From Booklist

Steve Vail, once an ace FBI agent, now a bricklayer (The Bricklayer, 2009), arrives in Washington to take Kate Bannon, the bureau’s assistant director, to an embassy soiree. But his romantic mission is sidelined by an urgent summons from the bureau: a Russian embassy staffer, code-named Calculus, is offering to name Americans feeding sensitive information to Russian intelligence. But no sooner than the bureau accepts the Russian’s terms, he is spirited off to Moscow, presumably to be tortured into admitting what he has done. Steve and Kate must identify the moles and reel them in before the Russians snuff them. But before that can happen, Vail must solve the many puzzles that Calculus uses to conceal information. Thriller fans get an endlessly twisting plot strewn with chases, gun battles, and explosions. Calculus’ puzzles are engaging, and the bureau’s procedural and bureaucratic thickets sound real.

From Publishers Weekly

Milo Weaver, a former field agent with the CIA’s clandestine Department of Tourism, returns to action after a stint in prison for alleged financial fraud in this intense sequel to The Tourist. His handlers want Weaver to pursue a mole rumored to have infiltrated the CIA’s black-ops department, but with his loyalty in question, he must first undergo some test missions, one of which is to kill the 15-year-old daughter of Moldovan immigrants now living in Berlin. Such a horrific assignment further weakens Weaver’s already wavering enthusiasm for his secret life, and he becomes increasingly preoccupied with reconnecting with his estranged wife and child. When bombshell revelations rock Weaver’s world, he vows to somehow put international intelligence work behind him. Can he do so without jeopardizing his and his family’s safety? Steinhauer’s adept characterization of a morally conflicted spy makes this an emotionally powerful read.

Booklist Review

Griffin’s Matt Royal novels may be the closest approximation we have today to John D. MacDonald in his pulp-fiction prime. Griffin’s characters are as stark as a man in a trench coat under a street light. They all have backstories that give them depth, and they possess that lovable quality of players in radio-era dramas with which MacDonald infused the characters in his Travis McGee series. In Griffin’s latest, the slightly over-the-top action, also characteristic of MacDonald, begins when Royal’s friend is gunned down in broad daylight by a sniper. The assassin, however, is really stalking Royal, who soon enough must contend with Glock-wielding fisherman and a particularly nasty biker gang. All this takes place in or near Sarasota, Florida, MacDonald’s adopted home town. Griffin captures the mood and tone of the McGee novels nicely, as the amiable Royal dispatches his adversaries with ?lan, eager to resume his casually hedonistic lifestyle. Good fun.

My mother-in-law bought me the latest in the series, The Queen of Patpong, and I read it in early September. But work and life intervened and I never managed to post a review here. Allow me to rectify that now.

I won’t leave you in suspense. I loved the book as usual. But it wasn’t neccesarily a foregone conclusion. This book is different as a big chunk of the story centers on and is told from the perspective of Rose rather than the central character Poke Rafferty.

As in the earlier books, however, this one places the reader smack in the middle of the heat and intrigue of Bangkok/Thailand. Hallinan offers an exciting plot but also gripping insight into the plight of young women forced to move to the city and act as pawns in the sex trade in a desperate attempt to make money and save their families.

This social drama is seamlessly weaved into the story so that it doesn’t come off as preachy or pedantic but simply reality.

Publishers Weekly capture the power of this perspective and story:

Hallinan’s compassionate fourth Poke Rafferty thriller (after Breathing Water) finds Poke and his live-in girlfriend, Rose, finally married, but a specter from Rose’s past as a dancer on Bangkok’s notorious Patpong Road comes back to haunt her. As a naïve country girl named Kwan, Rose fell for the charms of American Howard Horner, never suspecting that Horner’s true interest in her involved something far darker than romance. Long thought dead, sly predator Horner is back in Bangkok to stalk Rose and all who are dear to her. Hallinan uses the menace Horner represents to springboard into a sympathetic depiction of Rose’s life, revealing without condescension how a simple farm girl decided that the least bad of all the unappealing options open to her was to offer herself to a parade of strangers for money. Rafferty neither idolizes nor demonizes Bangkok’s sex workers, instead casting an empathetic but incisive eye on a class of people often reduced to mere caricature.

I think this is what I appreciate most about this series – it offers a wonderful balance between suspense and literary/social exploration; the blend of entertainment and enlightenment if you will.

Hallinan offer not only the tension and suspense of a thriller but the human insight of a more literary novel. In this type of setting and story it would be very easy to slip into caricature and cardboard cutouts but Hallinan offers humanity in all its depth and complexity instead.

As I have said before, and will say again, if you have not read this series I highly recommend you do so.

Here is publisher’s synopsis:

Max Parkman—autistic and whip-smart, emotionally fragile and aggressive—is perfect in his mother’s eyes. Until he’s accused of murder.

Attorney Danielle Parkman knows her teenage son Max’s behavior has been getting worse—using drugs and lashing out. But she can’t accept the diagnosis she receives at a top-notch adolescent psychiatric facility that her son is deeply disturbed. Dangerous.

