thriller, adventure, and historical fiction with elements of the occult.

The book begins near Falun, Sweden, when a cave diver named Erik Hall takes a solo dive into a long-abandoned and flooded copper mine. There he discovers a corpse. While the body is shockingly well preserved, there are reasons to believe it has been dead for many years. And that's not the only mystery surrounding it: the hands are clutching an ankh, and there is strange writing in the cave.

Cave diving is extremely dangerous, but doesn't it look fun?

Erik's discovery becomes a media sensation. Word leaks out about the ankh and other odd findings. Erik meets Don Titelman during the filming of a TV program, and afterward, he pelts Don with phone invitations to come see him. There may be something Erik hasn't shared with journalists. He wants Don's help in interpreting his discoveries.

Modern symbols

Don is Jewish, a one-time physician who became a Lund University professor of history with an expertise in the Nazis' use of mythology and symbolism. He was traumatized as a child by what he heard about concentration camps. Knowing thine enemy isn't enough for him, however, so he beefs up his mental defenses with a shoulder bag stuffed with an astonishing array of pills. The tiptoeing approach of an unpleasant emotion or difficult situation makes Don slip his hand into the bag.

An ankh

Don's acquaintance with Erik ends badly, and Don is wrongfully accused of a crime. He and an attorney sent to represent him, the attractive Eva Strand, are kidnapped and held by Germans. The two captives listen to a tale about an inconceivably strange device and its history, which includes real-life figures such as Nils Strindberg, a photographer who perished in an 1897 hot-air balloon expedition to the Arctic. Don is threatened with dire consequences if he doesn't give them what they want. Eva and Don manage to escape, and the story becomes their transcontinental quest to elude capture, while attempting to solve difficult clues that could lead them to some missing artifacts with unusual powers.

Wallentin was very ambitious with this debut novel. It's an information-packed and complex plot that involves the Nazis and figures from mythology, set in multiple locations over a century's time, and populated by both real and fictional characters. Let's take a look at the results.

Likable hero and dastardly villain

Problems first. The book's main problem is its lack of appealing fictional characters. Don, the protagonist, is only 43 years old; yet, he's a grey-faced physical and psychological wreck. If he's not actually unconscious, count on him to be upping or downing himself with fistfuls of drugs. It's a bit hard to root for Don and Eva, who's plucky enough, but whom we don't really know.

Another problem is the way in which the plot's requirements are met with coincidence and convenience. Don just so happens to pick up a certain object. Luckily, he has a reclusive sister who's a hacker. Eva does something she should have known better than to do.

Nils Strindberg was
only 25 when he died

At 464 pages, the book could use some trimming. Despite these flaws, I still liked the book.

Here's why:

Wallentin, a journalist, knows how to research and write, and Rachel Willson-Broyles provides a smooth translation. The settings are cinematic, and some of them are downright spooky: the flooded copper mine, the cemetery in Ypres, and the Arctic. The physical isolation is exacerbated by cold and darkness or wind and rain or snow. The intrinsic suspense is heightened by the characters' vulnerability. They're stubborn or unduly optimistic; inappropriately dressed, ill-equipped or exhausted.

Tyne Cot cemetery on the Ypres Salient, Belgium

While the amount of historical information keeps this plot from the quick pacing of a Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, this book is not meant to be a simple page-turner. Wallentin utilizes real characters and events in weaving his fictional plot, and he infuses it with the supernatural as do writers such as John Connolly and Dan Simmons. The mythology and literary clues are intriguing, and the properties of the artifacts, both physical and theoretical, are fascinating. Wallentin's book has similarities to Jules Verne's classic science fiction, but it's also similar to Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's literary thriller, The Rule of Four, and books by Francis Clifford and Lionel Davidson because it poses moral questions. Strindberg's Star is an original book that stretches the imagination and exercises the brain.

Ultimately, this book is about the double-edged quality of scientific discoveries and the nature of responsibility and guilt. Science has been used to both benefit and purposefully harm humankind, often at the hands of the same people. Should researchers be held responsible for their discoveries, and CEOs for the use of the products based on this research? There are important questions about the morality and wisdom of certain scientific explorations. There's a reason Wallentin makes the source of scientific knowledge a particular symbolic place. The actions of some, who feel no guilt, can leave unbearable burdens of guilt for others who aren't remotely responsible. A moment's actions can lead to a life of feeling guilty. Just how responsible are these characters for their fate?

I'll be thinking about Strindberg's Star. Despite its flaws, it's a timely and worthwhile read. Take it to the beach. The plot's action slows at times so Wallentin can provide fascinating historical background, yet the imaginative plot will keep readers turning these pages. I'll look forward to what Wallentin comes up with next.

Note: I received a free digital galley of Strindberg's Star from Viking Press. The book was published last month. August Strindberg was on Viking's early list of authors, and I wonder what he'd say upon seeing himself, his acquaintance Sven Hedin, and his young relative Nils in this Viking publication.