The Fine Line Between a Mystery and a Whiplash Injury

S.G. Redling, Baggage

What’s worse: when a book feels so predictable, you see where it’s headed from page one? Or when the author deliberately coaches you to consider her book predictable, only to pull the rug from under you on page 200? Asking for a friend. That friend happens to be S.G. Redling.

February 17th doesn’t like Anna Ray. That’s the day her father died violently when she was eleven years old. It’s the day her husband hanged himself last year. Anna and her cousin-slash-enabler Jeannie celebrate 2/17 annually by getting blackout drunk—which doesn’t differ much from other days. Except this year, Anna sobers up to discover a cloying, excessively affectionate co-worker has been murdered in a manner clearly targeted at her.

Two lessons I remember from college creative writing classes:

1. The longer you withhold your Big Reveal, the bigger it’d better be.
2. The more adamantly your protagonist believes X on page one, the more surely X gets proven false by the end.

Redling violates both. Her structure is complicated enough that explaining the violations is impossible without spoilers, so bear with me. I’ll try to explain without giving too much away.

Anna, an assistant ombudsman at a secluded liberal arts college, doesn’t want male attention. Her husband hasn’t been dead one year. But nerdy art professor Ellis Trachtenberg doesn’t know that; he keeps pressing her with unwanted gifts and attention. His on-campus murder one snowy midnight feels almost relieving. Until, that is, Anna discovers the killer disfigured Ellis’s remains in ways eerily similar to her father’s death. The police notice, too.

The story unfolds in two parallel paths. In one, Anna narrates her story in traumatized shoe-gazing alternating with bursts of juvenile drunken self-immolation. Despite being nearly thirty and employed, the circumstances surrounding her father’s death keep her from embracing adulthood. Her mother sends regular letters from prison, which Anna hides, unopened, in a shoebox. Jeannie, her cousin and adoptive sister, joins her for celebratory binges. Anna is a functioning alcoholic.

S.G. Redling

The second path flashes back to Anna’s history. In third-person, we approach Anna’s father’s death circumspectly (her husband’s death merits only one late, hasty chapter). A failed artist and raging drunk, nobody apparently feels bad when Pops’ remains appear. But Anna concertedly buries the circumstances, terrified to address them directly. This exclusion becomes pointed when Anna divulges the full truth to her troubled husband—but not us. We’re getting stonewalled.

Redling presumably knows seasoned mystery audiences have certain learned habits. Among these, we pay attention not only to what authors say, but what they omit. As Anna repeatedly discusses her history, particularly her father’s death, we notice she’s remarkably circumspect about the event itself. She never actually specifies the killer. Veteran readers can’t help ourselves: we start a suspect list, and quickly winnow it down to only one likely prospect.

I say she “presumably knows” because Redling subverts those habits. Her Big Reveal is that we’re wrong, the death happened exactly like everyone assumes, our suspect list was a waste of time, and… what? Redling outright lied to readers by omission? I don’t mind red herrings. Reading thrillers without them gets boring. I mind when the false path deposits me, not at some unanticipated conclusion, but back at the beginning.

My doubts began with the first flashback chapter, where Jeannie’s mother shows Jeannie a newspaper clipping about the murder. Jeannie has a suitably horrified reaction, especially to the accompanying photograph, and—chapter break! Without telling us anything about the text or photo, we leave that behind, not returning for 150 pages. That’s where I began feeling Redling was treating us unfairly, withholding information the characters have available from the beginning.

Mysteries thrive on hidden information, I understand. Authors cannot tell us everything from the beginning, because facts must be uncovered incrementally. But this isn’t really a mystery; the procedural element is scanty, the police characters thinly developed, existing to propel the plot and (not kidding) burst through doors in timely manners. The mystery is ancillary to what could’ve been a character novel. Redling just withholds information to deliberately mislead us.

I’ve previously reviewed one S.G. Redling novel, dubbing Damocles one of the best books I read in 2013. That novel’s slow, cerebral pace excited me, spotlighting an element often overlooked in genre fiction. So I had high expectations from this novel. If she’d skipped the mystery, focusing on a promising character destroying herself to evade trauma, this could’ve worked. But as genre mystery, it feels more like a chain yank.

