Author: Daniel Silva

2012, Harper

Filed Under: Thriller

Find it on Goodreads.

Portrait of a Spy is about what you’d expect of a mass-market paperback spy novel. A new terrorist mastermind threatens the post-9/11 world and an elite force of spies must penetrate the evil network before it’s too late. Sigh.

The main character, Gabriel Allon, is a cross between a Dan Brown and a Robert Ludlum protagonist. Except, unlike Dan Brown’s hero, he’s not an art historian, he’s an artist. That’s right, an artist spy! No, seriously.

I actually think an artist spy could make for a unique and engaging character. Unfortunately, this book is missing a few pieces, and the most noticeably absent is character development. Gabriel Allon is a flat character, and throughout most of the book very little is invested in developing him any further. I get the impression that the author probably made more effort to establish his protagonist’s character in an earlier novel. Unfortunately, Portrait of a Spy is little more than Allon in action, and since the reader never really is able to connect with the character, there’s little reason to fear for his safety or otherwise care.

This is not to say Silva didn’t try. He tried a bookending technique to build on his character from an alternative perspective. Rather than introducing us from Gabriel’s perspective, Silva shows Gabriel through the eyes of a curious, if not obtrusively nosy bunch of townies that apparently are obsessed with figuring out why this stranger settled in their town. The best development comes at the end, when Gabriel is struggling through his grief. However, this is too little too late. A die hard Gabriel Allon fan will probably be satisfied as he gears up for the next installment in the series. But no one else will be.

Silva’s treatment of dialogue in this novel is rather poor as well. Exposition too often masquerades as dialogue. It’s extremely hard to believe some of these passages could ever be delivered in live conversation. Because the characters delivering the speech and the characters listening are supposed experts in the field, there’s too much information shoehorned into conversation. Exposition for the benefit of educating the reader feels out of place and gets in the way of the story.

“The laws and customs of Islam and Saudi Arabia are old and very important to our society. I’ve learned how to navigate the system in a way that allows me to conduct my business with a minimum of disruption.”

“What about your countrywomen?”

“What about them?”

“Most aren’t as lucky as you are. Women in Saudi Arabia are considered property, not people. Most spend their lives locked away indoors. They’re not permitted to drive an automobile. They’re not permitted to go out in public without a male escort and without first concealing themselves beneath an abaya and a veil. They’re not permitted to travel, even inside the country, without receiving permission from their fathers or older brothers. Honor killings are permissible if a woman brings shame upon her family or engages in un-Islamic behavior, and adultery is a crime punishable by stoning. In the birthplace of Islam, women cannot even enter a mosque except in Mecca and Medina, which is odd, since the Prophet Muhammed was something of a feminist…”

Then, the book suffers partly because of the subject matter. Frankly, 9/11 stories have become passé. Still, there is some entertainment to be found and the insight into the politics and culture in this terrorized world is interesting enough.

All negativity aside, I do enjoy the idea of Gabriel’s character. I like that he is an artist whose personal tragedy seemed to conscript him into a life of a killer and spy. And I applaud Silva for creating a Jewish spy. Having an Israeli perspective is a welcome change in this genre. However, as a spy thriller, the book fails. Only during the climax was I ever fully engrossed.  The story and plot lines were slow in developing. Furthermore, even though it kept me reading, the climax itself is a terrible combination of trite and unbelievable. Not only does an ancillary character play a pivotal role in the climactic scene, their actions are completely unsupported in the text.

I recommend this book only if you’re looking for a distraction, a quick dip into a shallow pool.

Similar reads: The Firm, by John Grisham; Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown; The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

Author: David J. Kowalksi

2012, Titan

Filed Under: Sci-Fi, Historical, Thriller

Find it on Goodreads.

Writing a time travel novel is a big endeavor. There’s a slew of things you can mess up, and even one loose end can unravel the entire plausibility of your plot.

Needless to say, when I read the premise of this book (alternate history, time travel, some guy trying to save the Titanic) and that it was a debut novel 15 years in the making by a practicing OB/GYN, I didn’t really expect much. Even a few hundred pages into this behemoth of a book, I still wasn’t really sure which way things would fall. Luckily, they fell toward the side of awesome. I found myself really enjoying this novel, churning through the last few hundred pages excitedly.

As you might expect from 750 pages of time-travel fiction, the plot gets pretty complicated. It’s hard to explain my thoughts on the book without a somewhat lengthy set-up, so bear with me.

Things start out fairly straightforward. A man named Wells has traveled back in time and finagled his way aboard the Titanic. He’s from our present and he’s attempting to “correct” history by preventing the ship’s sinking. While he does manage to affect history and avoid the iceberg that famously brought the boat down, the ship strikes a different iceberg while correcting course and sinks all the same. Thus, some of the people who died on the Titanic now no longer died, and history changes.

John Jacob Astor IV is the new survivor most crucial to the plot. After returning to America, the influential tycoon involves the US in a diplomatic feud with England, which results in America staying out of World War I. Flash forward 100 years to 2012. World War II never happened. Most of the globe is split between the German and Japanese empires. The United States didn’t survive a second secession of the South and the Confederacy is now a nation of its own, largely in bed with Germany. The North, however, is largely occupied by Japanese forces. There is no active fighting between the empires, but things are tense and Cold War-like.

