Agrippa

 Agrippa, is a historical novel by Robert Harris about ancient Rome. While Harris provides some necessary background about the protagonist, the book’s action really began with the murder of Julius Caesar in the Roman Senate on the Ides of March (beware). I had not realized what a power vacuum came about as the result of Caesar’s death. This murder was the cause of the decent of the Roman Republic into a total dictatorship. Octavius was not Caesar’s son, but rather a more distant relative. Since Caesar had only a daughter and not a son, Octavius was the closest male relative who could succeed him, and Octavius did have some legitimate claim to Caesar’s title and property. But he was still a teenager. During his school years, Caesar was a small and sickly child who was often picked on by his classmates. It was when Agrippa saw what was happening and then came to Caesar’s defense, beating up his several assailants in the process, that the relatioship between Agrippa and Octavius began.

Although Agrippa was secretly the illegitimate son of Caesar, but because he was raised as a commoner, he had no real claim to becoming the next emperor. Agrippa was born feet first, and his mother did not survive his birth. The name of Agrippa was assigned to him, meaning “the mother killer.” The horrible name stuck and contributed to Agrippa’s remarkable success as a fighter and he became Octavius’s best and most trusted friend. The book followed the complicated love lives of the subsequent ruling class. Mark Antony and Cleopatra were part of the story. Harris reviewed the many wars that were fought to defend the Roman empire, and in the process Agrippa rose to be the most famous and successful Roman general, although Octavius also claimed credit for most of those victories. Octavius who became known as Augustus was the first emperor. As you read this fast-paced story, you’ll also learn at least a little about the subsequent emperors, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero.

This is a great novel and I hope you love it as much as I did.

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The President's Lawyer by Lawrence Robbins

 Any courtroom thriller that addresses friendship, loyalty, ambition, and just how hard it is to separate home life from work will usually find an audience. John Grisham’s been making a career of it. This 2024 novel is the author’s first. And ‘they’ say, write about what you know. Dr. Google tells us that Robbins is an accomplished trial and appellate lawyer who has argued a couple dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Safe bet that he will give this story considerable authenticity. 

We follow Rob Jacobson, a noted Washington, D.C., litigator who gets quite the case dropped in his lap. He’s been asked to defend his childhood friend who just happens to be one Jack Cutler. That’s as in former President Jack Cutler who stands accused of murdering Amanda Harper - a former White House lawyer and Cutler’s mistress. Yeah, this case will garner its share of public attention. But Rob has known Cutler since childhood. And Rob has a complicated history with Jack and Amanda. How so? Rob had once been romantically involved with Amanda. Makes this case painfully close to home.

Of course, Rob believes Jack to be innocent; hell, Jack passed his a lie-detector test. Rob knows this will be a career-defining case. Like many (most?) politicians, Cutler is equal parts a powerful ego, a volatile temper, a history of serial infidelity, not to mention, some disturbing sexual predilections. As Rob investigates Cutler’s past, he discovers behaviors that will make Cutler a less than sympathetic defendant. Rob is stuck between his oath to the bar or loyalty to a man he has known for most of his life. 

Rob's jumps into the trial as any attorney would: examine the evidence, question witnesses, investigate potential other suspects al while preparing for the impending media circus. Flashbacks reveal the depth of their friendship as well as differences in the big four traits of elected officials: personality, privilege, ambition, power. In the courtroom, damaging evidence snowballs against the former President. So much so that Rob has to wonder if his lifelong friend could really be a murderer.

If you like the back and forth of the courtroom, this book is right up your alley. Robbins clearly understands the courtroom. Exchanges involving jury selection, evidence, cross-examination, and trial strategy seem entirely convincing.  The pace is fast and (for one who has never seen the inside of a courtroom) utterly convincing and authentic. 

A book like this is told basically in two parts: the investigation and the trial. The trial crackles with realism. The investigation, less so as Robbins takes great pains to tell the reader (as well and Rob and Jack) what all is, and will be, happening from the legal side. We are left with competing loyalties driving the story and from over to cover, it’s quite a compelling read in addition to being a well-presented anatomy of a murder trial. 

If you think that Grisham is the best at legal thrillers (and he may well be), he’s got some competition from Lawrence Robbins who has the legal chops and expertise to be a worthy competitor.

