The Demi-Monde: Winter, by Rod Rees

The Demi-Monde: Winter

I’ve often compared fiction to a petri dish. It’s a fertile environment where you can put ideas and characters and situations and see what comes of it. Rod Rees applies my analogy a little more literally than I’m used to seeing in the opening book of his series, The Demi-Monde: Winter. The bulk of the book takes place inside of a computer simulation that was designed to train American soldiers for combat in asymmetrical warfare environments.  The simulation is peopled with the worst, most devious, most vicious figures from history: Reinhard Heydrich, Lavrentiy Beria, and Maximilien Robespierre among others. Then the creators of the simulator stacked the deck by increasing population densities and introducing intractable political, religious, and social beliefs among the inhabitants. The place is designed to be a powder keg. No, that’s not the right analogy because there is always someone fighting someone else. Maybe it’s more like one of those coal fires that can’t ever be put out and is wildly dangerous to even approach.

This idea fascinates me; it’s what drew me to the book in the first place. But I almost stopped reading the book before I’d even finished the prologue because of how it was written. Rees is very fond of short. Punchy. Sentences.

And one sentence paragraphs.

Both of these irritated me and I was glad that the stylistics seem to calm down as the book progresses. I suspect Rees just needed to get into the right tonal groove. It also took me a while to get used to Rees’s tricks with capitalization. A lot of those inflammatory political and religious beliefs programmed into the simulation have far too many capitalism and I had a hard time taking them seriously. Honestly, how are you supposed to take the vile philosophy of UnFunDaMentalism seriously? But I’m glad I stuck with the book because the pay off was completely worth a little writerly eccentricity. And, as I said, Rees does seem to calm down after a while.

So, to the plot. In the prologue, we meet Norma Williams, the President’s daughter, is trapped inside the simulation. Unless she can get to a Portal site, she can’t get back to her body in the Real World. The bulk of the book is narrated by Ella Thomas, the woman sent into the simulation–the Demi-Monde–to rescue Norma. If this were just a rescue mission, it would have been an exciting enough plot. But things quickly start to get weird.

The Demi-Monde exists inside of a powerful computer named ABBA. This computer appears to be so intelligent that it’s clearly got its own agenda, one that doesn’t jibe with its programmers’ agenda. Rees hints at all sorts of mysteries that the programmers aren’t aware of and definitely didn’t include in their original simulation. It gets downright supernatural after a while.

So there’s the rescue mission, the supernatural stuff, cyber-Nazis, and a cyber version of the Warsaw Uprising, all on top of one of the most fantastically interesting and dangerous settings I’ve seen in fiction. I am really looking forward to the next book in the series because this book doesn’t resolve itself at the end. This book is clearly setting up things for the next book. I can only hope that Rees keeps up the good work with his wildly inventive and provocative story.

Portrait of a Spy, by Daniel Silva

Portrait of a Spy

Every summer we get a new Gabriel Allon book. As I read this last one, I was struck by the fact that, every summer, we get a slight variation on a theme. Something awful happens. Gabriel gets reluctantly involved. A scheme is concocted and seems to work very well at first. Things go wrong. Someone is kidnapped and Gabriel has to rescue them. Gabriel gets the crap beaten out of him, but manages to salvage the operation sooner or later. Gabriel wrestles with his guilt and gets over it. Tune in next summer. This is pretty much a complete summary for Daniel Silva’s Portrait of a Spy.

I’ve picked up on a pattern in the Gabriel Allon novels. The whole series covers Gabriel’s life and espionage operations, but in side the big series are small trilogies that show Gabriel dueling with a major villain or a particular group of baddies. The best analogy I can think of is to compare them to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, only much more dour. The whole series was Buffy’s story. Each season had a Big Bag, and most of the episodes had a monster of the week. Portrait of a Spy is a monster of the week novel, as far as I can tell. In this novel, Gabriel–with the help of a very wealthy Saudi woman–go after a sophisticated terror network. There is some excitement, but it’s so formulaic that it’s hard to get worked up about anything. I knew how it was going to end from near the middle of the book.