Joseph Kennedy Jr. (who couldn’t have died in a WWII that didn’t occur) has attempted some unsuccessful political bids and is now the head of the Confederate Bureau of Investigation. He’s been working on a secret project called Camelot, a gambit move intended to re-unite the USA through causing a clash between the empires. But Kennedy has deeper secrets: through a particular chain of events, he has access to the very same time machine as Wells. As the book opens, the Camelot plot, which involved lots of double agents and similar tactics, has broken down. However, things are still set in motion to trigger a great, and likely apocalyptic, war between the two sides–with America as the battle ground.

I’m oversimplifying things a lot here, Kowalski planned out everything fastidiously. The book is rife with historical figures and events, many skewed due to his alternate history. It doesn’t read like someone read a couple entries on Wikipedia and fictionalized some things, or dropped actual names into a plot that would work fine without them. Kowalski obviously did his homework, then took the time to properly synthesize portions of history into a fiction with clear lines of plausibility.

The main plot that follows features Kennedy and clan scrambling from now war-torn New York City to make a hail mary mission to the time machine (which is located in Nevada), in the hopes of correcting time and undoing the only history they’ve known. Not really sure what will happen, but assured that if they do nothing things will end in ruin (via a test run of the time machine to the future), they opt for a possible chance of freeing the world from doom, even if would result in they themselves ceasing to exist.

Just like Wells before them, Kennedy and his team believe the key to repairing history is… to save the Titanic. They concluded that Wells had brought the Titanic down, not attempted to preserve it. The dramatic irony this injects into the plot is palpable and satisfying. It was perhaps this twist alone that the book won me over. Dramatic irony is easy to abuse or otherwise misuse, but when executed properly it can do wonders for a book. In Kowalski’s case, it propels his characters nicely, and furthermore ratchets up the tension for the reader the closer the character get to achieving their goal. Eventually I found myself genuinely excited while reading, not something I had expected going into this book. Then, as the complexity of the plot’s workings became more visible, Kowalski introduces some very interesting and slightly brain-bending play with time travel and paradoxes, at which point I was all-in.

Further explaining the plot, though, or what those paradoxes might be would take forever and spoil too much. Suffice to say, as things move on, it becomes clear that Kowalski did an impeccable job with his plotting–many things crop up later in the book that I only then realized I had been clued into hundreds of pages earlier. But I rushed past the dangling hints while racing along with Kennedy in his urgent race to save the Titanic.

When I agreed to read this book, I didn’t think it was going to be very good, but figured just maybe it would at least be entertaining. It did manage that, but also managed to impress me. Kowalski’s never going to win any awards for his prose. There’s plenty of clunker lines like this: “He hid the dread behind the rampart of his face.” But when a book’s plot structure is as tight as Kowalski has delivered here, that’s fine with me. If Kowalski writes another book, I’ll read it. I just hope he takes his time with it and gives the particulars the care he gave Company of the Dead–even that means waiting fifteen years.

Similar Reads: The Revisionists (Mullen), The Map of Time (Palma)

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

Author: Donald E. Westlake

2011, Hard Case Crime (Titan)

Filed Under: Thriller

Find it on Goodreads.

When Donald E. Westlake died in 2008 he had over 100 novels under his belt. He left at least one unpublished, left in the care of fellow crime writer Max Allan Collins for some forty-odd years. Supposedly written in the ’70s, The Comedy is Finished was completed and ready for publication right around the time Scorsese’s film The King of Comedy came out in 1983. Although the motives and characters are different, the basic plot about a celebrity kidnapping was similar enough to his unpublished novel that Westlake tabled the book for fear of being called a copycat. After Westlake’s death, Collins found a publisher, and The Comedy Is Finished finally saw publication last month.

Set in the post-Vietnam days when yuppies begin to settle into the nascent ’80s, the novel focuses on an aging comedian, Koo Davis, who is kidnapped by a group of Marxist twentysomethings unable to move on from the radical days of the previous decade. Koo is pretty much a Bob Hope analogue, a relic of a past era of entertainment. Even through some traumatic experiences, he constantly manages corny one-liners and paraprosdokians.

At first this fell a bit flat for me, but Koo’s seeming incapability for seriousness reveals itself as a well-crafted shield for a deeply insecure and sad old man. Westlake’s effort isn’t high literature by any stretch, but he did touch a few nerves of emotion that serve the book nicely and left me genuinely surprised.

The plot is a fairly basic ransom thriller. Koo is kidnapped by five young people so full of grandiose visions of seeding a new American revolution to tear down capitalism that they too are relics of a bygone era. Though unlike Koo, they are unable to recognize that, or at least desperate not to acknowledge it. Since they kidnapped a famous personality in order to demand the release of political prisoners (Black Panthers and the like), the FBI is brought in, and things play out from there somewhat predictably.

The story switches perspectives between Koo; his various kidnappers; Mike Wiskiel, the agent in charge of the investigation; and Lynsey Rayne, Koo’s agent and the closest thing to someone who loves him (even though he has an ex-wife and estranged sons). Aside from Koo, none of the characters are particularly interesting, though a few have their moments, yet none are particularly disinteresting either. On the whole they come together to tell a compelling, if fairly standard, crime story.

Even though much of this book is predictable and verging on cliche, I enjoyed reading it quite a bit. Westlake tells a good story, arranging the pieces in a satisfying way. Fans of crime fiction like this will find plenty to like in this book, especially if they are already fans of Westlake. Personally, I agreed to read the book after seeing the cover in all its pulp fiction-y glory, so if that appeals to you too, this book is worth your time–it is exactly what it advertises itself to be.