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All Secrets Die by Andrew Watts & Dale M. Nelson

Get settled down for a fast-paced technothriller focusing on cybersecurity, espionage, and the consequences when technology falls into the wrong hands. Published in 2024, we follow CIA officer Colt McShane as he confronts a threat capable of exposing virtually every secret in the world.

Catastrophic security breaches release highly sensitive information is released. CIA operations are compromised and data from governments and organizations around the world suddenly becomes available and vulnerable. The attacks are the result of Archon, a techno-terrorist organization that has developed technology that can beat any level of encryption (sounding very James Bond-ish?). The successful instruction of financial institutions, intelligence agencies, governments, and private citizens could throw all international system into chaos.

It’s up to Colt McShane to stop the threat. He plans to infiltrate Archon, capture one of its leaders to force Archon to pony up a way to disable the technology. When Colt reaches his target, the man is suddenly assassinated. Looks like someone else is hunting Archon's leaders. Someone else is interested in controlling or destroying the same technology.

The further Colt digs, he comes across one Ava Klein, a mysterious operative of a covert organization called Trinity. Together, they must unravel the various competing intelligence agencies, terrorists, law enforcement, and enemies all of whom with unclear motives including people within his own government.

A story like this is tough. How to make juggling all those ones and zeros a compelling serious physical threat. Hacking as a tool is less background detail, but now becomes a serious weapon, an unsettling threat to global digital security.

Colt and Ava rush through international locations to combine traditional espionage with artificial intelligence, quantum computing, cyberwarfare, and political manipulation. Plenty of tension, action, and technology.

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Winter Counts by David Heska Wambli Weiden

Y’all know I like crime thrillers. Also like stories set in the American west, especially those that feature Native Americans. Winter Counts is centered on the Rosebud Indian Reservation (in South Dakota). The primary character is Virgil Wounded Horse mixed-race Lakota) who works as a vigilante or “enforcer.” Familiar with the Longmire story lines? Virgil is akin to Hector. 

Crimes on the reservation typically are neglected or subject to a complicated web of tribal and federal jurisdiction limits. When local or federal law enforcement fails, the locals call on Virgil to deliver justice denied.

Reservation issues tend to revolve around property crime, minor assaults, weed, and alcohol. Until heroin starts to find its way in. His fourteen-year-old nephew, Nathan, gets involved with the heroin and is hospitalized after an overdose. Being Nathan’s guardian, (after the death of his sister) Virgil sets out to find the source and how the drug is entering their world. A former girlfriend, Marie Short Bear, re-enters Virgil’s life and gets pulled into the search for the bad guys.

The investigation leads Virgil well beyond the reservation into Denver where he uncovers connections between different criminal organizations. Tracking the trafficking routes, Virgil uncovers connections to reservation politics, tribal power, and the chance that people he knows the reservation contact where he has to confront these outside threats but also his own history of anger, grief, and alcoholism (his own ‘winter counts’) that cloud his own feelings and judgements about his Lakota identity.

The Lakota tradition of winter counts involves pictorial records of significant events remembered from year to year which for Virgil are a metaphor for personal and collective memory that have shaped his life. It all descends on Virgil as he tries to stop the drug trade while dealing with his relationship with Lakota traditions and his own community.

I liked the way Weiden weaved a fast-paced thriller with a thoughtful presentation of Native American life. The reservation is more than a backdrop for the mystery; it is a central character to the story, like the way Pelecanos makes Washington, DC a critical character. On the reservation, systemic injustice, poverty, addiction, racism, cultural identity must be balanced with Lakota resilience, humor, and tradition.

An interesting book. Not perfect. A few secondary characters could’ve been fleshed out more and some of the plot could be paced better. But don’t let that detract anyone from picking this up. Pretty sure I’ll be checking back in with Virgil. All in all, an impressive 2020 debut effort.  

And it checks all my boxes: crime thriller, western, Native American. 

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The Collaborators by Michael Idov

Michael Idov is an established espionage author with special interest in stories based in and around Latvia that involve the CIA, Russian politics, international finance, and cybercrimes. Quite a collection of topics, right? 

The Collaborators (2024) is a contemporary espionage thriller novel that follows two unlikely souls whose tasks eventually converge. Ari Falk is a disillusioned young CIA officer and Maya Chou is a wealthy, troubled twenty-three-year-old born of a Russian-American billionaire father who apparently committed suicide.

