Force of Nature

Force of Nature may be C. J. Box’s best book yet in the Joe Pickett series. Box presents the usual characters, but this story is mostly about Nate Romanowski, the former special forces guy, now a fugitive from the feds, who has dropped off the grid in the rugged Wyoming back country. The book is built around Nate’s unique world as a master falconer, the teacher of falconry to Sheridan Pickett, Joe’s oldest kid. Nate was trained by the more infamous and even more remote character, John Nemecek. Box lets us know that Nate knows some secrets about Nemecek’s past, and as the result of some new developments, Nemecek is unwilling to risk having those secrets come to light. To say he is ruthless would be a dramatic understatement.

The book opens with three people attempting to take down Nate. They catch him in the middle of a trout fishing stream, resulting in Nate being wounded, shot through the shoulder with an arrow, but the three of them are killed. The boat in which they were riding floats down stream to be discovered – thus begins the action that does not stop until the end of the book. Everyone who has a connection to Nate is at risk, and of course, that puts Joe and the rest of the Picketts directly in the middle. Nemecek is the one character that makes Nate afraid, and throughout the book, Nate assumes that he won’t survive his efforts to protect the Picketts. Box brings in the usual peripheral characters: Joe’s remarkable wife Marybeth and the boob Sheriff McLanahan. McLanahan is up for re-election and Joe is openly supporting his opponent, the competent Deputy Mike Reed. However, McLanahan and Pickett need to cooperate with each other to solve the murders that keep piling up, and cooperation is not easy for either of them. Box also introduces numerous new people including Joe’s new trainee, Luke Brueggemann and Haley (never caught her last name). Haley is a particularly interesting character whose role is fluid and helps keep the intensity of this book rolling along.

In teaching us about falconry, Box talked about the devotion and dedication it takes for a human to develop a partnership with a bird which might just fly away at any moment and never return. He also wrote of the intensity of the falcon, like that of Romanowski and Nemecek: “There’s this condition elite falcons get when all they think about is to fly, fuck, and fight. It’s called  yarak.” (I laughed at that line – a variant of the old joke about the “Rule of the 3 F’s” – but that’s another story for a different format.) This is a very good book – a very fast read. You won’t want to put it down.

Soft Target by Stephen Hunter

Ok, I'm not usually one to post a review of a title previously reviewed here at MRB. West Coast Don posted his take on Hunter's latest, and rather than just drop a comment on that page, I'll add a few other thoughts on Hunter's latest.

1. As best I can recall, Ray Cruz began as a weekend pass for Bob Lee Swagger while he was raking up kills in Vietnam in Time to Hunt. I think he also has a bit of a cameo in Dead Zero, but I could be wrong on that. I don't remember exactly where Cruz and Swagger first meet up.

2. Nikki Swagger, Bob Lee's daughter, shows up in the books that have current day story line. She was front and center in Days of Thunder as a reporter in Bristol, TN. Here, she's working for the Minneapolis news media and ends up on network for her work on the hostage crisis in this book. Nick Memphis, the FBI agent (now assistant Director) appears in some way or another in all the Bob Lee books.

3. My partner in crime here at MRB, West Coast Don, forgot to mention a critical character in this book. The hostage crisis response by the Minnesota State Police is being run by their newly appointed head dog. Colonel Douglas Obobo is the first African-American superintendent of the state police. "He had the gift of inspiration, of making people believe, first in him, second in the mission, and third in the larger program that sustained the mission and in the administrative entity that embraced all." Son of a Kenyan grad student at Harvard and a Radcliffe anthropology major. He himself graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law. Joined the Boston PD as a beat cop then the Homicide Squad. A cop who 'never broke a case, arrested a suspect, won a gunfight, led a raid, or testified in court.' Next up was as the lead investigator for a Senate committee, then ass't commish of the Baltimore PD, chief in Omaha, now in Minnesota. On the fast track to be head of the FBI. He wins people, good and bad, with praise, compassion, and empathy. The days of the neanderthals are gone, he can reason with anybody. Hmmm. Bet you can't guess who Hunter modeled this character after. Read one interview where Hunter was stumbling with the story, but said once he had a handle on the Obobo character, the book wrote itself.