As I read, I found the title of this book to be an ironic misnomer. We don’t learn much more about Gabriel’s inner life in this novel. We’re consistently told rather than shown how he feels and thinks. I felt very detached from the plot and from the character throughout the whole read, and it left me disappointed at the end. The villains remain shadowy stock figures, too. We’re told that the villains, a cleric-turned-recruiter and a terrorist mastermind, are Islamic fundamentalists who hate the West–but that’s it. In previous novels, Silva devoted page space to explaining why his villains were the way they were and why they were unique and cunning dangers. Silva is capable of better books than this one. I’d really only recommend it to fans of the series. I really hope the next book will inject some life into the series.

Aside from the book’s plot and character problems, the other thing that struck me was the depiction on Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism that is portrayed in the book. There are several sections and speeches that make it sound like another “Pissed Off at Islam” book. Personally, I think there are sects of Islam that are every bit as bad as novelists and politicians would have us believe. I don’t dispute that. What I object to are the novelists and politicians tarring everyone with the same brush and expecting people to just go along with it. What bothers me even more is that there are few attempts to humanize and understand these terrorists. Terrorism is not created in a vacuum. There are reasons to explain this behavior. I think that the only way to stop terrorism is to remove the conditions that give birth to it.

However, Silva makes a point in this novel that I very much agree with. The West’s war on terrorism is probably a forever war. It has the potential to last longer than the Cold War. It’s already been more costly. On the one hand, this is fertile ground for thriller/espionage writers. On the other, it means that we need to start combating terrorism more intelligently. I suppose these thoughts indicate that Silva’s book at least accomplished the goal of making his readers at least think about the situation.

Worth Dying For, by Lee Child

Worth Dying For

Worth Dying For is the second Jack Reacher novel this year. The first one ended on a cliffhanger (though we knew he would be alright because there’s this book). I’m not sure what I was expecting in this book, but in the first pages, we find our hero getting pulled into yet another mystery. He doesn’t even get time to recuperate from the injuries he received in the previous book. There are some familiar elements in this book: the deadline, the mysterious truck that’s at the heart of everything, and the evil local guys who have the whole town under their thumbs.

The best thing about this book is the brilliant use of misunderstanding among all the bad guys. It’s almost farcical the way they behave. Before I get into that, let me back up and talk about the mysterious truck. Throughout the book, we get progress updates about the truck, but are never told what’s in it. The local bag guys, the Duncans, have promised the contents to some very bad men in Las Vegas. When the shipment is delayed, they blame Reacher. The Las Vegas guys (and their bosses and their bosses’ bosses) send men to Nebraska to take care of Reacher. But since they also have orders to eliminate each other, things rapidly devolve into a bloody and hilarious (if you have a sick sense of humor like I do) debacle.

As Reacher methodically takes out all the henchman (an extraordinary number in this book), he also has a side project. Taking pity on the non-evil locals, Reacher starts to investigate the disappearance of a little girl twenty-five years prior to the start of the novel. Everyone is sure that the Duncans had something to do with it, but no one can prove it. Readers who pay attention to the foreshadowing and hint-dropping should be able to figure it out, too.

This secondary plot helps bulk up the book as a whole and gives it a bit of humanity, too. I say that because this is an extremely violent book. All the Reacher books are violent, but there’s a level of cruelty here that surprised me. Reacher always had a reason for doing what he does, and it’s fun to watch him crack skulls now and again. While he has his reasons here, I feel like Reacher is going to a new and disturbing level of violence. It seems like he’s so tired of fighting people that he just wants to end fights so definitively that people will leave him the hell alone. One the one hand, I can (kind of) sympathize with that point of view. But on the other hand, I have to wonder if Reacher needs some therapy or at least a hug.