Similar Reads: The Thin Man (Hammet), No Rest for the Dead (Gulli, ed.), Jailbait Zombie (Acevedo)

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

2011, Doubleday

Filed under: Sci-Fi, Thriller

Goodreads

Robopocalypse begins with the fun, rambunctious voice of Cormac Wallace, a commander in the human forces fighting a horde of killer robots controlled by a super-intelligent sentient robot that the humans nickname “Big Rob.” Or, at least they were once controlled by Big Rob. The humans have won the war, but they still have to stamp out the last waves of mindless robots, and Wallace does so with panache. When he encounters a swarm of “stumpers”—little scuttling robots who seek out the heat of human flesh and then explode—he tries desperately to spark up his flamethrower as they scramble up his cold metal armor, thinking this:

There’s going to be a temperature differential at my waist level, where the armor has chinks. A torso-level trigger state in body armor isn’t a death sentence, but it doesn’t look good for my balls, either.

Shortly thereafter, balls intact, Wallace discovers a massive archive of robot-curated files about the human-Rob war, specifically about the human “heroes” of the war (according to the intriguing word choice of the robots). The bulk of the novel then becomes Wallace’s selections from the archive—a series of vignettes from different perspectives and featuring different people. Essentially, it’s a collection of linked stories about the robot uprising and the New War.

This structure has its pros and cons. On the plus side, it lets Wilson skip around however he likes, highlighting the most interesting details of a massive story, and it gives the reader a sense of the war’s breadth and depth.

On the other hand, it takes a writer of unusual talent to make such a project feel like more than a fast-cutting mashup of un-fleshed out characters. Wilson, despite a few early glimmers of real promise, does not have that unusual talent.

Still, you’re reading Robocopalypse, not Shakespeare. The idea of sentient robots rebelling against humanity is as old as robots themselves. This is not original, and it’s not literature, but within that framework, Wilson delivers more than I expected.

He especially excels at interior character moments when he comes at them from the right angle. In the passage I quoted above, after Wallace gets his flamethrower operational, he fries the heat-seeking stumpers by the score:

No explosions, just the occasional sputtering flare. The heat boils the juice in their shells before detonation. The worst part is that they don’t even care. They’re too simple to understand what’s happening to them.

They love the heat.

That is a solid, complex moment, both entertainingly written and insightful, as it connotes the dissatisfaction of fighting something that’s too stupid to know it’s losing.

Here’s another one, when the manager of a small fast food joint is attacked by one of the first rogue domestic robots and, bleeding, and then dragged toward safety by his one employee (with whom he’s only recently made friends):

Felipe grabs me by the waist and drags me back around the counter without even looking at the door. He’s panting and taking little crab steps. I can smell the joint in his front pocket. I watch my blood smearing behind me on the tile floor and I think, Shit, man, I just mopped that.

This chapter is one of my favorites. Felipe and this idiot manager display more character, complexity, and pathos in a short, tangential vignette than most of the main characters display during the entire novel.

That’s not entirely to say that those main characters are bad. But they are a bit shallow. If personal interior moments are Wilson’s strength, his weakness is the heartfelt portrayal of climactic scenes. When one character’s closest relation dies quite horribly, their last words to each other are a series of hamfisted callbacks to some of the dorkier things they’ve said in the novel. There’s not much in the way of growth here, or nuance.

I didn’t really expect nuance from a robot apocalypse novel, but I did want it to live up to its potential. Robopocalypse shows flashes, here and there, of great fiction, or at least signs of bringing novelty to the robot-apocalypse genre.

There’s the old man whose lover is a low-quality android. There are the sentient robots who begin to resent the superintelligent Big Rob, seeing their conscription in Big Rob’s war on humanity as enslavement, equal to or worse than their previous lives as servants of humans. There are the experiments Rob conducts on human subjects, replacing flesh with robotic parts—some of those test subjects escape and become Rob’s greatest enemies.

These are interesting ideas and Wilson is in a relatively specialized position to offer them: he’s not just cashing in with a one-off robot book, he actually holds a Ph.D. in Robotics and writes almost exclusively about robots. Unfortunately, the real heft of those ideas comes from the internal struggle with them, not the external ramifications. In other words, the fact that unhappy robots fight with humans against Big Rob is not interesting in terms of the tactics of the battle itself (especially since we know from the beginning that the humans will win), it’s interesting as an exploration of slavery, computer viruses, free will, and the definition of life.

While Wilson is not entirely unequipped to fully exploit these ideas—as his couple of great interior moments show—he does not succeed with them.

It’s a shame, but all is not lost. Robopocalypse is still an entertaining read, good enough for me to read Wilson’s next book, Amped which comes out in June. Hopefully, he’ll stick with one voice and one main character, and he’ll be able to flesh it out well enough to meet its potential.

Similar books: Machine Man, by Max Barry; World War Z, by Max Brooks

2011, Putnam Juvenile

Filed under: Thriller, Fantasy, Young Adult

It’s 1952. Janie is a regular 14-year-old American girl, living in Los Angeles… until she discovers that her parents are Communists, about to be arrested for un-American activities. The family flees to London.

Once there, Janie starts flirting with a boy in her class named Benjamin, and they embark on a mission to spy on a man that Benjamin thinks is a Russian agent. Only, the man he meets is Benjamin’s own father, the apothecary of the title.