Until she finds Max, unconscious and bloodied, beside a patient who has been brutally stabbed to death.

Trapped in a world of doubt and fear, barred from contacting Max, Danielle clings to the belief that her son is innocent. But has she, too, lost touch with reality? Is her son really a killer?

With the justice system bearing down on them, Danielle steels herself to discover the truth, no matter what it is. She’ll do whatever it takes to find the killer and to save her son from being destroyed by a system that’s all too eager to convict him.

I was initially frustrated. The lead character, Max’s mom Danielle, wasn’t a very sympathetic character to me. She seemed pushy and impatient and grating in many ways. This, and the fact that I was reading it in short spurts most of the time, made the story languish.

But once you get to the bloody scene in the hospital things begin to pick up and there are a number of twists and turns that keep you guessing. And of course, Danielle is vindicated to some degree (I won’t spoil it any more than that).

In the end I found it a story where the “hook” is greater than the prose – the creative storyline better than the writing that describes it. Once the story picked up some steam it was entertaining for the most part – I wanted to keep reading to find out what happened – but it left you kind flat at the end.

Publishers Weekly

A serviceable hero and plot propel this largely workmanlike thriller from Larsen (Stealing Trinity). Tough, uncompromising National Transportation Safety Board investigator Jammer Davis attempts to uncover the cause of a mysterious crash of the brand new CargoAir C-500, a flying-wing cargo plane operating under fly-by-wire technology. Meanwhile, a series of terrorist suicide attacks threatens oil facilities around the world. Jammer, aided by his semi-love interest, CIA agent Anna Sorensen, will stop at nothing as he bulls his way through bureaucratic obstruction, inept and corrupt officials, hired killers, and problems at home with his teenage daughter, Jenny. Eventually, he gets on the trail of a far larger plot involving a cabal of international businessmen out for economic gain. Larsen ties up all his loose ends nicely, and a nail-biter conclusion finally heats up the action.

Publishers Weekly

A 21-year veteran of the CIA, Hasler charts the day-to-day efforts of a team of counterterrorist analysts (aka alchemists) in a strong debut that puts most other thriller authors with similar backgrounds in the intelligence field to shame. Madeline James and her crew of brilliant misfits struggle to piece together shreds of evidence gleaned from mountains of raw data (slag) in a race to uncover a plot that threatens to dwarf the body count of 9/11. They must also battle a management structure bent on denying their findings so the current administration will have the ammunition needed to justify going to war with Iran. The parallels with recent history add to the credibility and suspense. Readers will be left aghast at the toll politics and basic self-serving, cover-your-ass government policies take on agencies and individuals whose job is to keep our country safe. Many will find Hasler’s female point-of-view a welcome change from the usual smash and bash male offering in the genre.

From the Publisher

When a high-speed chase goes terribly wrong, Santa Fe police officer Dan Page watches in horror as a car and gas tanker explode into flames. Torn with guilt that he may be responsible, Page returns home to discover that his wife, Tori, has disappeared.

Frantic, Page follows her trail to Rostov, a remote town in Texas famous for a massive astronomical observatory, a long-abandoned military base, and unexplained nighttime phenomena that draw onlookers from every corner of the globe. Many of these gawkers—Tori among them—are compelled to visit this tiny community to witness the mysterious Rostov Lights.

Without warning, a gunman begins firing on the lights, screaming “Go back to hell where you came from,” then turns his rifle on the bystanders. A bloodbath ensues, and events quickly spiral out of control, setting the stage for even greater violence and death.

Page must solve the mystery of the Rostov Lights to save his wife. In the process, he learns that the decaying military base may not be abandoned at all, and that the government may have known about the lights for decades. Could these phenomena be more dangerous than anyone could have possibly imagined?

–>Trust Me by Peter Leonard

From Booklist

Leonard’s first novel, Quiver (2008), displayed some rookie flaws, but his second effort establishes him as a genuinely gifted storyteller. Although the book is similar in many ways to the hard-edged, witty, character-driven novels of Leonard’s father, Elmore, it has its own voice and its own stylistic flourishes. In this fast-paced, elaborately plotted tale, a woman concocts a scheme to retrieve $300,000 from an ex-boyfriend, but she doesn’t count on the wrath of an angry thug, her ex-boyfriend’s scheming nephew, or a pair of hit men with their own plans for that 300 grand. While the cachet of the author’s more famous father should guarantee the novel plenty of interest, it’s Peter Leonard’s own talent that shines through here. In time, if you find yourself referring to “that really cool mystery writer, Leonard,” you might have to explain which one you’re talking about.

–>Water Witch by Deborah Leblanc

From the Publisher

People are disappearing in the mysterious bayous of Louisiana and it’s up to a local “water witch,” a woman with powers of divination, to try to find them before more people disappear.

The simple plot belies the novels complexity, but here is Booklist’s quick take:

This latest Turkish import, set in Istanbul, is written entirely in the first person, from the points of view of the two main characters, Arda, a child of privilege and a smothering mother, and Bedirhan, an orphan turned assassin. The reader is rapidly drawn into the innermost thoughts and feelings of both characters, as Arda decides how to live his life after the death of his mother, and Bedirhan vows to get out of the assassin business. The tension is gradually ratcheted up as Arda discovers his father was assassinated and sets out to hunt for the killer, even as the reader learns of the strangely intertwined lives of Arda and Bedirhan.