Selling Armageddon By the Yard

Rebecca Belliston, Life (Citizens of Logan Pond, Volume 1)

After the banks collapsed and President Rigsby seized absolute authority, the families around Logan Pond banded together. Five years on, Carrie Ashworth, only twenty-three, is raising her orphaned siblings, growing her people’s garden, and running interference with patrolman (read: stormtrooper) Oliver Simmons. But two new members, in a clan that’s been steady for five years, causes friction, made only worse when a government raid jeopardizes the community.

Rebecca Belliston’s third thriller starts well. (The second volume, already published, is entitled Liberty. Guess where we’re headed.) Belliston avoids stock Tea Party clichés about government overreach, preferring to present engaging characters enacting a complex story. But problems arise as the story progresses. Important story elements begin feeling uncomfortably familiar, and the narrative becomes distinctly preachy. Then, in a sudden Blaze, I realized where my concerns originated.

Carrie and the Logan Pond clan have established their outlaw clan around a suburban cul-de-sac outside Auburn, Illinois. This premise uncomfortably resembles NBC’s ill-fated series Revolution, but Belliston avoids showrunner Eric Kripke’s swinging machismo. Carrie’s extended clan has established an equilibrium of domestic tranquility, growing crops and stealthily evading government involvement. They enjoy a pleasant semi-libertarian balance despite America’s suspended Constitution.

One rainy evening, Mariah Pierce and her son Greg suddenly appear, disrupting the balance. Mariah wants to live peaceably with this extended clan, but handsome, bitter Greg has powerful anti-establishment desires. Notwithstanding his relentlessly bad attitude, Logan Pond evidently wants to decorate the chapel for Greg and Carrie, since they haven’t seen a marriage-aged bachelor in years. Sadly, the young adults get along like gasoline and matches.

I enjoyed the first hundred pages or so. Despite the enforced Edward-and-Bella dynamic between the leads, I found the premise and characters engaging, and wanted to like them. Okay, characters occasionally start unnecessary debates about whether to receive society’s collapse with stoicism or radical rebellion, and the government Belliston proposes seems profoundly impractical. But her engaging characters and sophisticated story make forgiving such lapses comparatively easy.

Rebecca Belliston

Then, somewhere after page 100, things change. Local patrolmen raid Logan Pond, seeking undocumented residents for the work camps. Yes, work camps; Belliston’s World War II metaphors aren’t subtle. Though everyone escapes, they lose property, crops, and sense of security. Suddenly, the once-peaceful community starts talking Greg’s radical language, while shy, moonstruck Patrolman Oliver desperately scrambles to repair his patched relationship with Carrie. The novel’s tone abruptly shifts.

Besides becoming more confrontational, Belliston’s characters begin a sudden tendency toward monologues. Both spoken and internal, these monologues turn on how Logan Pond should confront an intrusive government that disregards rule of law. These diatribes and debates seemed remarkably familiar. Desperate to understand where I’d heard these arguments before, I Googled Rebecca Belliston. Turns out she’s a prominent Mormon with a parallel career composing LDS worship music.

And I realized: the White Horse Prophecy.

Current LDS leadership considers the White Horse Prophecy apocryphal and doesn’t accord it Scriptural legitimacy. However, it remains influential in Mormon political circles. Supposedly, Joseph Smith received a prophecy correlating his nascent church with the White Horse of the Revelation, and foretelling that, one day, the US Constitution would hang “as by a thread.” (Mormons consider the Constitution divinely inspired.) Then the White Horse will ride in, heroically restoring order.

Several public Mormons, Glenn Beck chief among them, embrace the White Horse Prophecy as instrumental to their political and social mores. They see change as corruption, activism as Godlessness, and the Democratic Party as forerunner to biblical Armageddon. This dynamic lionizes outsidership as proof of integrity, and positions religious conservatives as bulwarks against overwhelming secularized rot. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more marginalized you are, the more right you are.

Like Stephanie Meyer, Rebecca Belliston uses little or no religious language in her writing. Yet her spiritual heritage shines through her prose, from the chaste romance and studiously mild language, to the sanctification of outsider status, to the belief in the despised community restoring Nineteenth Century values. Belliston starts well, but quickly becomes predictable. What starts as an engaging character-driven dystopian story quickly unwinds into a semi-religious Libertarian political tract.

I suppose, in writing socially engaged fiction, the author’s beliefs will unconsciously inform the story. Should I write a post-apocalyptic dystopia (hey agents, I have a manuscript), it would reflect my Distributist values. I just wish Belliston had permitted her characters to drive her story, rather than yoking them to her beliefs. Because I really enjoyed this story, right up until the moment the author got in her own way.