From there, Benjamin and Janie begin a fairly typical young-adult-novel adventure: they follow clues, use newfound powers, and become embroiled in a massive conflict with no less than the world at stake.

It’s a familiar arc, and while Meloy writes it well, it’s a relatively forgettable novel. Except, that is, for one aspect, a facet of the mythos of The Apothecary that’s fairly original, but also quite uncomfortable. (Minor spoilers ahead. If you want to go in fresh, skip the rest of this. If you like Harry Potter and the Lemony Snicket books, you’ll probably like this one, as well.)

The odd facet has to do with Meloy’s chosen system of magic. It begins as herbology, a muddled herb in a cup of tea that makes the drinker tell the truth. But it quickly becomes proper magic, as Janie and co. receive a potion that will transmogrify them, temporarily, into birds.

The recipe for that potion, and for every other potion the apothecary can concoct, comes from a massive, centuries-old tome called the Pharmacoepia. That innocent detail makes a world of difference: it means that the magic contained in the Pharmacoepia is available to anyone who can read Latin. It means that Janie and Benjamin are not unique.

This means that the world of The Apothecary, and its magic, is more democratic. It also highlights the fact that one of the great pleasures of this brand of YA book comes from being included, which means, it comes from excluding people. When you read Harry Potter, you get to be a wizard, instead of some frumpy old muggle. And not only that, you get to be among the most famous, most important wizards in the world. If everyone could use magic, the thrill of inclusion would wane significantly.

To make it more palatable, authors ensure that the exclusive group is oppressed somehow, or that they don’t want to be part of the exclusive group. Katniss Everdeen hates fighting in the Hunger Games, but without the status the Games afford her, she’s nothing but a gruntwork drone, slowly starving to death in backwater Appalachia.

There is no such status, and no exclusivity, in The Apothecary. The knowledge of the Pharmacoepia comes from millenia of tireless study on the parts of a long line of apothecaries and alchemists. The Pharmacoepia itself is nothing but a glorified cookbook. Without it, a few people might remember a few potions, but the bulk of the knowledge, the bulk of the magic, will be lost.

Similarly, the users of the Pharmacoepia are interchangeable. If it falls into the wrong hands, the bad guys can use it just as well as the good guys. If Janie and Benjamin get lost or die, two other children could easily take their places. Any two children, from anywhere. They don’t even really need the children.

This makes for some uncomfortable moments. For example, at the end of the book (it’s also mentioned on the very first page), Benjamin slips Janie an alchemical roofie that makes her forget the previous three weeks, which is how long she’s been in London. She forgets all about the good guys and their fight against the bad guys. More unnervingly, she drops out of the alchemical brotherhood and instantly she’s just a regular girl again.

Knowledge of the Pharmacoepia is the only thing that ever makes her special, and because that knowledge can so easily be erased, so too can her specialness. It’s a weird, slippery philosophy for a YA book to be founded on. Meloy, for better or worse, never puts the replaceability of her heroes at the novel’s center, so it can easily be forgotten or ignored. But without it, The Apothecary is a fun but forgettable novel.

Similar books: The Hunger Games series, by Suzanne Collins; the Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling; the Unfortunate Events series, by Lemony Snicket; the Flavia de Luce series, by Alan Bradley

Author: Cody McFadyen

2008, Bantam

Filed Under: Thriller, Horror

This is a book that will in no way exercise your mind, or place any demands upon you as a reader. When I first started it, I read the first few pages, gave a book-snobby, mocking laugh, and put it right back down on my counter. I scooped it up on the way out the door to work a few days later, since I was running late and couldn’t remember where I had left 1Q84.

I crushed through the first third or so of the book on my commute that day, and found myself engaged and ready to read on the next day. A thriller about team of detectives hunting down a serial killer, The Darker Side takes a lot of cues from The Silence of the Lambs, and, since the murders center around a theme of Catholic contrition, even more from Seven.

Here’s the gist. I won’t give too much away since some of the motive stuff doesn’t come out until later in the book. Basically, bodies are being found in conspicuous places. The cause of death in each case is a sharp puncture wound to the heart, and in the wound is stuffed a numbered crucifix. The bodies pile up and come from more prominent places, and the killer, who calls himself The Preacher, releases “user-tube” videos of the victims’ forced Catholic confessions just prior to murder. The victims are picked because they have deep, dark secrets that somehow The Preacher has uncovered. An FBI team frantically tries to get ahead of the killings and prevent more from occurring, but it’s clear The Preacher is pulling all the strings.

The writing is not particularly good. The prose and syntax aren’t problematic, but never shine either. It’s the depictions of the stock characters that provide the initial sticking points.

The leader of the team of FBI investigators is Smoky Barrett. She’s serial killer expert who survived a violent rape followed by the gruesome murder of her family by a criminal she was hunting. Her face is scarred–like her psyche–but her broken and repaired constitution provides her just what she needs to be the best serial killer hunter there is. Clichéd though it may be, McFadyen depicts this side of Smoky adeptly. It’s when he tries to flesh her out with moments of woman-ness that things get a little off:

I’ve never had a penis, never wanted one, but I’ve held them in my hands. I know what they feel like, smell like, taste like, but I don’t know what it’s like to hold one and feel it being touched at the same time.