4. If books have a background theme, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Hunter tends to drift pretty far to the right side of the aisle, and this book is about how those who follow a charismatic leader like Obobo are ill prepared for the eventual time where the shit really hits the fan and the neanderthals like Cruz are what stands between good and evil, saying to evil, "you're gonna have to go through me" while the charismatic types grab their coat and run for cover to plot the spin for the adoring media.

5. As WCDon said, this book just flies. Could easily be a cover-to-cover, one sitting read. It's that gripping. It grabs your gut in the first chapter and loosens up only after the last jihadist is dead. Don't forget to breathe. As expected, Hunter stays near the top of my power rotation.

East Coast Don

Layover in Dubai by Dan Fesperman

 One of the biggest of Big Pharma is Pfluger Klaxon. Global, highly profitiable. Sam Keller doesn't really have one of the more glamorous jobs at Klaxon. He's an auditor, a CPA/MBA in his late 20's; on the lookout for anyone, inside or outside, who looks to profit at Klaxon's expense. He's headed for Hong Kong with Charlie Hatcher, a middle manager with a reputation as a partier on Klaxon's nickel. Corporate security asks Sam to keep an eye on Charlie during their 2 day layover in Dubai. Nanette Weaver, the head cop at Klaxon, tells Sam to just keep an eye on him by keeping the company cell phone on so she can get updates at a moment's notice. 

Charlie's rep is accurate. After some seemingly innocent wandering around Dubai clubs and hotels, he takes Sam to the York Club, a front for prostitution. Sam thinks Charlie is being well taken care of and shuts off the phone for a while. Minutes later, Charlie has had his abdomen opened up with an automatic pistol. Lt. Assad, a Dubai detective, draws the case and starts the investigation. Sam calls Nanette to  tell her what happened who then sets her travel for Dubai. She tells Sam to search the body for the Klaxon Blackberry, but the only thing Sam finds is an address book with a few notes in some sort of Charlie-speak shorthand. 

A mysterious 'Minister' contacts Detective Anwar Sharaf, an unlikely sort, unassuming, portly, middle aged, sort of ugly, speaks 5 languages and is reading Crime and Punishment in its original Russian. The sort of cop people underestimate and the worst kind of cop in a corrupt district; an honest cop. Sharaf checks out what happened and Assad ain't happy. Even Dubai cops are protective of their cases. 

Still jet lagged after the initial interview, Sam is dragged from his hotel room and arrested. Sharaf believes Sam is being set up and bluffs his way through booking and takes Sam to the best option for a safe house - his house. Madame Sharaf ain't happy either, but their young 20s-ish daughter, Laleh, in mid-rebellion mode, actually talks with the strange westerner, much to mom's chagrin. It's bad enough Laleh doesn't always cover her hair, but to actually sit on the same couch with a westerner is downright scandalous.  

Sharaf moves Sam from safe house to safe house over the next couple days while he and Sam form a wary and uneasy alliance to track data that links Nanette to Assad to the local US Counsel office, Russian and Iranian mafia, dozens of shopping malls, a battered women's shelter and lifelong friends of Sharaf "who dove the deepest waters with me." That's code for men he can trust (used to pearl dive and participate in a little smuggling as teenagers), because part of his work for the "Minister" is into dirty cops and the political peril they bring to men in power. 

Jack the Librarian works at, well . . . , the local public library. We have the same tastes in authors and I'm trying to get him to contribute to MRB. Having just been in Dubai, I saw this title on the 'We Recommend" rack, sitting on Jack's shelf. I asked Jack what he knew about Fesperman. Said he as an award winning novelist, former journalist in multiple war zones and, most importantly, a staple on his must-read author list, aka in his 'power rotation' as we say here at MRB. Good enough for me. Checked it out and polished it off in less than a week, no problem. Characters you care about, interesting clash of cultures between Sam and family Sharaf, and very well plotted. Not ready for my power rotation just yet, but neither was Hunter or Box or Pelecanos or Stella after one read.