Sam Spade Stalks the Massive Data Sprawl

Reece Hirsch, Intrusion

You ever have that experience where you dive into a book, love its ideas, commit yourself to reading… then find the book leaves you really, really tired? This book is like that. Reece Hirsch, a career digital privacy attorney, writes a novel about a digital security attorney taking on Earth’s best international online saboteurs. It melds classic science fiction imagery with gritty noir. It addresses today’s top international security concerns. What could go wrong?

Plenty.

Attorney Chris Bruen knows something’s up when Zapper, America’s biggest search engine, phones after midnight. Seems hackers have stolen Zapper’s nigh-priceless proprietary algorithms. Hackers employed by China’s People’s Liberation Army. Zapper has assembled dozens of Earth’s top security specialists to plug the leak, but they need their lawyer to squelch possible market-destroying damage. Bruen boldly proposes personally visiting Shanghai.

Reviewers can’t make this shit up. A Silicon Valley attorney proposes personally infiltrating the PLA and bringing stolen data home, like Jack Damn Ryan or something. He admits having no plan, only outdated Chinese connections, and sketchy Mandarin. Yet, the next morning, Bruen arrives in Shanghai, tracking the PLA’s most secure cell, while outrunning Chinese counterintelligence. Either he’s a superhero, or he’ll die doing 25-to-life in Qincheng Prison.

Early on, I had a flash. Hirsch describes an assassin tracking a corporate executive through Tokyo’s neon-lit Shinjuku district, and I realized: this is just like William Gibson’s multiple award-winning novel Neuromancer (best opening line ever!). Hirsch’s present-day setting purges sci-fi trappings like “sprawl cowboys” and “wetware,” but advancing technology means that, exactly thirty years on, what Gibson originally postulated as science fiction, has become disturbingly real.

Twenty pages later, looking down a rain-slicked Shanghai streetscape, Chris Bruen has a flash: this looks just like a William Gibson novel! Though he’s right, I jumped, thinking: “WTF? Did Hirsch just intrude and tell me how to perceive his narration?” Yes, son. Yes he did. I forgave this hiccup, figuring anybody can make mistakes once. Sure, writing coaches encourage Padawans to avoid getting between audiences and their narration. But surely everyone’s occasionally gaffed that way.

Reece Hirsch

With Hirsch, though, it isn’t occasional. He lards his prose with long, discursive soliloquies about, say, China’s mix of authoritative government and semi-free-market capitalism, or how China erects cities cheaply and hastily, backfilling with high-tech architecture once jobs arrive. This doesn’t surprise me; I’ve read Xuefei Ren. Chinese inequality particularly bothers Bruen, Hirsch’s viewpoint character. (Hirsch says Bruen lives in San Francisco, Americas second most unequal city, after NYC.)

Seriously, this continues for pages upon pages upon pages. Also, secondary characters discourse lengthily upon IRC protocols, Chinese prisons, and computer security techniques. Popular thriller writers like Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell use technical descriptions to advance stories while convincing readers they’re learning something. But Hirsch doesn’t explain, he lectures, often in explicitly moralistic terms. He doesn’t want to guide audiences, he wants to dictate their responses.

But any response requires audiences accepting extreme unlikelihoods. Once, captured by a PLA cell, Bruen (again, a Frisco attorney) kills two hackers and their PLA handler, despite having a broken arm and possible concussion. Yeah, right. He then steals the hackers’ laptop and, on the return train to Shanghai, commences unlocking the hackers’ lengthy data trail. With a broken arm. Still. Anyone who’s ever broken a limb knows you can’t just power through, not without a splint and fistfuls of Tylenol.

Hirsch simultaneously intensively researches China’s situation, and demands readers accept staggering Hail Marys. In a nation of staggering urban poverty, Bruen never meets anybody who doesn’t speak either English or Mandarin, even in Cantonese-speaking regions. Though China notoriously surveils nearly all visiting foreign nationals, Bruen stakes out a PLA division HQ for two days, then follows key employees home, without attracting visible attention.

What does the bull say?

This story arguably deserves told. Chinese data piracy increasingly overshadows nuclear proliferation or religious extremism as America’s biggest national security threat. In an epigraph, Hirsch quotes two federal data security specialists saying: any corporation which hasn’t seen data piracy isn’t looking hard enough. If it isn’t already, data security will soon become modern life’s biggest, most persistent force of international instability.

