Summer's Last Gasp

Where did the summer go? Part of me is relieved we're headed back to school, but another part wants one more trip to the lake with family, friends, board games and good books. At the very least, we deserve a few more weeks of reading on the patio before Labor Day, when we settle down for the seriousness of fall and winter.

Emma Healey's Elizabeth Is Missing (Harper, June 2014) is perfect for a season that is winding down. Healey's narrator is Maud Horsham, a mother and grandmother who survived the London Blitz, but is now descending into dementia. She lives alone and copes with the help of daily visits from a carer and her harried, but loving daughter, Helen. Maud also writes endless reminder notes to herself. Many of them involve her best friend, Elizabeth, who is no longer to be found at the house she shared with her disagreeable son. Despite Maud's visits to the police and the concerns she voices to Helen, no one seems to care about the missing Elizabeth.

This reminds Maud of the police reaction to the disappearance of her older sister, Sukey, shortly after World War II, and we follow her increasingly scrambled thoughts to the 1940s, where her memory is clearer. Then, she was 15 and living with her parents and a boarder who worked as a milkman. When the beautiful Sukey disappeared, she was married to Frank, a moving man experienced with the black market. Maud's narration is remarkable in its weaving in and out of its 1940s conciseness and its increasingly helter-skelter present. If Maud had a less loyal family, Elizabeth Is Missing would be heartbreaking reading. As is, it's an unsentimental but tender and insightful look at the disappearance of an aging woman's memory and identity.

John Scalzi also looks at aging, memory and identity in his book of science fiction, Old Man's War (Tor, 2005). The twilight years of John Perry, however, are light years removed from Maud Horsham's. John celebrates his 75th birthday by paying respects to his deceased wife and then enlisting in the army, now called the Colonial Defense Force. The CDF is full of old men and women, because their expertise is valued. They defend the Earth, now considered the sticks, but they also seek to colonize what little is left of unclaimed inhabitable outer space real estate. It almost goes without saying that other planets seek to colonize it too. Wars over colonization have been waged for years.

Upon enlistment, CDF soldiers are given youthful bodies. If they survive two years of service, they are given homestead claims on a colony planet. They are forbidden to return to Earth. Of course, the war they have to survive is unlike anything they expect. Scalzi's writing is witty and offbeat and his unusual elderly heroes are a welcome change as we head for a season of autumn colors and falling leaves.

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.

Memories Are Made of This

I'm sure you've walked into a room, only to discover you've forgotten what you planned to do there. And maybe you've heard the comment, "You'd forget your head if it weren't screwed on." Finding yourself headless would create a world of problems; however, this isn't The Twilight Zone, so we won't explore this topic further. The head sitting so firmly on your shoulders is capable of generating enough Big Headaches for you, like, how do you know what you're perceiving is reality? Can you trust the validity of your memories, the foundation of your self-identity? Is it possible for your memories to be implanted or altered?

These are questions David Ambrose poses in his 2000 book, The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk. The title refers to Luis Buñuel's surrealist film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in which some friends are trying to have dinner together, but their plans are constantly thwarted by disturbing events, odd scenes involving other characters, or their own bizarre dreams. None of these interruptions cause the friends to give up the idea of sharing a meal; they relentlessly continue their efforts, despite the illogical or impossible nature of what's happening around them.

Like a viewer who tries to make sense of that movie, a reader must figure out the actions of Ambrose's characters, who may not be what they seem. Brian Kay is a middle-aged man with brain damage caused by a viral infection. He remembers everything before the virus, but he can't turn experiences since then into permanent memory. Susan Flemyng, Kay's neurologist, conducts research in visual memory in Washington, D.C. When the book opens, she is enjoying close relationships with her father, husband, and young son. Charlie Monk has difficulty remembering events from his youth. He's currently a James Bond figure working for an agency so secret it doesn't have a name; Charlie takes instructions from a man he knows simply as Control. In between his super-heroic feats, Charlie relaxes in Los Angeles with beautiful women and good wine.

As the plot progresses, the characters and the reader relax no more. Dr. Flemyng explains:

"Chuang Tzu was a Chinese sage who lived twenty-five hundred years ago. He told once of how he dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamed he was a man. People have been telling that story ever since, because it represents something that mankind has always known instinctively--that we can never be sure whether the outside world corresponds to the picture of it that we have in our head. We can't even be sure that the outside world is actually there."

While The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk isn't a ghost story, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw comes to mind. Ambrose cleverly and energetically twists his futuristic thriller's plot, and the reader will need to interpret what has happened. This is one of those books that provoke thinking about the nature of evil.

After choosing his identity and memories, this shopper
should choose a good memory-foam mattress.

Carsten Stroud's Niceville, published in June 2012 by Knopf, is another. Sylvia Teague has often thought Niceville, founded in 1764 by four families who've now been feuding for a century, would be "one of the loveliest places in the Deep South if it had not been built, God only knew why, in the looming shadow of Tallulah's Wall." On top of this limestone cliff sits an ancient forest that whispers and creaks around a large sinkhole, full of cold black water, called Crater Sink. Cherokees considered it a place of evil; all the present-day citizens know is that nothing goes into Crater Sink and comes back out. In addition to this unsettling place, Niceville claims a bothersome statistic: people disappear at a much higher rate than the national average.

The latest such disappearance is Rainey Teague, Sylvia's 10-year-old son, last seen looking into the window of Uncle Moochie's pawnshop. A few days later, the kid is found. Oh, man, you'd never guess where. This is the point in the book when I visited the likker cabinet for a glass of bourbon and settled deep down in a comfy chair to savor Stroud's vivid writing, oddball characters, black humor, and crazily complex noir plot.

What else? Two men rob the First Third Bank, and a third coolly shoots not only the cops pursuing the first two, but also the people covering the chase in the news helicopter. Then the shooter puts on his Ray-Bans and lights a cigarette, "consoled by the warmth and the lovely light" of what promises to be a pretty evening. Do I need to tell you these three outlaws have watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? I must also mention a dentist who poses and then photographs his unconscious female patients in erotic tableaus, and a civic leader who installed a video camera in the bathroom his teenage daughters use.

Obviously, those characters make a mockery of the name of the town, but lawyer Kate Kavanaugh tries to be nice. Her client just won a divorce custody case against her husband, the extremely nasty Mr. Christian Antony Bock, who should, but doesn't, ooze down into a dank cellar and stay there. Although Kate's husband Nick is troubled (he served in Iraq with the Army Special Forces), he's now a more-than-competent lawman with the Cullen County Criminal Investigation Division, and he adores his wife. Kate's dad is a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, and her sister is married to a hot-tempered jerk who runs a private security company. Sorry, I was talking about good guys, and the bad guys keep intruding. There are only so many nice people in Niceville.

There are more disappearances, macabre deaths, and mysterious events that can only be explained in supernatural terms. Like Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280, Niceville puts a comedic edge on crime. And like The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk, it will give you a chance to contemplate how memories can entrap their creator and others, and identity can be manipulated for evil purposes.

This gothic thriller isn't for everyone. It's not a soothes-you-to-sleep read. If you appreciate dark humor, lyrical writing, and a plot that's spooky as hell, master storyteller Carsten Stroud wrote it for you. Let's hope very hard we'll see a sequel.

Note: I received a free review copy of Niceville.