This is her trying to relate to a transsexual victim. I’m sure a woman detective could conceivably go through a logic like this when thinking about trannies, but it feels a lot more like a male author trying to make his female protagonist look more definitively female than it does any sort of depiction of natural sentiment. Then, here’s how she relates to motherhood:

She assumes I know what she means, and she’s right. It’s universal mother-speak. Every child knows, when Mom uses your first and last name together, you’re in trouble. First, middle, and last? That particular triumvirate is reserved or the worst offenses, the greatest angers. Duck, cover, and hold.

No father has ever resorted to using middle names, evidently. Mothers only. The rest of the team members are similarly stilted. There’s the wisecracking bitch, who actually has a heart of gold; the geeky young tech expert, who happens to be gay; the white-knight family man, who has but one chink in his armor, etc. Once you get past all that, though, the book is pretty good.

This story is a lot like the plot of Seven. Ultimately that’s why I enjoyed it so much, because I really like that movie. Things get quite grisly, and at times very graphic sexually, so if you don’t like that kind of thing in your thrillers, stay away. Unlike–and perhaps due in-part to–Seven, there is lots of cookiecutterness to be found here, namely in Smoky and her team and the stereotypical serial killer at large. But you’ll almost certainly become drawn-in in large part because of the victims.

The auxiliary characters are the best in the book. Occasionally McFadyen pulls away from the main narration (which is focused though Smoky), and gives small chapters focused on these victims. These usually dip into the character’s past, and unveil for the reader the horrible things the victims have suppressed and The Preacher has uncovered. I usually don’t like perspective shifts like this in books, since it too often feels like the easy way. But in this case, it works great. These segments humanize the victims very nicely, and they can be tough to read. More than one made me squirm. Had McFadyen merely related the information through Smoky or The Preacher, it would have dulled the impact a lot and made it, well, preachy.

The Darker Side did a great job of sopping up time for my daily commute. If you like books/movies like those I referenced in the second paragraph, this is a good choice to occupy your commute, or to take on vacation for a mindless escape.

Just for fun, here’s one more silly, overly-titillating example of McFadyen’s woman-think:

Those priest eyes fix on mine and I feel the old, familiar flush of guilt. He knows, he knows. He knows I masturbate sometimes with the help of a vibrator. He knows I take a secret pleasure at making a man come with my mouth.

Similar Reads: No Rest for the Dead (Gulli, ed.), The Siege of Trencher’s Farm (Williams).

[Note: I found this book sitting at an Au Bon Pain with a sticker on it that said “FREE BOOK.” Someone “released it into the wild” through a program run by BookCrossing.com. I’ve since started releasing some books for others to find. It’s cool idea and a program worth checking out.

Author: Neal Stephenson

2011, William Morrow

Filed under: Literary, Thriller

Get this book.

A few weeks after Reamde came out, there was a bit of a kerfuffle about the ebook edition being full of typos. This is not surprising. The paper version has more than its share of typos, too. Not an overwhelming amount, perhaps two dozen mistakes over a thousand pages. But more than you see in most professionally published books.

I can entirely understand these errors. Reamde runs a thousand pages, roughly 400,000 words, and it was published just three years after Stephenson’s last novel. In addition, it’s a globe-trotting thriller, steeped in real-world facts and places, technology and tactics. And it has its own built-from-the-ground-up online virtual world.

It took me three weeks just to read this thing, let alone proofread it. I can’t even imagine editing or writing it. So a few mistakes are certainly forgivable. But they tell of Stephenson’s attitude toward writing, which has emphasized, in the past decade, length above all, moreso than ensuring the highest sentence-to-sentence quality possible.

This is not to say that Reamde feels rushed or shoddily produced. On the contrary, it’s very very good—entertaining, immersive, thrilling, fun, educational and full of great characters. But it’s not Stephenson’s best work. His best, in my mind, is still Snow Crash, the revolutionary information-disease cyberpunk epic that made his name. Snow Crash is also a hefty read at well over 100,000 words—I’d guess 150K—but it’s less than half the size of Reamde, and it shows a different Stephenson than the one from 2011.

When Stephenson labors over a passage, his prose is his best talent. Snow Crash teems with that kind of writing. But, since its publication (in 1992), Stephenson’s writing has expanded and sprawled. As Tom Bissell pointed out, he’s published six 1000-page novels in a dozen years. That’s an absurd pace, and it lends itself more toward new-Stephenson’s penchant for extensive logistical layout and much less toward old-Stephenson’s penchant for phrase-turning and bombastic character details.

For example, in Snow Crash, the main character is a samurai-sword-wielding pizza delivery driver, named Hiro Protagonist, who drives a very fancy car. This is how it’s described:

The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big, sticky contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

In Reamde, the two main characters are a middle-aged game developer and his favorite niece, who was born in Eritrea and raised in Iowa. Here’s how the coolest car in that novel is described, from the perspective of the niece:

From the axles up, it was simply a pickup truck, albeit of the biggest and heaviest class: the kind that, on her visits back home, she saw driving around in farm country, carrying bags of cement and towing fifth wheel trailers. From the axles down, though, it looked like nothing she’d ever seen. The wheels had been removed and replaced with contraptions that looked like miniature tank treads. At each corner of the vehicle, where her eye expected to see a round wheel, it was instead baffled by the impossible-looking spectacle of a large triangular object, consisting of a system of bright yellow levers and wheels circumscribed by a caterpillar tread made up of black rubber plates linked together into an endless conveyor belt about a foot and a half wide. This ran along the ground for several feet beneath each axle and then looped up and around the yellow framework that held it all together, which, she perceived, was bolted onto the truck’s axle using the same lug nut pattern as would be used to mount a conventional wheel. So it seemed that these things were a direct bolt-on replacement for conventional tires, made to spread the vehicle’s weight out over a much larger contact area. Just the thing for an environment that was covered with snow for six months out of each year, and mud for another two. And indeed as the day grew brighter, she saw that the truck’s rearview mirrors and upper body were spattered with dried mud. Conditions might be snowy up in this valley, but this truck had been stolen from some place where spring was well advanced.