One wonders whether Hirsch might prefer writing New Yorker articles over novels. He’s flush with facts and carefully differentiated information, but his story feels anemic. He lectures us eagerly, while Xerox characters describe various jigsaw puzzle pieces which events gradually assemble. Hirsch proves himself a masterful researcher with wonderfully panoptic view; sadly, he proves himself a really lackluster storyteller.

Rot at the Heart of Camelot

David R. Stokes, Camelot's Cousin: an Espionage Thriller

Radio talker and amateur historian Templeton Davis becomes proud owner of an antique briefcase buried half a century ago on a Virginia farm. But when he opens it, he finds code books, a camera full of evidence, and a remarkable secret. Seems this briefcase was once owned by notorious traitor Kim Philby, and Temp Davis finds himself tracking the last missing member of the Cambridge Five.

David R. Stokes, a radio pundit and part-time historian himself, has a really strong idea for a novel here. His motivating incident plays well with his central protagonist, who perhaps resembles Stokes’ idealized self-concept, but is interesting and compelling nonetheless. But Stokes’ debut novel could really use a firm editorial hand, because his strong idea gets lost among strange flowing spandrels and clunky formatting.

If, like me, you slept through World History 101, the Cambridge Five were a ring of Soviet spies recruited in Britain before World War II. Sons of privilege, they had grown disillusioned with Western capitalism and saw the USSR as some utopian experiment. Philby was the most famous, because he was in line to lead MI-6, Britain’s intelligence service. Next most famous must be the Fifth Man, who remains unidentified to this day.

Stokes is only the latest in a string of novelists, historians, and dramatists to posit the Fifth Man’s identity. Like the other four, Stokes’ suspect was born to privilege, and invested decades into the process of accruing power and influence. Then he used that influence to steer important global affairs. And despite the title, Stokes does not suggest the Fifth Man was that popular talk radio punching bag, Jack Kennedy.

Unfortunately Stokes doesn’t come from a fiction background. His prior book, The Shooting Salvationist, was an excellent history of a major, but nearly forgotten, American crime. But historians, like Stokes, butter their bread by expounding details and contextualizing facts. Novelists make choices. What must I include, and what can I omit? What must I explain now, and what can I save for later? What is necessary, and what is subtext?

Stokes doesn’t make such choices. He includes long discursions on historical background, whether it actually advances the story or not. His character backgrounds, spelled out the first time he introduces a character, sometimes spill over several pages. One scene that stands out in my memory, unpacking the secrets of a 1938 Scottish holiday weekend, receives such lengthy background that Stokes needs two whole chapters of exposition to reach the action.

When I say “two whole chapters,” understand: these chapters are short. Scenes sprawl across pages and pages, but those scenes are subdivided, requiring three or four chapters to have a conversation. Assuming, of course, that the characters actually get around to to talking, because Stokes may hold them in limbo for chapters while he expounds historical details or espionage procedure.

Then, while we wait for the story to resume, Stokes’ typography distracts from his exposition. His writing suffers with quirky usage, like misplaced apostrophe’s, misplaced Capitalization, and italics that make no sense in context. Some of the typos suggest Stokes didn’t proofread his own work, or needs a copy checker. Others look like Unicode errors, like Stokes formatted his book in Microsoft Word and then e-mailed it to his publisher.

All this disappointing baggage distracts from Stokes’ story, which is quite good. Temp Davis’ careful unpacking of the Fifth Man lets him make connections with surviving members of the Cold War intelligence community, while lingering ghosts of Soviet paranoia start to intrude on Temp’s life. The conflict, when it pokes out through Stokes’ cloud of language, unfolds with remarkable urgency. I really wanted to like this story.

I just wish Stokes had employed an editor. A little Maxwell Perkins could have helped Stokes turn this raw material into a gripping, Ian Fleming-esque international thriller. I’ve seen writing like this before: Stokes has a strong idea, but he never had anyone acting as a surrogate audience to help clarify his ideas. He assumes that, because his writing makes sense to him, it will make sense to us, too.

Stokes’ story succeeds, where it does, from his unquestionable love for his subject. His background as a historian gives this novel a deep background and remarkable verisimilitude. I enjoy this book when Stokes doesn’t put himself between the story and me. But without needed outside viewpoints to make sure Stokes is communicating with his audience, his words form a barrier between us and his vision. The struggle never resolves itself.

