Nice guys finish last

If you're looking for a satire of the office place, and you don't mind a little ultraviolence (or I suppose if you are seeking ultraviolence, and don't mind the satire) then you should have a look at Duane Swierczynski's Severance Package. The concerns a group of co-workers trapped in a Philadelphia high rise as they find that their boss is planning to kill them all. Turns out they are a civilian intelligence contractor and they are to be liquidated.

So the theme of the book is that the modern office is a Darwinian nightmare, a place where strength weeds out weakness and morals have no place. While it definitely takes a few jabs at the culture of work, as in the case of the striver who thinks his killer is trying to test his loyalty, it quickly moves to an escalating series of sadistic murders. The killer is particularly inventive in this story and particularly cruel. If you are looking for that sort of read, you have found it.

My major complaint about the book is with the core character, the killer. This person is calculating, incredibly astute, amoral, and yet also supposedly given to bizarre affections and delusions. I just didn't believe in the character and I suspect the complications were put in place to allow for the gotcha ending that Swierczynski has in store for the reader.

In both the good and bad sense of the word, the action is cinematic. It flows with rapid speed and well described detail. As in an action movie, the action itself rather the themes take over the story. Swierczynski makes good use of visuals in the book, which isn't surprising as he also works in the comic book world. For the right audience, this book will be a hit, others will be less than pleased.

But I remember everything

Sam Taylor's the Amnesiac tells the story of Jim Purdew and his realization that he cannot remember anything from his college years. His growing fixation on this fact slowly kills his relationship and sends him back to his old college town to try and uncover what he forgot. Along the way Purdew mediates on the nature of memory and identity in a way I found quite engaging.
The novel eventually enters a murky dreamstate, where the lines between reality and imagination are unclear. The story often teeters on the edge of nightmare. Not the nightmare of fright, but of an strangeness, the sense that thinks are just slightly off kilter.This can become rapidly silly, but I think Taylor does a great job with Purdew's wrestling with his memory. I especially liked his use of peculiar manuscripts that Purdew finds and writes himself.

The book lays it on a tad thick with its Phillip Larkin and Jorge Luis Borges references. Labyrinths are everywhere and a character appears who claims to have inherited Larkin's memory! I am poorly read in both artists, so I don't know how someone better read would react, but it might grate.

Taylor well balances his tasks of keeping the story moving and exploring his themes. Purdew, and other characters, are fascinated by detectives and detective fiction. Purdew even calls himself a private investigator at one point. Purdew, towards the end, wonders if the best mystery would merely give clues to the story and end on an quite ambiguous note. This is quite the tease by Taylor, who manages to add some additional tension to the end with this move.

A missed opportunity

Greg Bear's Quantico is a quick, frightening read which is actually a little hard to recommend. It is a cautionary tale of politics, laced with near future science fiction technology aspects crammed into a thriller framework. The first two elements are excellent, while the thriller element is strong, but suffers from the common pitfalls of thrillers.

As I noted earlier, the book paints a disturbing picture of the escalating technology and practice arms race between counter-terror cops and terrorists, as well as the resultant decline in civil liberties. It also has a number of fascinating ideas for future counter-terror weapon systems. For these reasons the book is well worth reading.

On the downside, it is forced to meet the needs of the thriller genre, which include missed opportunities to stop the nefarious plot, our heroes placed in danger and a conclusion with a race against time and even greater dangers (this particular conclusion featured one very cool weapon though.) Now Bear does a decent to good job with this. He successfully cloaks just what is going on for most of the novel, but his climatic action doesn't rise above the pack.

This would have been a far stronger book if it had dialed down the action and focused on how an extended domestic anti-terror campaign affects those that fight it and the society in which it is fought. As it is, thriller readers will want more thrills and those looking for social analysis will flip ahead to get past the action.

There's a roadblock on the corner, they put from time to time

I am in the middle of Greg Bear's Quantico and I wonder why I haven't heard more about it. It is a bleak techno thriller set in the second decade of the 21st century with a US chastened by the Iraq experience and now trying to deal with multiple terrorist organizations, both domestic and international, within its borders.

Maybe it will go horribly wrong in the back half, but so far I find a scary look at a possible future. It is more frightening than the Execution Channel because that one seems a bit more over the top. Bear's protagonists are FBI agents, who have as much trouble from other government agencies as they do from the terrorists. The principal plot concerns biological weapons and involves right wing abortion clinic bombers and radical Islamists.

What I like best is how Bear quietly shows the creeping authoritarianism that results from the counter terror war. Agents make offhand references to the mandatory shutdown systems that police cars can use to stop any vehicle, the official hidden prison system in the US, the increased use of renditions and other little signs that all is not well in the Republic.

Techno-fans will love all his ideas about new training at Quantico, the arms race between criminals and cops that includes robots (like this one?) and of course biological weapons.

I suppose it could be that this is a thriller and Bear is a science fiction author, so his typical audience just wasn't interested. Or it could be it is too dark. I guess I will wait and see.