A lot of this comes down to taste. If you prefer a risky style, and shorter, more deliberate, and frankly more entertaining prose, you’d like Snow Crash more. If you prefer a very good but slightly long-winded and not quite as polished style, then you might well prefer Reamde.

Whatever your preference, it seems that Stephenson, as the last decade has proven, is the latter kind of writer, and Snow Crash was the exception to the rule.

That’s not to say Reamde doesn’t have its gems. In fact, it has a lot of them, but the sheer length of this book, the exhaustive setup and tangents Stephenson indulges, means that those real beauties are usually dozens of pages apart.

In this kind of format, Stephenson’s best talent is his world-building, a descriptor that usually attends science fiction or fantasy writing. In this case, the world Stephenson builds is an intensively realistic setting full of brilliantly realized characters. Each of his dozens of heroes and villains has a history and a unique worldview, habits, thoughts, good sides and weaknesses.

So, finally, the very worst you can say of Reamde is that it’s an outstanding thriller, one of the best ever and unique in its complexity and humanity. For the sake of thoroughness, and because it seems appropriate to have a review of Reamde run 1500 words, the rest of this review is a summary of the premise.

Richard Forthrast spent a good deal of his 20s ferrying pot across the US/Canada border. He made a whole lot of dirty cash, and so he spent a lot of time wondering and worrying about money laundering. Later on, after losing an entire decade to an addiction to World of Warcraft, he developed an idea for a similar medieval combat online role-playing game, one that wound up being called T’Rain, short for TERRAIN, the landform-generating program at the heart of the world.

T’Rain has a number of features that distinguish it from WoW, like its hyper-realistic land formations, and its ability to map real-life situations and actual jobs like airport security or business meetings into the game. Most of all, T’Rain’s distinguishing feature is that Forthrast built significant substructures into the game to cater to, of all groups, the masses of teenage Chinese “gold farmers” who slog through the game earning gold, weapons, and other things of value, and then selling them to rich Western players who have more money than time.

So, T’Rain features self-sustaining accounts, which don’t require credit cards, since Chinese teenagers don’t have credit cards. And it easily allows for transferring money back and forth from China, and so on and so forth. As Richard notices, gold farming is a multi-billion dollar per year industry, so catering to that market is not exactly insane.

But it also makes T’Rain ideal for money laundering, and for a particular kind of virus called ransomware, which worms into an infected computer, locks up all the documents it can find into one big encrypted zip file, and then charges the infectee for the key. The biggest new ransomware virus in T’Rain is called REAMDE, and it tells its victims to report with their ransom payment (a bargain-basement $73) to a certain location inside the game. That makes it difficult to actually pay, since hordes of predatory third-party gamers descend on the location in question and kill anyone who approaches.

Life’s tough in the real world, too. When a young hacker steals a bunch of credit card numbers and sells them to the Russian mafia, the file gets corrupted by REAMDE, and the Russian mafioso press-gangs the hacker’s girlfriend (who happens to be Richard Forthrast’s favorite niece) into service to track down the person responsible for the virus, so that he, the mafioso, can kill him.

All of that is just the beginning of the plot, the barest outlines of the premise. We’re still not even 100 pages into the novel’s massive girth. If you’re already bored, this probably isn’t the book for you. Things get more interesting, certainly, and there’s plenty of action, but Stephenson is never afraid to explain, in minute detail, the inner workings of a relatively minor detail, like how Richard stumbled across Pluto, his genius geologic-model maker, and why detailed geographic formations are important.

Stephenson’s writing is never quite dry, but it can be exhaustive, and hence exhausting. Still, a great novel, especially if you’re already a Stephenson fan.

Similar books: The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway; Zero History, by William Gibson; Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

2011, Mulholland Books

Filed Under: Thriller, Sci-Fi.

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I’m not exactly sure why I’ve been reading time travel books lately, but so far I’ve benefited nicely. Much like The Map of Time–though it is a very different book–The Revisionists mixes just the right amounts of elements from different genres to make for an exciting and compelling read.

Zed is from the future, a future that purposefully obfuscates its own history. Books are only allowed in print for so long before being utterly obliterated from the record. When a person dies, the government scrubs all trace of their existence down to seizing photographs and belongings from the their loved ones’ possession. Faced with such a situation and left with nothing to lose, Zed, who works as an investigator for the government, accepts an assignment to travel back in time in order to protect the Perfect Present.

Zed’s world came about through a chain of terror events (which stemmed from unregulated defense contracting and privatized espionage in the early 2000′s) that resulted in a world war. Years later when society was rebuilt with tighter government control, time travel was invented. Despite the governments best efforts at an iron fist, it fell into rebel hands. These rebels (known as “hags”) travel through time to pivotal moments in the human timeline in the hope of righting a former wrong–stopping an assassination, derailing the 9/11 plot, preventing the Holocaust. It’s the job of operatives like Zed to make sure these events still occur, to keep history from being rewritten and thus preserving the Perfect Present.