While this is not the best entry in the series, I sense that this book is a kind of turning point for Reacher. I wonder if he’s starting to realize that his lifestyle (traveling around the country as a reluctant knight-errant) isn’t working anymore. I’m very curious to see what future books have in store for him.

Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville

Ghosts of Belfast

When I picked up Stuart Neville’s Ghosts of Belfast I thought the ghosts described were metaphorical. After all, what former killer for the IRA doesn’t have the “ghosts” of his victims following him around? We meet the protagonist, Gerry Fegan, drinking in a pub, trying to drown out the voices and sight of the quite literal ghosts that have been following him around since just before he got out of Her Majesty’s Maze Prison. There are eleven of them, and they let him know that the only way to get rid of them is to get revenge on the people who caused their deaths.

Gerry’s ghosts and his memories take the reader on a trip through the violent history of the Troubles, while letting us know that the bad times aren’t as over as they seem to be. Catholics and Protestants still hate each other, almost as much as Republicans and Unionists do. As Gerry goes after Republicans and undercover Scots, members of the provisional government and law enforcement try to hunt him down and stop him before Gerry destroys the Good Friday Agreement. This makes Gerry sound like a violent psychopath, but he’s not. In spite of everything, he’s a good man. He argues with his ghosts to try and spare lives, but they are relentless in getting what they want.

The writing in this book is incredible, with a wonderfully drawn cast of heroes and villains (and some characters who are a bit of both). I felt for Gerry. He’s good at killing people, yes, but all he wanted was to stop and go on with his life. Neville gives you the necessary history without letting the pace of the book bog down. (Though I will admit that I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia looking things up. I couldn’t help myself.) Even though I knew roughly what was going to happen, I couldn’t predict where each subsequent chapter would go. I didn’t even know if Gerry would live long enough to get the ghosts their revenge. This an amazing first novel by an author I hope has a long career.

Rembrandt Affair, by Daniel Silva

Rembrandt Affair

In The Rembrandt Affair, by Daniel Silva, shows our hero Gabriel Allon getting back to his roots. After chasing down Palestinian terrorists and evil Russian oligarchs, an old friend asks Gabriel to track down a stolen $45 million painting of Rembrandt van Rijn’s mistress. The book even opens in in Port Navas, Cornwall–where Gabriel hid/lived during the early books, after the death of his family. Not only that, but the book is peppered with appearances from old characters. And even though it was 460-odd pages, I blistered through it yesterday.

After a few chapters to set the scene, an old friend visits Gabriel to enlist his help in tracking down the stolen painting. It takes a little arm twisting by Gabriel’s wife, but soon Gabriel is headed for the Continent to track down the painting by finding out its provenance. Meanwhile, we get to see what’s happening to the painting. For a while, it seems like the painting is just getting further and further away while Gabriel turns up old horrors about Dutch Jews being forced to give up their property before being deported. The provenance trail leads to Argentina, then to a wealth Swiss industrialist with a spotless reputation.

It is a law of fiction that two apparently unrelated plot lines will eventually converge. When they do, a simple (for a given amount of simple) job of recovering a painting turns into an operation involving the intelligence services of three different countries. Nothing ever goes off without a hitch in a Silva novel. The only problem I had was that most of the action took place in the last sixty pages. Everything else was background and buildup. Until the big finale, I felt like Gabriel was taking a back seat to the action. I kept waiting for him to take the lead, but it just wouldn’t happen until almost the end of the book.

I was reminded as I read it of my favorite books in the series, the ones that weren’t just about terrorists. But it wasn’t quite as good as those books. I saw a few things in this book that worry me and make me worry about the future of the series. Is Gabriel going to start taking a more behind-the-scenes role? Are his fighting days really behind him? If so, who’s going to be the new Gabriel? I hope this isn’t the end of the line for my favorite assassin/art restorer.