Violence Will Solve the Arab Spring, Apparently

Jac Simensen, Stone the Devil

Billionaire defense contractor Nicholas Donner and his deputy, retired general Frank “Fidel” Thornton, dread the spreading anarchy in the Mideast, post-Arab Spring. When a grieving Iranian-American laborer blames Muslims for the violence surrounding his family, Donner’s party turns him into a walking weapon. Then they coldly point him at the holiest site in the world’s second largest religion. Pax Americana apparently ensues

In his fourth novel, Jac Simensen tries to capture Tom Clancy’s magic in a bottle. But at 182 crowded pages, this feels more like an outline waiting to be completed. Clancy’s shortest novels run three to four times this length, for good reason. Because Simensen’s tale of privatized foreign policy involves so many contexts outside readers’ experience, it just needs unpacked. Stuff happens too fast for readers to feel particularly involved.

Because this book is so short, and events proceed at a headlong pace, I can’t review this book without spoilers. Yet Simensen builds his story on such a lattice of premises, balanced like a Jenga game, that I can’t touch one without disturbing them all. Start with the premise of freelance national security through strategic violence. Governments have a name for non-state actors who use violence to achieve political ends: terrorists.

Donner and his company are meant to be the heroes, or at least the protagonists, of this story. Yet watching them manipulate despondent widower Rusty Samadi into carrying their bomb for them, they exactly resemble al-Qaeda. These are our heroes? Donner also gets by on threats, force, and payment under the table, just like Don Corleone. We never get a horse’s head in bed, but we do get a murdered cat.

Samadi’s grief was, I admit, well written. Simensen spends long early chapters establishing the personal backgrounds of his large ensemble of characters, and when Samadi’s wife dies in front of him, I really felt it. But after seventy pages of slow build, the whole story suddenly accelerates beyond credibility, and huge story blocks get elided. The process of training an English-speaking American to pass as a Muslim happens entirely offstage.

This loss of realistic detail extends to the whole story. Donner’s family realizes he intends something terrible, and does everything possible to intervene. Then they learn he means to kill thousands in their holiest place of worship. This causes them moral qualms that they swallow with remarkable alacrity, going in the space of one sob from wanting to stop it, to accepting it as the best hope for a bad situation.

And I cannot credit, as Simensen does, that when a dirty bomb destroys the Ka’aba in Mecca, global Muslims would blame Iran. Surely Muslims realize that the Islamic world’s most publicly pietistic government would not destroy their faith’s holiest site, planted evidence notwithstanding. Yet Simensen depicts Muslims retaliating against Iran, while America sits and gloats.

Simensen’s Donner even mouths historical inaccuracies to justify his self-righteousness. He claims that Ronald Reagan, with Arab connivance, manipulated petroleum prices to starve the Soviets and end the Cold War. But history says that oil strikes in Siberia, Prudhoe Bay, Nigeria, and the North Sea broke the 1973 OPEC embargo. I can’t tell whether Donner made the error, or Simensen, or even if it’s an error rather than deliberate self-deception.

In lit-crit we speak of the “intentional fallacy.” This means I can’t proclaim to know the thoughts in an author’s head from reading his words. I cannot know that Simensen thinks Yanqui terrorism would restore American dominance, or that the ends justify the cynical Realpolitik means. But because he presents no other alternatives, and ends the story with General Thornton trying to franchise his freelance jackboot diplomacy, it sure seems likely.

When I read the back cover synopsis, I feared I held yet another ethnocentric paean to vigilante diplomacy. It wouldn't be my first. To his credit, Simensen shows enough subtlety of thought to avoid seeming to actually endorse the violence underpinning his plot. But because he runs so short, who can say what he does intend. This is no love song to righteous violence; it’s just a heated rush.

Simensen does himself no favors keeping his hugely complex thriller so short. Because he does too much too fast, we never share his characters’ journey, and thus never see their choices as plausible. Despite his politics (Clancy, too, is a nationalist firebrand), Simensen could have sold this. But he gave me nothing to consider but how unlikely I find his premise, and that’s what I take from the experience.

