Five reviews today from four great reviewers:
1. Jules Brenner, who runs the excellent review site Critical Mystery Tour, reviews Twice a Spy by Keith Thompson.
2. In the latest "Crime Writers Reading Crime Fiction," author Steve Anderson reviews Jonathan Zimler's The Warsaw Anagrams.
3. Then, Ann Snuggs, after of her review of Fred Zackel's vintage mystery Cocaine and Blue Eyes, keeps the Zackel string going with two more reviews--Death in Key Largo and Murder in Waikiki both now available as e-books.
4. Noir Journal reviewer Poker Ben (Ben Springer) reviews R. Scott Bakker's Disciple of the Dog.
***************************************************************************
Twice a Spy by Keith Thomson (Doubleday, March 2011)
Review by Jules Brenner
Bringing humor into a traditionally serious genre runs the risk of diminishing or diluting the danger and mystery that lurks in that corner of literature and, hence, its natural drama. While it's been done to great effect (by Carl Hiaasen, for example), this satiric jolt on spying and spycraft may be a first. But, that's not all that sets this novel--Thomson's followup to his debut "Once a Spy"--apart. Can you imagine using Alzheimer's disease as a running gag in a yarn about a loose nuke?
Unappealing as that may sound to some readers, Keith Thomson manages to pull it off, thanks in large part to the irreverent yet pragmatic way he has the illness fit his characters and his narrative--using it as a source of suspense and drama.
Making light of such things isn't his intent. But, taking the position that a realistic approach in dealing with a loved one who is less than he once was--whose symptoms might well have a humorous edge in realistic terms--is. How many elders make light of their "senior moments?"
The patient here, one Drummond Davis, has always been an eccentric. For thirty years he's been a CIA agent posing as an appliance salesman. Which is why he's been busy secreting what appear to be nukes inside washing machines for the perfectly sane reason that an easily shipped household appliance makes a perfect concealment shell for an atomic demolition munition (ADM), a portable Russian-made bomb with a ten-kiloton yield, in order to get around U.S. customs.
Of course, the play wasn't to make sales. These decoy clothes washers, Drummond's own invention, have been used for three decades to draw in terrorist groups for a highly successful sting operation. Which explains the utter secrecy of his real work, and why his own son had no idea of his true calling.
But, when Drummond starts showing the symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer's, lots of things change. First, Charlie, now an agent for the NSA, realizes that assassins are preventing him from placing his 60-year-plus father in a nursing home. And when he then discovers that these killers are Drummond's own men trying to deal with their boss's vulnerability by terminating him in order to safeguard their secret operation, their own identities and their stock of weaponized washing machines. Dad, it turns out, isn't the stern and straitlaced appliance salesman Charlie thought he was since he was a boy. Far from it.
Now, what Charlie, and his beautiful, dangerous ex-NSA agent and highly-trained assassin girl friend Alice have on their hands as they dodge the killers, is an old, dearly beloved spook who holds the key to where the last hidden nuke/washer is.
To get to it before the enemy does, Charlie--no stranger to the wiles of a clever son and caretaker--finds a way to arouse Drummond from his lapses into semi-comatose slumber into full-fledged normality. During such critical moments of lucidity, Drummond gives us a glimpse of his not-quite-lost astuteness in charm and deception. And he's lucid enough--often enough--to keep his agency betrayers and the terrorists at bay--and the chase in high gear.
As for Alice, she gets kidnapped and mostly out of the line of fire as father and son share the brunt of the dangerous exploits. But she does get a chance to show how lethal she can be with devised weaponry and, by phone, to help Charlie and Drummond out of a close scrape with certain death.
While all this sounds accomplished, and I make a case for the use of the illness as a dramatic humor device, it isn't as smooth and well structured as it may sound. It's fun, mind, but the Alzheimer's device becomes just a wee bit contrived and dramatically convenient. There's also a certain wandering aspect in a story that seems overstocked with characters and diversions.
These carps are strictly mine, and might not be a matter of concern for many readers. I therefore suggest that what comes from this author is better to read than ignore. I strongly suspect a major genre voice in the making here and I have to encourage a wide following. Satires on assassinations, terrorist plots, kidnappings and wild shootouts don't come around so often that one as amiable as this one should be dodged or disregarded.
|
If you don't yet own Twice a Spy and would like to purchase it (usually at a sizable discount), click here. |
Reviewer Jules Brenner's first professional exposure to fiction was reading movie scripts that he helped translate visually into films as Director of Photography. As a journalist accredited by the MPAA, he reviews films for filmcritic.com, Cimema Signals, as well as for his site, Critical Mystery Tour. His book reviews have been published in Mystery Scene Magazine, Sacramento News & Reviews, 9ine magazine, PopMatters.com and more.