The CIA has tasked Ari to Riga, Latvia. His cover is that of a media investor. His job is to support Russian opposition journalists trying to uncover and publicize the activities of bad actors in the Kremlin. His most important asset is Anton Basmanny, a Russian blogger with viral videos that expose corruption among the power elite of Latvia. Anton is abducted following a suspicious diversion of his flight. Ari sets out to determine who ordered the flight to divert and whether Anton is alive. Anton’s abduction gets connected to the suicide of billionaire financier Paul Obrandt. 

Maya refuses to believe that her father killed himself. While investigating his business affairs, she finds evidence that his death is connected to something much larger. Eventually, these two investigations, despite differences in motivations and backgrounds, each quest is destined to intersect. 

Ari and Maya sift through wealthy Russian businessmen, intelligence agencies, political influence operations, and historical events. The investigation skips through Riga, Istanbul, Berlin, Marrakesh, and Moscow; flashbacks gradually reveal the connections between historical relationships and the current conspiracy. In the end, the reader sees this as more that an espionage tale, but a look at how the post-Soviet Russia developed its own political and financial system and the role played by Western governments. 

This seems authentic primarily due to Idov’s personal history with this part of the word. His experience as an editor and screenwriter creates a believable world of intelligence operations, media manipulation, oligarchic wealth, and contemporary Russian politics. Ari is no Bond or Borne. He’s intelligent but also tired and uncertain of the masters on both side of the game. 

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Maya plays well off Ari due to her lack of espionage experience. She goes off half-cocked adding both humor and emotional tension. I will say that this is complicated and layered with all its speaking parts, timelines, and conspiracies. 

Betting many will find this intelligent and entertaining with believable characters, sharp political commentary is a modern view of espionage where social media and finances can be every bit as powerful as humint and weapons. Just keep a notepad nearby to keep track of details.

The Patriarch

 

The Patriarch is the 8^th book in the Bruno series by Martin Walker, narrated by Robert Ian MacKenzie. I’ve reviewed the first seven books in the blog and I expect that I’ll get to the 9^th book whenever my reading queue gets short enough to go there. In this story, there is a further evolution in the ways that Brun is an unusual police officer, the chief of a one-man force in a small fictional village in rural France. Although he has gotten offers to move to Paris where he would be likely to get promotions, he has grown to love the quiet life in this small town, the populace of which Bruno intends to protect. This single man continues to be involved with available women, and in this case, it leads to a complication in the investigation of a crime. Like in past stories, his work leads to him having significant injuries.

An old man from North Africa, who fought on behalf of France in the war with Algeria, was murdered, and the investigation led to new information of one of Bruno’s lifelong heroes, a WWII flying ace, Marco Desaix, the patriarch who becomes accused of hidden and highly suspicious activities against France. Meanwhile, Bruno continues to demonstrate his incredible gifts as a chef and a wine connoisseur. It’s another successful story from the author.

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Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 voices

 I’ve never read a book quite like Hotel Angeline before, and I bet you haven’t either. The subtitle is “A Novel in 36 voices.” Robert Dugoni, one of my favorite authors, lives in Seattle which he described as a particular rich community for both writers and readers. In the foreword by Nancy Pearl, it is asserted, “No two people read the same book, even when it appears to be identical, with the same author, same cover, same publication date, and same pagination." She quoted Paul Auster, “The one thing I try to do in all my books is to leave enough room in the prose for the reader to inhabit it. Because I finally believe it’s the reader who writes the book and not the writer.” Dugoni and Jennie Shortridge were planning to attend a month-long arts festival in Seattle, and they looked for a way to make it more fun for the writers by writing a book together, six authors per day, six days in all. So, 36 authors agreed to participate. There was very limited instruction and structure for the authors, but the intent was for each author to build on what had been written before. Included in the effort was a nonprofit group founded by Dugani called Seattle7Writers.

You might imagine that there were unexpected changes and twists in this story, but the authors had a beginning, a middle and a satisfactory ending. The content was more for young adult reading that being an adult thriller. At any rate, if you’re intrigued by this effort to write a book in such a format, then have at it. It is kind of fun, but if it was not for the structure of the writing, I probably would have panned the content.

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