REVIEWS FROM W. J. H. REED
THE DARKENING FIELD
WILLIAM RYAN
Minotaur Books January, 2012
Detective Captain Alexei Korolev is a trusted man... and that's not such a good thing. Trusted means successful and discreet or dead in the 1930s Soviet Union. Based on his work in an earlier case involving the NKVD and stolen icons, Korolev is now trusted by Stalin's inner circle to handle those matters which are too sensitive to hand off to the regular police. The apparent suicide of a young girl on a film set near Odessa shouldn't be a case for special handling and wouldn't be unless she were the close personal friend of Nikolai Ezhov, People's Commissar of State Security and a confidant of Comrade Stalin himself. Rousted from his flat at 2:00 a.m. and hustled to the Lubianka, Korolev is given his assignment. Investigate and, if it really was a suicide, hand the case over to the Odessa cops. If it was murder, solve it quickly and with no mention of Comrade Ezhov.
Ryan's research is solid and his Odessa is absolutely real. The Potemkin Steps take your breath away and the harbor slums smell of unwashed workers and cheap vodka. For Korolev, it's a new hunting ground that is familiar and foreign at the same time. The Moscow Thieves call the shots in Odessa too but the cops are different, maybe crooked or maybe just incompetent. The countryside has been depopulated by the forced collectivization of the farms, churches have been desecrated and the survivors are sullen or possibly hostile. Korolev needs to size up the situation and act -- quickly. Assisting him is a new partner, female junior detective Nadezhda Slivka of the Odessa CID, and his Moscow neighbor, writer Isaac Babel, who is rewriting the film's screenplay.
THE DARKENING FIELD is Soviet noir at its finest and is also a thriller that will hold the reader at the edge of his chair, waiting for the next twist in the plot. Korolev is a hero with clay feet, serving the Soviet state and secretly keeping as true to his Orthodox faith as he can. The question is whether he can fit the pieces together and solve the crime without signing his own death warrant. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
THE SECOND SON
JONATHAN RABB
Picador Trade pb 1/12
1936. The year of Hitler's Olympics. The year of the socialist-sponsored People's Olympics in Barcelona. The year Chief Inspector Nikolai Hoffner is forced out of Berlin's Kriminalpolizei because his mother was a Jew. A year of endings and new beginnings colored by hatred and hope. For Hoffner, the job loss is something he can deal with. He has connections on both sides of the law and knows he can make his way in Berlin whatever happens. His elder son's embracing of the Nazis is more troubling and his younger son's disappearance while working as a journalist in Spain is frightening. Using his underworld connections, Hoffner catches a ride on a smuggler's flight to Barcelona to save one son if he can. Unfortunately, he arrives just as the Spanish Civil War begins.
Police work in the middle of civil unrest was the theme of Jonathan Rabb's first Berlin novel, ROSA. He returns to the confused arena of questionable loyalties, unfettered violence and constant danger in THE SECOND SON. Georg Hoffner, the younger son, is up to something much more sinister than filming the People's Olympics for Pathé Gazette. What it is and how Nikolai can save him are at the heart of this noir-tinged father-and-son novel.
Rabb's three Berlin novels, ROSA, SHADOW AND LIGHT and THE SECOND SON, are each set approximately ten years apart and show the tragic ruin of Hoffner's family along with Germany's leap off the cliff into Nazism. Hoffner sees what is happening and is powerless to prevent either the personal or the political catastrophe. THE SECOND SON ties all of the strings together amid the muddle of Communists, Catholics, Anarchists, Socialists, Falangists, monarchists, criminals, and victims. No one is completely innocent; no one has totally pure intent. Everyone acts in his or her own interest as it appears at the moment, leading to rapid shifts of loyalty and complete uncertainty about which side anyone is on.
THE SECOND SON reminded me of Alan Furst at his best and was as powerfully moving in its portrait of normal people caught in the vice of events which they cannot control. Like Furst, Rabb has a talent for making his characters real and complete people that the reader cares greatly about. For the lover of historical mysteries and thrillers, THE SECOND SON is a novel that should not be missed. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
BLOODLAND
ALAN GLYNN
Picador Trade PBO 2/12
Interconnectedness is widely recognized in the Internet age. A drought in Australia influences the price of cake in Moscow; a storm in Nigeria raises the price of gas in Cleveland; civil war in Sierra Leone hurts diamond sales in Antwerp.