(And thanks to Adrienne Sparks, Associate Director of Marketing, at Doubleday, for the review copy. Click to connect to Keith Thomson's own site and to his Facebook page.)
*********************************************************************************************************
Now, the latest installment of:
Crime Writers Reading Crime Fiction
The Warsaw Anagrams by Richard Zimler (Overlook, June 30 2011)
Reviewed by author Steve Anderson
In October 1940, Warsaw's German occupiers ordered that Jews be rounded up and crammed into neighborhoods that took up only two percent of the city. This was the Warsaw Ghetto: Specially erected high walls, barbed wire and sadistic guards doomed Warsaw's Jews to grim and brutal ways that were only just beginning.
One of the doomed is an elderly Jew, Erik Cohen, once a prominent psychiatrist. Erik gets by but is already skin and bones. We know little about his former life, only that he was respected and took some comfort in that respect. Erik's young nephew, Adam, is one of Erik's few lights of hope. Adam has a sparkle about him and might just make it out of this hell.
Then Adam is murdered. It's a grisly killing that leaves the boy's corpse horribly disfigured and tossed onto barbwire just outside the ghetto. Erik's shock turns to rage, and he summons the grit to find the killer. The clues are few and cryptic and Erik will endanger friends and family on the way, which would seem more careless if they weren't already so damned.
The desperate hunt is on. Erik and his old friend Izzy even cross over secretly into regular Warsaw, a chase full of riddles and false friends that will lead just where it had to. This isn't standard historical crime fiction. The story surges between: Erik's pursuit of an untouchable and crafty killer who, in standard historical mystery style, also symbolizes the dark era; and Erik's longing for lives and loved ones lost and soon to be lost, the former pummeling Erik in storms of emotion and nightmare.
Erik Cohen had been an atheist and modern Jew, but the old Jewish ways loom even as they're being eradicated. At times the dead seem to come alive like Ibbur in the Jewish Kabbalah, decent souls not sure if they're alive or dead. The ciphers and anagrams of that tradition will also help Erik cover his tracks — and lead him to the killer.
The dire setting of The Warsaw Anagrams outdoes the mean streets of most any noir novel. Those inside slowly succumb to misery and oppression, cold and hunger, and those somehow alive survive as ghosts of their former selves. It's a grueling wasteland churning backwards to a primitive state where good can rarely find its reward. Everyone loses and the more cunning often win. The story evokes noir in the fierce and hopeless way Erik and others scrap and scheme to beat rigged odds, well knowing they're well screwed. They will finish off what they pursue not so much to survive but to honor their dead and plunge a jagged blade into the throat of all those who thrive on making them disappear.
The author Richard Zimler is from New York and lives and teaches in Portugal. Zimler's novels include the internationally bestselling The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, Hunting Midnight, Guardian of the Dawn, and Seventh Gate. He's won numerous prizes for his historical fiction, and the reasons ring clear in The Warsaw Anagrams. The writing is intense. Zimler is able to pinpoint emotions and desires with dead accuracy. The beginning and some sections favor loose, introspective narrative over action and dialogue that show the reader the way, but these passages work with great effect to establish Erik's longing, agony and the harsh fate of too many.
Near the end, when Erik tells the man who will continue his quest for him, "Beware of men who see no mystery when they look in the mirror," you begin to know just what Erik means.
Reviewer Steve Anderson is the author of a number of novels, including the historical espionage thriller The Losing Role, now out in paperback and available for Amazon Kindle, iBooks and other e-readers. His novels Besserwisser: A Novel and False Refuge mix crime, history, mystery, noir and dark humor.
**************************************************************************************
|
Reviewed by Ann Snuggs
What a great little nugget of reading entertainment!
That's first reaction upon finishing the last word of Fred Zackel's A Death in Key Largo. Of a length to be read in one long evening or two short ones, this story of murder-for-hire gone bad has more ins and outs than an interior/exterior chase scene from an old-fashioned movie.
Flea Nichols is under pressure. He's been kiting checks. But his bad checks can be traded for a reliable hit man - if he can produce one.
Enter Joey Serra, a real, live Las Vegas hit man.