Edit: After first writing this review, I received an e-mail from the author, in which he said this:

My intent was to show Donner and company as cold blooded terrorists and their cynical actions equal to Islamic extremist's terrorism. (My condemnation of their actions may have been too subtle for that to come through.) I also wanted to explore the proposition that today's ultra-rich may have the capability to take on activities previously only possible by governments, (for evil or good.) To some extent, The Gates Foundation is doing this today.... perhaps it wouldn't be too big a next step for some multi-billionaire, xenophobic, nut-case to decide to directly take on who he/she perceives to be enemies of the United States?

I guess, in hindsight, I can see that. But I really did not get that in the reading experience. I think this, too, contributes to my opinion that the book is too short to accomplish the author's goals, because a longer book that lingered more on the long-term implications might have made that clearer.

27th Precinct Book Club—Serial Slayers

Chelsea Cain, Kill You Twice

Detective Lammers needed a slug of lukewarm precinct coffee to bolster himself before walking into the waiting room. Hargreave was waiting out there. The man was an excellent source of information, but talking to him always took all the courage Lammers could muster. His training officer claimed he’d been allowed to fortify his coffee with bourbon. Sounded like a story.

Ah, well, no sense prolonging it. Lammers took a threadbare chair opposite Hargreave. “Whaddya got for me?”

Hargreave reached into his attaché with an inscrutable grin. “Just one this time. The new one from Chelsea Cain.”

“That ex-hippie who keeps turning up on the bestseller chart?”

“The same one.” Hargreave tossed the book to Lammers. “This is the fifth in her Beauty Killer series, which is a naked rip-off of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter novels. But don’t let that fool you. She’s actually a good writer, with a strong focus on character and psychological nuance. When you read the books, it feels like you’ve read this story before, but somehow, the characters remain new enough to be interesting.”

Lammers riffled idly through the pages. “So this one is a serial killer drama?”

“Don’t focus on the killer,” Hargreave said. “If you treat this like a cop drama, you’ll feel like you’ve read this before, which you have. In terms of the mystery aspect, Cain’s novels are really ordinary and derivative. But if you read this like a character drama set against a crime background, you have a smart, intriguing ensemble who push each other to reveal strange and powerful personalities.”

“I know a little about the story,” Lammers said. “Gretchen Lowell is a sadistic genius, and Archie Sheridan is the cop she’s obsessed with. Though she’s locked up, she has the power in the relationship, and demonstrates it through repeated breakouts. Nobody knows what to do with her, in part because nobody knows who she really is.”

“Bingo,” Hargreave said with a smile. “Have you read them?”

“The first one was a lukewarm market grab, the second was actually damned good, and the third one rambled without a clear sense of purpose.”

Chelsea Cain

“The fourth book?”

“Missed that one.”

“Well, you can jump into this one without it. Cain takes the time to explain what you might have missed. This time, Gretchen is under sedation and restraint, so when a killer uses her sgnature on locals, everyone knows it can’t be her. But then she calls Archie into her cell and asks him to intervene, because she thinks this new killer is after the child nobody knew she had.”

Lammers rubbed his chin. “So the torturer asks a favor from the man she tortured?”

“More than that. The woman who holds power by refusing to open herself up, opens herself up. This makes us wonder who Gretchen really is, and if her expression of ultimate evil might just be a cover to protect herself from something even darker. To put it another way, how can the sins of the past torment a person who has no past?”

“So I take it we start to get a glimpse at who Gretchen Lowell really is.”

“Yes, no, maybe so,” Hargreave said, flashing a theatrical shrug. “Gretchen lies with such intricate aggression that we never know what’s true. Then, as the story goes along, clues conflict with her story, suggesting the killer is no mere psychopath; he may be a time bomb Gretchen herself set running when she realized she’d be at somebody else’s mercy. Especially when the bomb starts to go off, and she demands quid pro quo for information.”

Lammers shook his head. “I don’t care for novelists who make crime so complicated. Most crime is banal—even murder usually has perfectly ordinary motivations.”

“Like I said, you can’t read it like a crime novel.” Hargreave leaned in and tapped the hardback with two fingers. “This is a story about characters who push each other to the limits of human endurance. They expose each other’s weaknesses, but they also provoke each other to go further and do more. Even Gretchen in her psychosis turns out to have superhuman qualities. She just uses them to kill people.”

Lammers tucked the book under his arm. “I think we’ll give this one a try.”

“Good choice,” Hargreave said. “It may be a bombastic, implausible premise, but if you read it the right way, the rewards hit you in subtle ways.”