Blood Oath, by Christopher Farnsworth

Blood Oath

Blood Oath, by Christopher Farnsworth, is a novel that desperately wants to be a movie. The story plays out in what I think of as a cinematic way. There’s tons of action: explosions, car chases, torture, rescue, etc. The characterization suffers. The villains, particularly, are thinly drawn and their motivations are sketchy. This book had such a promising premise, but I don’t think it lived up that promise.

This book is in a similar vein to the National Treasure movies, but with the added bonus of the supernatural. In 1867, a whaling vessel returns from the Indian Ocean with a reduced crew and a newly created vampire. President Andrew Johnson pardons the vampire and has him swear to protect the Union and follow all orders from the President. To make sure the vampire, Cade, follows these orders, Johnson brings in a Madame Laveau to hex him. When I heard about that part, I wondered if Johnson could imagine some of the other men who made it into that office. Hell, Johnson himself was impeached once. Anyway, Cade has faithfully served since that day. Farnsworth constructs an entire alternate history around Cade, complete with evil Nazi scientists, creatures from the Other Side, and Freemasons figuring prominently. The first third of the book, which outlines all this, is the best part of the book. Blood Oath shines here, until the plot starts to derail.

After a Frankstein-inspired terrorist plot is discovered, Cade tracks down his old nemesis, the aforementioned evil Nazi scientist, along with his new Odd Couple partner. Meanwhile, a black ops agent goes off the reservation to try and kill Cade. Confused yet? It got more confusing when I realized that there’s no real reason that Holt, the agent, was gunning for Cade. As for the Big Bad, apparently it’s enough motivation that he’s a mad, evil Nazi scientist. After Cade’s extensive set up, no one else gets much of a back story. The book suffers for it, because most of the characters never rise above even one dimensional. Most of them just seem to exist to piss Cade off.

The plot gets somewhat more on track towards the end, when some of the extra plot threads get wrapped up. But it never lives up to the beginning, unfortunately. The writing style, too, is spare. A surprising number of paragraphs in this book are just one sentence long. That’s right, just one sentence. Farnsworth appears to be going for a punctuated, staccato effect with his short paragraphs. But the device is overused. Plus, Farnsworth is capable of much better writing. Occasionally, I was pleasantly surprised by the sophistication of his observations and the originality of his phrasing.

Blood Oath had a lot of potential, but I was disappointed by the execution. If there is a second book in this series, I don’t know if I’ll read it. I’d have to read a lot of good reviews before I read it.

Daemon, by Daniel Suarez

Daemon

Every now and then, I compliment a writer by saying they write in a cinematic way. They can make the characters and the action so real that, in a reader’s mind, the action plays out like a movie. Daniel Suarez’s Daemon is the most cinematic book I’ve ever encountered. Descriptive without being overwritten, Daemon is full of explosions, double crosses, antagonists and protagonists with murky motivations, more explosions, chases, and incredible fight scenes. I am so looking forward to the sequel.

Daemon is the story of men against technology. Imagine an antagonist that can never be reasoned with, that out thinks you at every turn, that has unknowable goals, and that has access to nearly infinite resources. That’s what our heroes are up against in this book. After the death of an eccentric video game designing billionaire, a series of deadly events is triggered. The only link is that technology–specifically the Internet–played a part. The detectives (and later the FBI) can’t find a human perpetrator. The person everything starts to trace back to has been dead for days before the first murders. At this point, I started to wonder if the plot was going to be something like the one in Jeffrey Deaver’s Blue Nowhere, where a computer-aided murderer goes on a rampage. But it soon became clear that the Daemon’s (the name of the billionaire’s software) plan was much, much bigger than that.

Suarez starts to bring in other characters. In addition to Detective Sergeant Sebeck, who’s investigating the murders, we met the black hat hacker Gragg and white hat hacker Jon Ross, Dr. Phillips from the NSA, the former prisoner turned assassin Charles, the Major (who works for some unidentified alphabet organization), and a would-be investigative journalist who gets all her tips from the Daemon. The book switches back and forth between all these perspectives. On the one hand, the baddies seem to have their act together. Following computer issued orders, they forward the Daemon’s plan–whatever it is. And then on the other hand, the good guys are so disjointed (and occasionally thwarted by people who are supposed to be on their side) that defeating the Daemon seems well nigh impossible.

