How does it feel to be hunted?

Is there any sub-genre more played than the serial killer tale? Hard to think of any. One way around the deadness is to write a serial killer novel that is less about the killer than it is about a suspect/potential victim. Andrew Pyper does that in his riveting Killing Circle.

The book is filled with stories, story tellers and thoughts about stories. The main character, a widower named Patrick has two loves, his son and his writing. Unfortunately his writing has devolved to writing a column about tv shows for a Toronto news daily. He spots an add for a writer's group and decides to join. The group is filled with oddballs including a comic geek, a graphic horror fan, the hot alterna-girl, the mobbed up divorcee and the creepy lecher who guides the circle. One of these people tells a gripping story about a bad man called the Sandman. Soon, they begin to fear that the character is real.

Patrick eventually finds some success which allows for much musing on the nature of writing and reading and what writers have to do to succeed. The killer, it seems, is fascinated by the nature of story and what it means to have a story.

Pyper doesn't let this get too weighty though, he's too wise for that. One of his characters remarks that all the symbolism and ideas in the world won't matter if the story itself is bad. The story here is excellent, with nice shifts in direction and a nice amount of mis-direction as well. There is just enough grisly for those that want it. Pyper doesn't revel in it, but he does threaten it. I also like what he does with Patrick, a character that becomes increasingly unhinged by the idea that he is being pursued by a character from a story.

Huston's new one is a departure

I don't blame you if you have started and put down Charlie Huston's Sleepless. Only my great love of his previous books got me past the challenging beginning? Challenging is a word you normally apply to thrillers, but this one qualifies. Although he does not make it clear until later, he has two narrators. Initially I thought you could tell the difference because one was written in first and another in third person, but it turns out one character is written in both while one is just first person. The occasional use of dates threw me as well. I thought maybe the two voices were the same person separated by time.

The dates caused another problem for me. The book is set in mid-2010 and the world has gone completely to hell. 10% of the population is infected with a disease that prevents them from ever going to sleep. On top of that, global warming has advanced and the economy has cratered. The poor areas of LA are now war zones and air strikes are common. So, I was quite confused. The world went this bad in six months?

Well as it turns out, the hell of the story actually starts in 2008. This book, mind you, was published in 2010. You don't learn when the troubles started until about half way through. Maybe the book was written a few years ago, but if so, why didn't they change the dates?

All this complaining aside, I really enjoyed the book. Huston is working towards more complicated stories with characters beyond his pulpy types (gay, aesthete assassin anyone?) He does keep his noirish attitude though. You can bet the Man is up to no good (is he ever?). There are plenty of inventive story lines, including how important MMORPGs have become in a world where people are afraid to leave their house.

So, if you like well written apocalyptic thrillers where the heroes are threatened more by other people than by the environment. If you are a fan, give it a chance.

A new Boyd is here

I adore William Boyd, one of the finest of Britain's literary writers. His Any Human Heart is just fantastic, right up there with Atonement and Kavalier and Klay in my book. An Ice Cream War is one of my favorite war novels. In his last book, he took a turn into genreland, with his spy novel Restless. His newest, Ordinary Thunderstorms, makes me think he likes the genre fiction. Hey, so does Chabon. This one is a thriller (!) about climate change set in London. Sure, climate change is topical, but I would at least try anything he wrote.

A simple prop to occupy your time

There are certain movies I would never plan to watch, but would happily sit through if I was in a hotel with nothing else to do. I am thinking of most action movies here, or the occasional rom com. They are inoffensive time killers best used to while away lonely or waiting hours. Douglas Preston's lastest thriller Impact fits into that category for books. I wouldn't rush out to get it, but there worse ways to kill time.

Preston ably constructs a story using one of the most common plots, the Race Against Time. A young scientist working at a barely disguised Jet Propulsion Laboratory , a smart college dropout working as a waitress in Maine and Preston's recurring former CIA agent turned former monk turned back into agent begin investigating mysteries surrounding astronomical events. One of them realizes that the Earth might be facing a terrible threat, while a foolish action by one puts all their lives in danger.