“Good enough,” Lammers said, rising. “Now get out of my station house, you lowlife pissant.”

Also in this series:
Heartsick
Sweetheart
Evil at Heart
The Night Season

See also:
27th Precinct Book Club—Nicely Noir

A Bad Idea Disguised as a Strange Novel

Ben Coes, The Last Refuge: A Dewey Andreas Novel

Just in time for Independence Day, former political insider Ben Coes presents the most ill-considered praise of militant nationalism in many moons. The author, who has connections to George HW Bush and Mitt Romney, punches every hot-button issue on this year’s electoral slate, and apparently seeks to enflame feelings. I fear, if read by uncritical audiences, this novel will cause irreparable harm to US foreign policy.

Dewey Andreas, ex-Delta, covert assassin, and semi-illicit security consultant, is ready to settle into a life of relative normalcy. Unfortunately, a Mossad officer—the same one who rescued Andreas from Hezbollah insurgents mere months earlier—is captured and spirited to Iran’s most notorious prison. With American agents sitting on their hands, and Israel on the verge of prompting World War III, Andreas goes guerilla to pay his debts at the point of a gun.

But Andreas discovers bigger forces at play. In Israel, the father of the officer he means to rescue has Polaroids, originally meant for Andreas himself, of a nuclear weapon. Painted on the nose-cone, in Farsi: “Goodbye Tel Aviv.” Suddenly, besides rescuing a friend, Andreas must also prevent the most deadly act of terrorism in world history. That isn’t even the final revelation in a book that never stops accelerating.

It’s impossible to separate this book’s story from its politics, and impossible to ignore that I consider its politics flat damn wrong. Coes uses moralistic words like “evil” and “detestable” to describe Iran, while pinching his description of Dewey Andreas from other well-known heroes like James Bond and Jack Ryan. This includes violence so comically choreographed that it would only make sense inside the Matrix.

The narrative implies that Andreas is justified in anything he does, no matter how heinous or brutal, by the exigencies of a hard world. This includes murder, kidnapping, torture, and what I can only describe as acts of war on American and international soil. Though he does this all officially off the grid, he has the tacit blessing and under-the-table financial support of America’s military intelligence apparatus.

Ben Coes

If this guy were real, we’d call him a war criminal. In a prior book, he orchestrated a military coup in Pakistan, and continues to trade on that accomplishment in this book. He admits that, back in the Reagan years, he assassinated foreign nationals on foreign soil. In this book, he uses human shields, hires contract enforcers, and smuggles weapons across international borders. Serbia extradited Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague for less.

Moreover, Coes’ Iran is at best paradoxical. On the one hand, Iranian agents capture an Israeli national on US soil and spirit him to Tehran undetected. On the other hand, Iran’s rulers behave so maniacally that they beg to be played on film by Gary Oldman. They’re prone to petty grudges, incoherent rants, and Fascist shenanigans, including a kangaroo court so transparent that Judge Judy would fling her gavel. And with good reason: this Iran is a circus.

Ask yourself: if your arsenal had only one nuclear weapon, would you announce where you intended to set it off? Would you set it off at all? I venture that you would not. A single nuclear weapon serves best as a threat, when it could appear anywhere without warning. Once you use it, you’ve squandered your strategic advantage. But Coes’ Iranians don’t think that far ahead, because they’re mere hand puppets for Coes’ diatribe.

And some of the violence is so awkward it’s almost funny. At one point, Andreas jumps off a hotel balcony, twists in mid-air, and shoots well enough to hit a target on the balcony he just fled, at night, before splashing down in the hotel pool. Yeah, right. Elsewhere, his two contract enforcers open fire in an elevator, killing five Iranian bodyguards without hitting the diplomat they mean to capture, and even more remarkably, without hitting themselves with a ricochet.

This works, perhaps, because Coes thinks like a filmmaker, not a novelist. If he had a Hong Kong fight choreographer, flight rig, and soundtrack orchestra, his storyline might make sense. But in prose, his audience has time to wonder if everything he describes could work in a Newtonian universe. The sad answer is, it can’t. Then we wonder if his politics are as comically misguided.

Coes’ press biography stresses his connection to Mitt Romney. If Michigan Mittens wants to win this November, he might want to cork Ben Coes’ yap, because a post-Bush electorate will resist such weenie-swinging nationalism. At least I hope they will.

On a related topic:
Operation Ajax—America's First Battle With Iran