And then there’s the Daemon itself. As its capabilities reveal themselves, you can’t help but admire the mind that created it (and the author that thought up the idea in the first place). That bit of script thinks of everything. And because it was designed by an ueber-gamer, it’s got a kind of sadistic creativity when it comes to taking on the good guys. The bloody battles that punctuate the book read almost like boss fights in games, but there are no do-overs or respawning.

The ending of Daemon is a clear set up for the next book, Freedom. While some plot threads are wrapped up and you do get some of the satisfaction that comes with finishing a book, the very last chapter reads like a prologue for the next book. Having it read it, I just have to read the next one, if only to see what fresh hells the Daemon cooks up for our heroes.

Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson

Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Even though The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is the last book there will ever be in this series by Stieg Larsson, I thought it was a great end. First, I was glad that it actually had an ending. The second book in the series, The Girl Who Played With Fire, didn’t have one; it just lead right into the third. Second, and unusually for Larsson, it ends on a note of unadulterated hopefulness.

In The Girl Who Played With Fire, Lisbeth Salander (possibly the best character created in the last decade or more) confronted her father, a Russian defector who was protected by the state Security Police. She sustained such terrible injuries that, if this hadn’t been a work of fiction, she would have died. Consequently, she spends the first half of the book in a hospital. Larsson manages to keep the tension level high throughout by switching his perspective between two opposing forces: Salander’s friends and Salander’s enemies.

Mikael Blomqvist, the investigative journalist who was the main protagonist of the first book before Lisbeth stole the show, marshals Salander’s friends together because he knows that there’s no way she’s going to get a fair trial. As a joke, he names their group the Knights of the Idiotic Table, because the person they’re trying to protect is so pig-headed.

On the other side are the security agents who believe that if Salander walks free, everything they’ve been trying to keep secret will come out and that they’ll all serve fat jail sentences. Which is true, because in their zeal to weed out communists and enemies of the state, they broke a lot of laws. Since they’re still working for the government, they have a lot of power. Documents disappear, are stolen, or are forged. Prosecutors are manipulated. Evidence is planted. Just when Blomqvist and his allies get ahead, the Sapo (Security Police) knock them back again.

Throughout the book, these two forces wrestle back and forth. Lisbeth, who refuses to speak to the police and the psychiatrists, has her own plans, too. She doesn’t seem too worried about the possibility of jail time. She’s after revenge, something she does best. After the gore of the second book, it was kind of refreshing to get back to the brainy investigation and double-crossing of the first book.

Everything comes together at the end and it is very satisfying to see everyone getting what they deserved. There were a few times when I doubted the Knights ability to get Salander vindicated. And oh there were some real villains in this book. Those Sapo agents had no scruples about what they’d do. Things look very grim for Lisbeth for a lot of the book.

One thing I didn’t totally understand was Larsson’s characters harping on about the constitution all the time. Whenever someone mentioned that if the Sapo’s secrets come out, it could mean the end of their agency and they freak out about a “constitutional crisis.” I don’t know much about how the Swedish government is constructed. I think it’s similar to the British system. Every time someone mentioned the constitution, I thought about what might have happened if the story had played out in the United States. There would have been some hearings. Some people might have spent some time in jail. But no one would have been as worried about the constitution as the Swedes were.

I’ve read that Larsson had plans for more books after these three. I would have loved to have seen them, because Lisbeth and Mikael are so fascinating to watch. And really, these are some of the best mystery/thrillers I’ve read in a long time. It’s such a shame that Larsson died before he got a chance to see how wildly popular these books became.

The Defector, by Daniel Silva

The Defector

I meant to write about this last week after I finished the book, but I got busy re-reading the Harry Potter series.