Stay tuned. MRB just may have struck a new vein of gold in vast mine of thriller writers.

East Coast Don

A Drop of the Hard Stuff

This is the third book by Block that we’ve reviewed, the first in a year and a half. It’s the 17th book in the Matt Scudder series which began in 1976 with The Sins of Our Fathers. East Coast Don (ECD) raved about Eight Million Ways to Die from 1982, but I was none to excited about the 1986 title When the Sacred Gin Mill Closes. ECD promised to get back to the Matt Scudder series soon, but he never did. After reading the latest book, I am ready to read more of Block – this was a very good book which definitely held my interest all the way through. The character development was excellent, and Block was masterful in keeping the suspense alive all the way through. I didn’t see the end coming until he wanted me to. Even then, the conclusion was not quite what I expected – very good stuff.

I’ve never read a book quite like this one. We know that Scudder is a flawed former cop, a theme that keeps getting repeated in these books, now working as an unlicensed PI – think of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger, and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. This is a flashback novel to 1962 when Scudder is in his first year of sobriety, and his sobriety is fragile, so he goes to AA meetings every day, sometimes more than one a day. Block obviously knows the inside of AA since he writes about it with such clarity. If you’ve ever been curious about what AA is all about, what goes on in AA meetings, and what the “12 steps” are, then this is the place to learn because Block takes you through the process. While Jack continues to struggle with step one, his grade school chum, Jack Ellery, is working on step nine. Ellery has been sober for a couple years. Step one is “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.” As Block explains through Jack’s struggles, there’s a lot that goes on between step one and step nine, which is “make direct amends” to the people that have been harmed by the alcoholic, “whenever possible, except when to do so would injure to them or others.” Ellery was murdered when he was in the process of making his apologies and reparations for his past sins, and his sins were many, including one murder. Since he himself was such a bastard and had harmed so many people, his attempted amends were not always met with compassion by the people to whom he was reaching out. Ellery’s AA sponsor Greg Stillman decides that the 9th step ought to include a warning against doing anything that would harm the one making amends.

 With the journey into AA, Block also spends a little time on spirituality, including an alleged quote from Buddha, “It is your dissatisfaction with what is that is the source of all your unhappiness.” Those are words of wisdom. This book gets my strong recommendation.

Strange Flesh by Michael Olson

Ugh. This review will be, for me, as much of a struggle as the book.

This guy works for a NYC computer security firm tracking people and data that are trying to remain hidden. Twin Harvard silver spoon trust fund types hire the firm, the guy in particular cuz they all went to Hahvahd together, to find their half-brother (or was it step brother). Said brother is a virtual artist/gamer. Best way to find a virtual gamer is to join the game. The guy joins the game thru a virtual artist's studio (they are trying to perfect the holy grail of virtual reality - just think of the only non-retail genre on the internet actually making any money - to track down the brother. The game is based on some book about the Marquis de Sade and to move through the game the user has to post videos of progressive depravity. 

Like I said, a real struggle. There were probably 4 or 5 times I could have put this down, from the ridiculous plot to the overly technical virtual lingo and technology to the disgustingly obscene scenes in the game or the gorilla videoing necessary to advance in the game. To me, it was like trying to avoid looking at a train wreck, but you just can't. And the ending left me entirely cold. Reader reviews on Goodreads were mostly loved it/hated it. 

Part of the reason I kept going was that I was waiting for my name to come to the top of the wait list at the library; put it down and I had nothing to read. Am I glad I didn't pay for this thing. Thankfully, Alex Berenson's latest arrived last night.