It’s damn near impossible to talk about a book like this without spoiling anything, so be warned there’s possible spoilers ahead. I’ve tried not too, but I’m sure there’s some minor points that might be considered spoiler-y, so if you want to avoid that, this is where the review ends for you: exciting political thriller that incorporates time travel is worth your time.

Ready? Okay.

The key to fiction that involves time travel is all in the handling. I imagine it’s pretty easy to get into a plot only to find you’ve written yourself into a paradox that can’t be explained away in the story. Here, time traveling is treated smartly, in that it doesn’t ever really happen on the page. This is not a leap-around-time adventure like Back to the Future. Instead it’s more like Terminator: time travelers from different factions are sent to our present with the purpose of affecting world events in order to steer the future to their designs.

What I liked so much about this book was how much this works in the periphery. Sure, Zed is an agent sent from the future, but the most immediate consequence lies in the present. His job is to make sure a catastrophic event occurs in Washington DC in our era. So we are introduced to the various characters involved (mostly unbeknownst to them) in the cataclysm that’s yet to transpire.

We know what the players don’t. They’re going to die. But Mullen offers a delicious twist on dramatic irony–through the actions of Zed and the hags, that outcome can be altered. And that, really, is why this book works so well: tightly knotted plot lines full of whistleblowers, double agents, treasonous ambassadors, scumbag defense contractors and oblivious lawyers. It’d be a solid political thriller without all the sci-fi stuff. Like any good piece of science fiction, its extraordinary elements work to enhance the book, rather than buckle when asked to support the work without much help.

Mullen shifts perspectives between a few characters (relating their stories or the event in question isn’t necessary for this review so I’ve left them fresh for you) and does a nice job of patiently drawing the different pieces and players together. Slowly Zed moves from the primary character to another player in the game, his story ultimately enmeshing with the others’ to make for a fine cohesive whole. This book went from piquing my interest in the first two chapters to having me riveted. It’s a solid thriller.

Similar Reads: Flashback (Simmons), The Thousand (Guilfoile) The Map of Time (Palma), How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Yu)

2011, Dutton

Filed under: Mystery, Thriller

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The Keeper of Lost Causes is the first English-translated book in Jussi Adler-Olsen’s bestselling Danish crime series, about the unique Department Q. It stars Carl Morck, who’s one of Copenhagen’s best detectives… until he falls into an ambush and watches his partner crippled and another cop killed.

Morck is deeply traumatized by the incident, and his passion for detective work vanishes. Since his superiors can’t fire him without starting a union battle, they devise a plan to stash Morck away by creating a new department for high-profile cold cases, Department Q. Morck’s assignment to Q is technically a promotion, which appeases the police union, but really it’s a way to put Morck on ice. Nobody will care if the traumatized detective never solves one of the years-old crimes assigned to him, so it’s the perfect place for him to recuperate (i.e. not work very hard). Meanwhile, the bosses can route most of the government money earmarked for Dept. Q to their underfunded homicide division.

Morck, for his part, is more than happy to sit around staring at the covers of case files. Until, that is, he runs across an interesting case and his curiosity drags him back into an investigation. Keeper follows that investigation as a straightforward, quite entertaining police procedural.

The case Morck stumbles upon is the five-year-old disappearance of a prominent, attractive female politician, Merete Lynggaard, and the narrative bounces back and forth between Merete’s experience and Carl’s unraveling the case.

Though police originally thought Merete fell into the ocean during a nighttime cruise, she was actually kidnapped and imprisoned by mysterious people. The bulk of Merete’s sections detail the torments she faces in captivity: her kidnappers have put her in an empty room without so much as a window to the outside world. She lives in complete darkness for a year, without a toothbrush or a change of clothes. After 12 months, her tormentors turn on the lights for the next year, and increase the air pressure by one atmosphere, as they will each year until they decide to kill her by dropping the pressure back to normal and making all the tissues in her body explode.

Adler-Olsen’s strength lies in crafting suspense, and these consistently nauseating looks into Merete’s imprisonment serve just that purpose. As Morck investigates, uncovering one clue after another, the vignettes describing the brutality of Merete’s imprisonment provide urgency and stoke the need to see the bad people punished. In this way, Keeper reads like a much more polished, much more gripping version of Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo Girl books.

Unfortunately, Adler-Olsen’s writing gets muddied by a rough translation, which dilutes his prose and dialogue.

He looked like a boy whose request for an ice cream cone had been refused, but knows that if he stands there long enough, there’s still a chance he might get one.

Still, he’s a much sharper writer than Larsson, and he’s one of the best I’ve read from the new wave of Scandinavian crime novelists. For every one of those seemingly mandatory translation train wrecks, you get something pretty good. Lines are never quite phrased well in English, but there are a few that you can tell might have been good in the original Danish. Like this description of a mental ward:

Egely was a whitewashed building that splendidly proclaimed its purpose. No one ever entered voluntarily, and it was far from easy for anyone to get out. It was obvious that this was not a place for finger-painting or guitar lessons. This was where people with money and status placed the weak members of their families.