The Defector, the ninth book to feature Gabriel Allon, picked up almost immediately after the events of Moscow Rules and features the same antagonist, Ivan Kharkov. Even though Kharkov was nearly ruined in the last book, he still has enough money and influence to kidnap a Russian defector (hence the title) who helped Allon bring Kharkov down. The plot revolves around a promise Allon made to Grigory Bulganov not to let him be buried in an unmarked grave. When Bulganov is kidnapped and taken back to Russia, Gabriel calls in favors and reunites with his old team from the Office–Israeli Intelligence.

The plan hums along until Gabriel’s new wife is kidnapped by Kharkov. The book really takes off at this point, and I had a hard time putting it down so that I could get some sleep.

Earlier in the series, Silva wrote three books that deal with the “unfinished business of the Holocaust.” These are still my favorite books. And the way that Silva starts to mine Russia’s past in this book makes me wonder if another such trilogy is currently unfolding, especially when Kharkov’s obsession with Stalin and Stalinism makes a reappearance. In Moscow Rules, Silva’s plot centered around Russia’s ruthless Wild West-like days after the fall of communism when former state officials and business men scrambled to get their hands on wealth and resources. This book does pick up on that thread, but adds some historical depth. As always when I read a work of fiction about Russia, I always end up feeling sorry for the poor, mixed-up country.

Since this is a thriller and much of the appeal rests on not knowing what comes next, I won’t say any more about the plot. I am curious to see what comes next, though. Will Gabriel face off against Kharkov and, possibly, finish him off? Will he go back to work for the Office? Will a new enemy come out of the woodwork? Such possibilities.

The Reapers, by John Connolly

The Reapers

I hardly ever do this, but I skipped a book in a series. I didn’t read the latest novel in the Charlie Parker series, The Unquiet. It’s sitting on my shelves waiting for me to get around to picking it up. The last John Connolly book I read was Bad Men. But I was trolling one of the local public libraries, and found a copy of The Reapers on the new book shelf. It’s not really a Parker novel, but he makes an appearance. Instead, this is about a couple of Parker’s friends, Louis (a former hitman) and Angel (a former thief). But I always like Louis and Angel, so I figured what the hell.

While the novel is nominally about Louis and Angel, it’s narrated for the most part by Willie Brew, a mechanic that Louis bailed out of debt many years ago. While Willie is a pretty good narrator, it made me feel like I was getting the story second-hand. And I didn’t really like it. It took away some of the tension that I look for from mysteries and thrillers. I think that’s a big part of why I didn’t like this book as much as I liked the earliest Parker novels. The other reason is that a lot of the characters spend their time being introspective rather than acting. I probably came to this book with the wrong expectations. I think what Connolly is trying to do (and has been trying to do) is use his characters to explore the effect that a life of violence has on your soul (or anima or whatever you care to call it). Consequently, it feels like the whole dramatis personae needs a good dose of prozac or something.

What I liked the most about this book was the character descriptions when a new character would come on the scene, like this one of a pair of enforcers:

Unfortunately, there are individuals whose physical appearance comdemns them to a certain path in life. The Fulcis looked liked criminals, and it seemed inevitable that criminals they would become. The possibility of their cheating fate was further hampered by their emotional and psychological makeup, which might charitably be described as combustible. The Fulcis had fuses so short they barely existed. As time went on, a great many medical professionals…attempted unsuccessfully, to balance the Fulcis’ moods by pharmaceutical intervention. What they discovered in the process was quite fascinating, and interesting papers for professional and academic study might well have resulted hand the Fulcis been willing to stay still long enough to cooperate in their formulation. (257)

Connolly still has his magic when it comes to the noir-ish passages. His language is elegant and unusual. And the book was really good in places where he let his inner noir take over. But looking back at the foreshadowing in the first Parker novels, I can see why Connolly has turned introspective in these later books. I’m not sure if I’ll keep reading the series, though. I want more plot in my books, more action, more suspense.