This is England, this is badass

The New York Review of Books Classics imprint is one of the great treasures of the reading world. Whether it be by introducing new authors to the American reading public or by republishing great out of print works, the NYRB line dramatically increased the average quality of available books. As an added bonus, they have consistently engaging artwork, which you can see on the imprint's blog.

One of their newest releases comes from 1939 England. Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male tells the story of a English hunter who decides to see if he can get a very difficult prey in his sights. While traveling in Poland he lays in wait and stalks an un-named "great man," who is clearly Hitler, and is then captured by said great man's secret police.

The story of is of his escape from and pursuit by the secret police. The story of the hunter becoming the hunted is cliche, but it is so well done here. The un-named hunter takes on the characteristics of both a predator and prey at different times in the story and notes the at time superior predator behavior of his pursuers.

What I found most appealing about the narrator is that it is a reasonable portrayal of a highly competent hero. There are many characters in fiction and thrillers in particular who are above average at everything. They can woo anyone they choose, they can use weapons better than trained soldiers, they can fix any mechanism and they can pick the best pairing of wine with squab.

The un-named hunter knows hunting and the outdoors very well and is at his best in that element. Outside of it, he makes mistakes. Household portrays him as wonderfully even-keeled and with a unaffected nonchalance. In the first few pages, we see a perfectly understated description of his wounds from torture and that tone carries throughout the book.

This story proves that it is possible to write engaging thrillers. I wish more of today's writers would read it and take it to heart.

The Keep

Jennifer Egan's The Keep mixes love, ghost and Gothic stories into a fine literary thriller. While the book is a bit too self-referential to provide true scares or deep surprises, it manages to evoke dread and create suspense while spinning a story about the challenges of connecting with others.

The story begins in an unnamed Central European country where Howard invites his cousin Danny to come stay and work. Twenty years past, Danny was involved in a cruel prank on Howard, but now Howard is rich enough to but and renovate castles. Most of the castle is being repaired, but the keep, where the residing Baroness holds sway, is off-limits. Shortly after we learn all this, we are introduced to Ray, who is writing the story for his maximum security prison writing class.

The hazy line between imagination and reality is constantly tested. Howard believes that his technology free hotel will allow people to experience imagination as it once was, nearly a hallucination. Danny, with technology withdrawal, paranoia and other reasons to be hazy has a number of experiences that hard to explain. Outside of the story, the degree to which Ray is simply retelling or inventing his story isn't always clear. When you have finished reading the book, take a look at a faux promotional site for the hotel at the Keep. It clears up a few mysteries.

Egan balances the elements of Gothic and ghost in the castle story and awkward potential romance between Ray and his teacher quite well. Aside from a coda that doesn't really fit with the rest of the book, this is a stupendous read.

It doesn't mean they're not after you

Thomas H Cook's The Chatham School Affair is one of my all time favorite mysteries. Yes, the plot is excellent, but unlike so many other mystery stories, it is emotionally resonant as well. I saw good notices for his newest, the Cloud of Unknowing, so I gave it a shot. In the book, a mentally ill boy drowns and the mother suspects the father. Complicating matters is that grandfather was a paranoid schizophrenic and the mother's brother suspects she is becoming unhinged as well.

I liked rather than loved this one. Cook provides all kinds of tension with a two track narrative. Long flashbacks are broken up by an conversation, which may be an interrogation, of the brother by the local police detective. This provides the dual tension as we follow the original death and the subsequent tragedies.

Cook is interested in how families can bend and break under pressure and this book is no exception. The inter-relationships of the family members provide a few very good emotional wallops. They don't have the gut punch that the Chatham School Affair's do, but they are still terribly sad.

I've heard that Cook's Red Leaves is an equal to the Chatham School Affair, so I plan to give that one a try.

Deep Storm

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have had great success in the thriller market. Starting with the quite good Relic, they co-wrote a number of stand-alone novels before fixating on the continuing adventures of their Special Agent Pendergast. Over time, I have become disenchanted with this character as he moved from quirky to bizarrely knowledgeable. His is simply too good at physical combat, psychological manipulation and deep knowledge of esoteric subjects.

While I am less enamored of their group work, their solo novels are picking up. Last year I read Preston's Tyrannosaur Canyon, which was quite fun. This weekend I finished Child's Deep Storm which is about as a good a mysterious artifact exploration thriller as you will find. This one succeeds where books like Black Monday fail because of its focus, its deception and its pace.

In thrillers like this one, all that matters is the characters interaction with each other and the chase after the secret/problem/whatever. If we get long asides about the character's past or families the novel loses its pace and our attention.

It is also helpful for the book to hold out its secret for as long as possible, for once we know what is going on, most of the interest is lost. Writers can salvage this with a surprise ending, but generally the last section of these thrillers includes the race against time element. This book has that too, but it also has a spooky ending and enough deception and red herrings to keep you guessing.

Obviously pace is key to prevent you from spotting plot holes and generally ridiculous behavior or ideas. This one keeps up the action with short chapters and lots of action. This doesn't approach literature, but it is great fun.