You could easily imagine a typical thriller with this setup.  Alternating first person chapters leading the reader on a quest to figure out how these two characters are connected and racing to find the conclusion/resolution.

But the novel never had that thriller feel for me.

Glenn Harper explains:

What’s happening has the hallmarks of a thriller or crime novel, but not the tone, which in Altun’s novel is light rather than tense, with numerous literary references that are at least in part clues to the author’s intentions (the references include Grahame Greene but also Jorge Luis Borges and Paul Auster, and the title is a reference to music by Dvorak). Among Turkish novels widely available in English, Altun resembles crime novelist Mehmet Murat Somer (even though Somer’s novels are frequently comic) than the postmodern novels of Orhan Pamuk (though Altun’s tone is lighter and more playful than Pamuk’s). Fairly early in the novel, Arda mentions a family friend named Selçuk Altun, a banker and novelist. That bit of metafiction becomes more important in the last third of the novel, when Altun becomes a puppetmaster within the novel, as well as its author, giving a series of clues about Bedirhan in the form of locations around Istanbul. Arda’s quest becomes an unconventional tour of the city and its history rather than a hot pursuit of the killer.

In its basic form the plot may seem like a thriller but is just doesn’t read that way.  It really isn’t that suspenseful or mysterious or tense.  Altun’s light style and meta-fictional bent give it a literary feel; even if rambling and discursive one at times.

Much of the subject matter is more traditionally literary as well: his relationship with his mother growing up and his change in perspective after her death; his infatuation with a neighbor girl and his coming to terms with their platonic relationship as adults; his feeling about his dad now that both his parents are gone; etc.  Altun brings a very psychological focus to these relationships; as if Arda’s telling of the story is therapeutic – Arda on the couch.

But these threads are all weaved into the larger mystery of who killed his father and why.  And Altun inserts himself as a character into the story to guide Arda through a series of clues.  This takes the reader through an exploration of Istanbul’s architecture, culture, and history.

If you get the sense there is a lot going on, despite the short  length, you are right.  This was a book that had the feel of one I should re-read.  The first time you are just getting a sense of the lay of the land. In a second reading, I could pick up on the literary references more and enjoy the detailed explorations of the city. I often feel that way with layered or complex works whose style and subjects I am not familiar with.

And that brings up another point, if you don’t know anything about Turkey (its history, geography, politics, etc.) you – or at least I – feel at a disadvantage.  There are clearly some arguments  – point counter-point style – about the city/nation/region that would have more impact and clarity if you knew more about them.

Even with these weaknesses going in, I enjoyed reading Songs My Mother Never Taught Me.  Altun has a light witty satirical style and the book is only a couple hundred pages.  The two central characters are interesting and entertaining.  It just didn’t quite seem to come together for me.

Anyone with an interest in Turkish literature and culture will want to check this one out.  But those who enjoy a satirical meta-fictional type twist on the thriller/mystery genre will enjoy it as well.

Book cover via Amazon

–> American Rifle: A biography by Alexander Rose

Amazon.com Review

Given the title, American Rifle is a book that many potential readers might dismiss without a thought. Don’t do it: Alexander Rose’s peculiar “biography” is not written for gun enthusiasts–though they’ll certainly enjoy it–but for anyone interested American history from George Washington to the Wild West to Iraq. Drawing on original sources ranging from Samuel Colt to the soldiers who depend on the weapon the most, this book is an exhaustive history of the rifle’s place in American culture, not only as an instrument of war, but also as a driver of technological innovation and advances in mass production that helped propel the United States into its role as both a military and economic superpower. Once you start, American Rifle will have to be pried from your cold, dead hands before you put it down.

–> The Bodies Left Behind by Jeffery Deaver

Synopsis

When a night-time call to 911 from a secluded Wisconsin vacation house is cut short, offduty deputy Brynn McKenzie leaves her husband and son at the dinner table and drives up to Lake Mondac to investigate. Was it a misdial or an aborted crime report?

Brynn stumbles onto a scene of true horror and narrowly escapes from two professional criminals. She and a terrified visitor to the weekend house, Michelle, flee into the woods in a race for their lives. As different as night and day, and stripped of modern-day resources, Brynn, a tough deputy with a difficult past, and Michelle, a pampered city girl, must overcome their natural reluctance to trust each other and learn to use their wits and courage to survive the relentless pursuit. The deputy’s disappearance spurs both her troubled son and her new husband into action, while the incident sets in motion Brynn’s loyal fellow deputies and elements from Milwaukee’s underside. These various forces race along inexorably toward the novel’s gritty and stunning conclusion.

The Bodies Left Behind is an epic cat-and-mouse chase, told nearly in real-time, and is filled with Deaver’s patented twists and turns, where nothing is what it seems, and death lingers just around the next curve on a deserted path deep in the midnight forest.