East Coast Don

This is an intriguing and dark story that takes place on Cape Cod, set in the years 1926 and1927. There’s a modern-day quality of Edgar Allen Poe in this book. It’s one of 15 books by Cook and it is an Edgar Award winner. He’s had at least three other books nominated for the Edgar Award, so I’m planning to read more of him. Chatham School is a private boarding school for boys which is run by Arthur Griswald, the headmaster, and the story is narrated by his son, Henry, a student at the school. Elizabeth Channing is the new teacher for the school year, hired by Mr. Griswald on the recommendation of Miss Channing’s uncle, an old class mate the headmaster. She herself started out life with some difficulty, her mother having died when Elizabeth was just four years old. Then, her father, a travel writer, pulled her out of regular school and acted as her only teacher as he traveled the world. There were hints that there was a sexual relationship between father and daughter, but Cook was never explicit about that. When her father died, she was sent to live with her uncle in Africa, so this young and beautiful woman arrived at the Chatham School with a aura of exotic mystery. One of the charms of this book was the quality of the prose, so much better than many of the books we’ve reviewed in this blog. Another charm was the occasional reference to the classics. In the opening paragraph, in his speech to the students at the beginning of the new school year, Griswald quoted Milton: “Be careful what you do, for evil on itself doth back recoil.” Henry, who was writing this book as a memoir, many years later commented on his father’s use of that phrase: “In later years he could not have imagined how wrong he was, nor how profoundly I knew him to be so.” Elizabeth’s father, the travel writer, had written many articles for magazines, but he only wrote one book, and that was about the travels he had with his daughter. Cook quoted from the book regarding a time that Channing’s father had taken her to Capri: “I sat with her in full view of the infamous Salto di Tiberio and spoke to her of what life should be, the heights it should reach, the passions it should embrace, all this said and done in the hope that she might come to live it as a bird on the wing. For life is best lived at the edge of folly.” In the course of spinning his story, Cook also quoted William Blake, Tacitus, and Shakespeare. In response to the dialogue between Henry and Sarah Doyle, the vibrant servant girl who worked at the home of the Griswalds, the author wrote about the struggle we humans sometimes feel between impulse and duty: “For we have never discovered why, given the brevity of life and the depth of our need and the force of our passions, we do not pursue our own individual happiness with an annihilating zeal, throwing all else to the wind. We know only that we don’t, and that all our goodness, our only claim to glory, resides in this inexplicable devotion to things other than ourselves.” Meanwhile, Cook is master at character development, and he skillfully flips back and forth from Henry’s reflections on the events of that year from the perspective of an old man, to what Henry was feeling in the midst of the events as they occurred when he was a young boy. Emotions were stretched to the breaking point, and murders were committed. A trial ensued and punishment was handed down. The effects on all of the characters, the school, and the small village of Chatham were profound and life-long. I am thrilled to have found a new author, and maybe I’ll next try one of his several titles that were Edgar Award nominees, Sacrificial Ground, Blood Innocents, and Blood Echoes.

A Matter of Honor

This is not Jeffrey Archer at his best. The plot was very slow developing, and I thought it was stupid. The powers that be in Russia discovered that the “Czar’s icon of St. George,” a revered piece of artwork that has been hanging at the Winter Palace in Leningrad under heavy guard for 50 years, is a fake. They surmise that the czar must have hidden it just prior to the time the Red Army overran the Winter Palace at the outset of the Russian Revolution. Maybe the czar thought he could use it to bargain for his life and that of his family, but the Romanovs were all executed before he could do so. The story takes place in 1966, and the General Secretary of the Communist party wants the real one found urgently. He has a month before an unexplained deadline, and he is willing to pay almost anything and authorize almost anything in order to find the real one. The Russians deposit $770 million in a NY bank without explanation. It is not until 2/3 of the way through the book when the reader finds out the reason that murders are being committed in the hunt to find the icon. A secret was contained in a document hidden in the icon, a document that indicated that the 1867 treaty in which Russia sold Alaska (“Seward’s Folly) to the U.S. for $7.2 million was really only a 99-year lease agreement, not a permanent sale. The treaty actually had a buy-back agreement which in today’s terms, was a bargain for the Russians. That’s when I quit reading. The characters were interesting enough, although once again, not up to what I’ve come to expect from Archer. The book does not get my recommendation.