Similarly half-decent are Adler-Olsen’s characterizations of Morck’s new department and his capable but weird sidekick, Assad. Both are given a depth of attention that implies they will be around for the sequels. Morck himself is an amusing hero, if not exactly riveting on his own.

My biggest complaint is that, for the reader, the discovery of the evil mastermind behind this plot comes not from Carl’s investigation, but from that mastermind simply revealing himself to Merete on a whim, as he had categorically refused to do for five years. Still, while that feels programmatic and disappointing, it is necessary for the story, and Adler-Olsen manages to keep the suspense high even after the kidnappers are unmasked, which helps a lot.

All in all, this is a well-paced procedural mystery. Certainly not the best I’ve read, but better than most of these translated pulp novels, and a perfect fit for any fans of Scandinavian crime novels.

Similar reads: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, by Stieg Larsson

2011, Touchstone

Filed Under: Mystery, Thriller.

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The inevitable first question when looking at a mystery book with 26* authors is, how did they do it? The second is, of course, does it work at all?

I’m still not really sure the answer to question number one. I had fun imagining, while reading this book, that each author was given a character, or a role, kind of like a dinner party parlor game. By the end of the book, with enough authors writing multiple entries from varying perspectives it becomes clear that this wasn’t the case.

It also becomes clear that Gulli is a fine and comprehensive editor. The answer to the second question? Yeah, it works; everything is sewn up nicely.

The book opens with an affluent woman from San Francisco, Rosemary Thomas, being executed by lethal injection for the murder of her husband, art gallery curator and socialite Chris Thomas. Chris’s body was found decomposed almost beyond recognition and stuffed into an iron maiden in a German museum. It’s pretty clear (to the reader at least) there’s reasonable doubt as far as Rosemary’s guilt is concerned, but it becomes a politiczed case and she is basically fast-tracked to execution.

Then we jump back a few years, set the scene, meet the characters. Chris was crooked, so there are black market art dealers and mobsters, and he was a philanderer, so there’re a few of his lovers:  the ambitious young art dealer who owes Chris her career, and a beautiful grifter cum call girl. There’s an artist friend of Rosemary–who has good professional reason to hate Chris and his sexual advances–and her ex-con husband. There the billionaire philanthropist who funds the gallery–he was Rosemary’s friend–and there’s Rosemary’s money-grubbing lawyer brother. These were the last people to see Chris alive. Then at the center of it all, we meet Jon Nunn, the cop whose damning testimony was the final nail in Rosemary’s coffin.

Fast forward back to the present. Much of the book revolves around Nunn, who has slipped into a deep alcoholic depression, trying to reopen the case. He now thinks he got it wrong. Meanwhile a shadowy figure is also sneaking around and amonymously attacking and threatening the characters. From here, much of the book is your typical thriller. It’s exciting and fast paced, if a little predictable. But, when you consider how many ladles are stirring this pot, that’s actually pretty impressive. There are a fair amount of plot threads and character threads at work, and however Gulli managed it, it’s quite a feat that the cord never frays and the story keeps its pace and momentum nicely.

The novel reaches what I found to be its highest point about 2/3 in, when it shifts from a more taught thriller to a nice little whodunnit. All the characters, with their collected motives and alibis are brought together through Nunn’s detective work. A game of Clue ensues, with each character playing his or her hand as best they can. I’m a pretty infrequent mystery reader, I’ll admit. So maybe this is just the way these books are alway structured, I really don’t know. Nonetheless, I liked this part very much. It plays out fairly quickly, but that short time is a little cerebral and quite exciting.

Now I don’t know if its through smoothing by Gulli’s hand, or the nature of popular mystery writing, but none of the various parts of this tale feel disparate. It’s certainly not a collection of linked stories like I more or less expected it to be. Occasionally you can tell a change in author (besides the name given at the start of each chapter) through something subtle like shift in balance between dialogue and exposition, but on the whole, the style is very uniform.

In fact, the only thing that I didn’t enjoy thoroughly was the ending. I won’t spoil it of course, but it’s pretty predictable. I sort of expected that; it mostly only bothered me because of David Baldacci’s challenge in his preface:

And in my humble opinion it’s a twist that is so original you won’t have to concern yourself with bragging on your blog about how you figured it all out long before the conclusion. Well, I guess you can, but you’d be lying.

I figured it out before the end of the prologue–and I’m not lying. But that didn’t ruin this book for me. To tell the truth I got a bit of a rush to finally find out I was right all along. And I enjoyed the ride, working through the mystery to see if my suspicions were founded. I think anyone who likes mysteries or any of the contributoing authors will like this book. It’s not literary fare, just a quick and easy to digest mystery book. If you see it on an airport bookstore shelf, pick it up. It would make a great flight companion.

Similar Reads: The Thousand (Guilfoile), The Wreckage (Robotham), The Reversal (Connelly)

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

*Full List of Authors: Jeff Abbot, Lori Armstrong, Sandra Brown, Thomas Cook, Jeffery Deaver, Dana Gabaldon, Tess Gerritsen, Andrew F. Fulli, Peter James, J.A. Jance, Faye Kellerman, Raymond Khoury, John Lescroart, Jeff Lindsay, Gayle Lynds, Philip Margolin, Alexander McCall Smith, Michael Palmer, T. Jefferson Parker, Matthew Pearl, Kathy Reichs, Marcus Sakey, Jonathan Santlofer, Lisa Scottoline, R.L. Stine, & Marcia Talley.