Alan Glynn again uses this truism as a unifying theme for his new novel, BLOODLAND. Like his earlier novel, WINTERLAND, BLOODLAND plays on the idea that every story might be related to every other if you just look hard enough. WINTERLAND's Larry Bolger, the disgraced Irish premier, and mysterious financier James Vaughn are back again in a new stew of shadowy international trade deals, private security firms and press manipulation on a grand scale. But the driving force in BLOODLAND is the dogged persistence of Irish journalist Jimmy Gilroy, who sees the inconsistencies in the official stories and doesn't look away. Hired to write a quickie biography of tabloid starlet Susie Monaghan, Gilroy begins to question why she died in a copter crash along with businessmen, paraglide enthusiasts and a minor U.N. bureaucrat. The answers just don't make sense and each new lie draws him further into the skein of deceit. Everything really is related to everything else and the outcome isn't certain until the last page.
Glynn's strength is the absolute believability of his characters and their motivations. BLOODLAND continues this with a vengeance. Even the most minor supporting player rings true and there's never a second where the writing intrudes on the suspense. Breakneck pacing, convoluted and deadly plotting, and enough realism to make the reader break into sweating anxiety all combine to make BLOODLAND a sure bet for a movie option and a thriller lover's delight. RECOMMENDED.
THE FEAR INDEX
ROBERT HARRIS
Alfred A. Knopf January, 2012
The dominant emotion of the first decade of the twenty-first century was fear and this continues today. Crashing towers, anthrax, suicide bombing, it's all there and all very scary. Robert Harris takes this systemic fear and uses it as the central driving force in his new thriller, FEAR INDEX.
Dr. Alex Hoffmann is a mathematical genius who has developed a new kind of artificial intelligence: not your basic I-can-defeat-any-human-at-chess-or-Jeopardy machine intelligence, but a program handing multi-million dollar trades for a Geneva-based hedge fund. The machine uses algorithms designed to measure and analyze the level of fear in the world financial markets, anticipating moves in market trends that the average human trader couldn't even see until hours or days later. Hoffmann has become highly successful and his hedge fund has made billions for his hyper-rich clients.
Living in a multi-million dollar lakeside mansion, protected by the latest high-tech security systems and virtually unknown to the public at large, Hoffmann is content. At least until the security systems are breached and he confronts a skeletal figure in a long leather coat who is busy sharpening knives in his kitchen. Hoffman is knocked out by the intruder who then flees. Unexplained purchases, new bank accounts in his name that he has no knowledge of, odd messages on supposedly secure cell phones all begin to cascade on Hoffmann.
Harris uses this escalating rampage of unexplainable events to disturb and disorient Hoffmann and the reader. Along the way, we learn a lot about automated stock trading, money markets, why physicists tend to make good traders, subsets of internet porn genres, the paperless workplace and the devastating power of pure terror.
Robert Harris is the best-selling author of THE GHOST, ENIGMA, and FATHERLAND. THE FEAR INDEX will bring him to the attention of a whole new audience. The tech-savvy readers of Stieg Larsson and Neal Stephenson will find a lot to like in this very modern thriller. RECOMMENDED.
ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER LIFE
LEIF GW PERSSON
Pantheon Books March, 2012
Everything ages, everything changes. The infatuations of youth yield to the demands of adulthood. What used to be the most important thing in the world couldn't mean less anymore. What doesn't change is murder.
In 1975, six young Germans storm the West German embassy in Stockholm, demanding the release of Baader-Meinhof gang members from West German jails. Twelve hours later, two hostages are dead, the embassy blown up and the terrorists captured. The surviving terrorists are charged with murder. In 1989, a mid-level government statistician is murdered under mysterious circumstances. No one is charged and this case remains unsolved. In 2000, Lars Martin Johansson, newly appointed head of the secret police, is drawn to the two cases by what appears to be a completely unrelated, routine background check. Fresh eyes from another time see everything in a different light.
Leif GW Persson uses these cases to tell a story that is compelling, suspenseful and at times very funny. His sense of the incongruous allows the reader to learn that a bullet scouring a plastic stair rail will produce a smell best described as "burnt telephone" and that real police investigations often try to ignore the motive in a crime because it gets in the way of information gathering. Donuts and a sea of coffee share pride of place with solid, plodding police procedures and the cops involved are complex, prejudiced and sometimes incompetent. It all comes together in a mélange of partially understood plot lines, characters with contradictory motivations and apparently unrelated facts that hold the reader to the last page.
ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER LIFE is the second volume in Persson's trilogy of Lars Martin Johansson novels that began with BETWEEN SUMMER'S LONGING AND WINTER'S END. It is a solid serving for what promises to be a three-course delight for Scandinavian crime fiction fans. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
PRAGUE FATALE
PHILIP KERR
A Marion Wood Book/G. P. Putnam's Sons April, 2012
The fates have not been kind to Bernie Gunther. A homicide cop in Berlin's Kripo, Bernie resigned when the Nazis took over and became a hotel detective. Unfortunately, even the Nazis figured out that a gold Party badge doesn't make a man a good detective and Gunther is forced back to the force to solve the crimes that the party hacks can't or won't.
Kripo is now part of the RSHA, the Reich Main Security Office, headed by Reinhard Heydrich, nicknamed Hitler's Hangman and recently appointed Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia (before 1938, Czechoslovakia). Heydrich believes that someone is out to kill him and drafts Bernie to guard him from a list of suspects made up of top-level Nazis.
To celebrate his new position, Heydrich invites a group of high-ranking Party members, whom he suspects are involved in the plot, to a weekend house party outside of Prague. Before Bernie has even finished reading the guest list, there is a murder - not of Heydrich but one of his aides. It is a classic locked room murder, all doors and windows locked from the inside, no murder weapon present, just a corpse with one boot on and one off as if he were killed while undressing for bed.
The list of possible killers is unnerving; all are mass murderers or their accomplices, but which one committed this murder? For Gunther and Kerr, this is the central dilemma: how do you distinguish individual evil in the midst of mass evil? Hard-nosed with a distinctly Mitteleuropa world view, Gunther is a German Philip Marlowe, jaded but still with an inner core of virtue that he won't admit to even under pain of death.
This is Philip Kerr's eighth Bernie Gunther novel and in many ways it is the darkest. Bernie is more morally compromised than ever and even his "good" deeds are tainted by the monstrosities of the Nazi era. A fascinating character in horrific times, Bernie Gunther stars in mysteries that no fan should miss. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED .
CHILDREN OF WRATH
PAUL GROSSMAN
St. Martin's Press March, 2012
Weimar Berlin in 1929 is a city with a lot of experience in bad. Kinky bad, like the child prostitutes prowling the boulevards and the sex and bondage clubs; forebodingly bad, like the Nazis and Communists fighting in the streets; economically bad, like the first rumblings of the Great Depression; gastronomically bad, like the outbreak of fatally contaminated sausages randomly killing off rich and poor alike; and monstrously bad, like the burlap sacks of children's bones washing up from the storm sewers. Not just bones, but bones cleaned and polished and assembled into weird art forms using human muscle tissue spun into cords to hold them together. Bones showing clear evidence of tooth marks where they have been picked clean of flesh.
Detective Willi Kraus is a war hero, a member of Berlin's famous Homicide Squad, and a Jew. The last outweighs the previous two and means that Willi is an outcast on the squad, never given back-up, never given important assignments and constantly mocked for his non-German looks. Although Kraus was the first to discover a sack of child bones, he's not assigned to the case. Too high profile a case to give to the Jew. Instead, his chief assigns him to investigate sausages.
Grossman gives the reader an encyclopedic tour of the Berlin stockyards, a Germanic model of sanitation and efficiency where every part of the animal is processed for some use whether for meat and sausage, leather, soap or cosmetics. High-pressure hoses wash away filth and assembly lines move carcasses past rows of single-minded men with very sharp knives. Kraus begins to suspect that some of the meat packers may be buying tainted ingredients from a back alley peddlers market nearby. Unfortunately, even as he investigates the tainted sausages, more sacks of bones emerge from the storm drains.
As both investigations progress, the city becomes transfixed. Their food and their children are threatened by unknown forces and the pressure on the cops to solve the case ratchets up daily. Since failure seems certain, both cases are given to Kraus so that the blame will be his alone. Grossman uses this tension to pull the reader along through the increasing darkness of Berlin's sewers and the spiritual darkness of its slide into fascism. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.