Joey agrees to meet Flea in a restaurant on Key Largo to discuss the proposal.
Spotting Flea Nichols, Joey Serra (aka Joey Sierra) suddenly grinned. He beckoned Flea to join him. Flea Nichols reluctantly came and sat across from the other man. Flea thought his eyes seemed cold as a rock and twice as hard.
Joey eyes may look cold and hard to Flea but Ivy Lawson, the waitress who served him, likes looking at him.
He was almost twice her age, at least forty, six foot tall, sort of cute to look at, maybe even attractive, but not handsome or (worse) pretty. He was built big, too, like an athlete. . . . He was carefully groomed, with a nice striped polo shirt, dark slacks and expensive sunglasses by his water glass.
Ivy finds herself more attracted to him as they converse, then pegs him as a nice guy upon discovering the twenty-dollar tip he left when he and Flea exited the restaurant.
Joey isn't sold on the job, even with one-thousand in circulated bills in earnest money, but Flea begs and pleads until Joey agrees to at least check out the proposition. One condition: He is no longer "Mr. Serra" but "Mr. Peterson" while he is in Florida.
The guy desperate for the deal hangs out at Paradise Bowl, but he's not bowling. Richard Collins plays poker every afternoon in a room upstairs. Clocks out in time to go home to supper. Debra Lawson, the owner, condones the arrangement. After all, she's his lover and co-conspirator.
The first face-to-face between the hit man and his potential client goes poorly but Joey agrees to one more try before he rejects the offer out-of-hand and hops the first plane back to Vegas.
Joey got up-close and in his face. "What do you want done?"
Flea told you, didn't he?" Richard wanted to turn away or step back, but the other man wouldn't let him.
Joey made an expansive gesture. "I need to hear you say it."
"I'll pay ten thousand dollars to have my wife killed," Richard said.
"You do know murdering your wife is illegal."
Richard blinked, surprised Joey would even consider bringing up the obvious.
"Murder for Hire. That usually starts with a jail sentence of twenty-five years to life. With good behavior, you'd get out in seventeen years."
"Why all this shit?"
They turned their backs on the bright sun.
"I want you to know what you're getting into."
Small acreage, such as an island, encourages webs of connections among acquaintances, lovers, friends, families. The nest into which Joey has fallen is no exception.
Complications abound as Joey uses the role of a National Park Service employee for his cover, raising the ire of Collins' wife Saundra. It comes as a surprise when he finds himself more and more attracted to the natural beauties of the Keys. One of those beauties just happens to be Ivy. And, while Joey dominates the pages, by the end one starts to consider that it may be Ivy's story, or perhaps it belongs to the islands themselves.
There's nothing noir about this book. It's straight crime with an intriguing cast. Zackel's fine descriptive prose splashes vivid images of the characters and the lush Florida setting across the pages of this skillfully constructed tale.
One little nitpick: The book is imprecisely titled. A death? Not really. When bloodshed comes, after a lot of mouthing about it, bodies (plural) fall.
However, it's a page-turner, hard to stop reading. So start early and plan to stay up late.
Footnote: It's also a fantastic bargain in the Kindle edition at a price less than a buck. Can't get a cup of airport coffee for that.
|
Vintage Review: Murder in Waikiki by Fred Zackel
Reviewed by Ann Snuggs
Fred Zackel's Murder in Waikiki is a photo of trouble in paradise. (That's a hint.)
At the start it appears to be a police procedural. Homicide detectives Steven Ke'aloha Shaw and Aaron Tusitala reach the Ainahau Hotel to find the victim never even made it out of the airport courtesy van. Slumped in the rear seat he might have been asleep had the ice pick and bloodstains blending with the red flowers on his shirt not given witness to the lifeblood that had drained from his body.
It's a Ship of Fools, Stagecoach, Hombre, any tale which draws a sundry group of characters together into crunch time or a web of mystery.
Save one, no one on the van even noticed the victim wasn't breathing, yet every one is affected in some way.
Combine a dying elderly man and his souvenir collecting wife, a couple expecting a first baby, a mother and teenage daughter not on the best of terms, and an out-of-work disk jockey returning home to celebrate a lonely fiftieth birthday with the dead body of a stranger.
If that cast of characters isn't enough, stir in the owner of the Ainahau and her estranged musician husband, the dead man's fiancée - who traveled to the Islands separately - and blend in assortment of tourist-serving personnel plus other tourists.
Paradise heats up.
The investigation of a murdered man traveling alone requires questions of his connections on the mainland. Offices empty there while the clock still shows business hours in Hawaii. The detectives call it quits when their calls only connect with answering machines or steadily ring unanswered.
The night is young enough for Shaw to set out for an on-the-town spree to clear his psyche. If only he had known what twisted fate had in store for him.
Steve didn’t like Ah Sin. It was too loud, too touristy, at times too desperate. Still, it’s stroboscopic lights conferred anonymity, and he wanted to get out and meet normal people, not other cops, madmen or outlaws. He wanted to think of something other than homicide. The people here were warm-blooded and alive and death was the furthest thing from their minds. He wanted romance, too. An overnight romance.
His target for the night, the hot number he picks up in Ah Sin for a orgy of sizzling sex ties right back into the murder investigation. She just happens to be the victim’s fiancée.
It’s a tangled jungle of murder and deception as the bodies pile up and secrets from the past rear their ugly heads. Even Erle Stanley Gardner‘s Mason would be pressed to uncover the murderer.
Dark as it is in some sequences, Murder in Waikiki is not noir, though the ending would fit the requirements of the genre. Nobody escapes unscathed. Even the peripheral characters have received damage.
The tale is a real page-turner - if something read on a PC can be called that - but there are a few little problems. The biggest is that it can't decide what it wants to be. As said above, it starts as a police procedural. Then it shifts toward character studies. A few sequences smack of the genre of romance novel that features sex-as-a-spectator-sport graphic details. At times the poor story almost gets lost.
Fortunately, it is strong enough to hang in there and win out with a surprise killer and a pitch dark ending. And, of course, an added pleasure is Zackel’s beautifully crafted prose. The man really does know how to handle the English language.
Print editions of Murder in Waikiki are few and far between. Finding one online is a "good luck" proposition. However, it is available in a Kindle edition, which - with the Kindle for PC app - can be read on computers. The low price for the electronic edition is a bargain, even though it is tough to curl up in bed with a good computer. Still, it's well worth the effort to download the Kindle for PC app in order to buy and read the book.
Thanks yet again to Noir Journal reviewer Ann Snuggs, a published author herself, a former newspaper columnist, , and in my opinion, an expert on hard-boiled fiction as well as on film noir.
****************************************************************
Disciple Of The Dog by R. Scott Bakker
Reviewed by Ben Springer aka "PokerBen"
What if you remembered everything, and couldn’t forget anything? Would you consider it a blessing? For New Jersey Private Investigator Disciple Manning , it’s a curse.
Sure it helps him with his cases--the fact that he can recall conversations he’s had verbatim without the need to take notes is useful. But in most other ways it’s a burden.
Disciple, or “Diss” as he’s called, keeps a ratty office in a strip mall in downtown Newark. Sandwiched between a Souvlaki stand, and a porn shop, he and his secretary Kimberly (a part time stripper), do business there.
When the parent’s of 21-year-old Jennifer Bonjour seek Diss’ help in finding their daughter who went missing after dropping out of school and joining a cult, Disciple quickly accepts the case.
The cult known as “The Framers” is headed by a wacky former professor named Xenophon Baars, who thinks the world is five billion years older then we think it is,and is about to end.
Disciple heads to Pennsylvania where the Framers compound is located to investigate. Along the way he meets a young journalist from Pittsburgh named Molly who is hoping the case of the missing girl will be her big break. Together the two of them, along with the small town police chief work together to try and solve the case.
What I love about “Disciple Of The Dog” is that it’s not your run-of-the-mill, traditional PI novel. Bakker brings a fresh, unique take on a subject that can at times be stale. The main character he creates is unique and very funny. Whether you love him or hate him, you will still be compelled to keep reading.
Though it’s more of a character-driven story, there are still enough twists and turns in the plot to keep any mystery fan guessing until the very end.
I look forward to what should be a great new series. I truly hope the sequel isn’t too far behind.
(Thanks to Aisha Cloud, Publicist at Tor/Forge Books)
Noir Journal reviewer Ben Springer aka "PokerBen" is an avid reader, and fan of the crime and noir fiction genres. When he's not reading, or writing reviews for his favorite websites, he's busy chatting with fellow book lovers on Internet forums and on Twitter. Sometimes he even plays a little poker. He lives in Colorado.
That's it for now.
Coming soon--vintage film noir reviews of Hitchcock's Laura and Rear Window.
ML