The really strange thing is, the book almost ignores the more exciting existential threat to Earth storyline to focus on the danger to a few random people story line. Preston did a better job blending the personal story with the bigger picture in his last book Blasphemy. The disconnect makes the finale feel like an afterthought.

So, as I said, if you find yourself on an airplane and staring at that little map that shows the progress of your flight, this will while away the hours, but that is about all it is going to do.

We can be like they are

Beat the Reaper is written by Josh Bazell, one of those hyper-capable people that might irritate you if they didn't do things so well. While he was in medical school, he came up with an idea for a comic novel about a doctor who is also an anti-healer, a hitman. I guess it helps that he was an English major in college.

Anyway, the book is great fun. We see former hitman Pietro Brnwa, now Dr Peter Brown in the witness protection program, go through his day as an intern in a run down Manhattan hospital. His days are rough enough, but get worse when one of his former colleagues from the Life surfaces and lets his enemies know where he is. Now he has to dodge assassination while saving lives in the hospital.

The book alternates between Peter's life in the hospital and Pietro's life as a hitman. At first, I thought we had some of the dread Killer with a Heart of Gold* here, and to be honest, it is still hard to believe that someone who takes money for murder is going to turn out to be a peachy guy who risks his life to prevent an unnecessary amputation. I accepted it here, because the writing is flashy and hilarious and because there is a life changing event for Pietro that arises from his life of crime.

There is so much to enjoy here, including all sorts of little nuggets about medicine. At the end Bazell puts in a disclaimer that the whole book is fiction, but I like to think there are some fun facts to be enjoyed.

*An example of a book that is killed by the Killer with a Heart of Gold is the Electric Church. Here again we have a supposedly hardened killer, who keeps claiming life is too hard to go easy on people, but who constantly finds reasons to do the ethical thing. Sorry, don't buy it.

Devil of Nanking

I had heard that Mo Hayder was one of the top writers of grisly horror-thrillers, so I was on the lookout for her books. I found a copy of Pig Island and gave it a try. I wasn't impressed. The writing was great and the book was bloated. Friends assured me that The Devil of Nanking was worth it. So I picked it up and it is.

The book ties (a bit improbably, but whatever) a young damaged British woman and an old damaged Chinese man. The man is rumored to be in possession of a film of an atrocity from the 1937 Rape of Nanking. The woman is obsessed with that act, for reasons she doesn't fully understand herself (but the wise reader knows she will learn.) Chasing the man down in Japan, she finds herself wanting work, which she finds as a hostess in a shady nightclub. Shady, because many of the guests are yakuza, Japanese gangsters. As it happens, all of these people are tied together.

While this book is a sort of thriller, it isn't one that keeps you guessing. About a third of the way through, you will be nearly certain how the book will end. That's fine, the punch of the book isn't in the guessing, but in the dread and tension that Hayder creates. Her characters remind me of those that Gillian Flynn creates, that is to say damaged and twisted. Rather than the middle American types we get in Flynn's books, here we have the oddballs of the expatriate community.

The terrible events of Nanking, which remain criminally little known in the West are at the center of the book. Hayder dedicates the book to Iris Chang, the Chinese-American writer whose book on the subject is a must read. Like Hayder's book it isn't very popular in Japan.

Another one I couldn't finish

I tend to like David Morrell,but I couldn't finish The Brotherhood of the Rose. There is a lot of love for this book, on Goodreads, at least, but a few things killed it for me. One was the idea that all the spy agencies got together in the 30s and decided to create safe havens for their agents where no one could harm one another. That sounds nutty today but even nuttier back in those days. Then the writing got me down, including some just plain weird stuff, as in the time when a Chinese assassin refers to "what you Westerners call dignity." What the Chinese have no concept of dignity?

Those annoyances aside, I just didn't care that much about it. There are twists and turns, but it just didn't grip me. Anyway, if you want a tale of assassins fighting their masters, that is what you get.

A book not to give this Christmas

I think at one point I liked Ralph Peters. His Red Army was a good NATO vs. Warsaw Pact novel, told from the perspective of the Soviets. Since he has moved on to a career as a jingoistic political commentator, it is no surprise that his books were heavy on the message. In this case, it was the US might just be able to eek out a win, unless the pusillanimous, pinko pussies in Europe screw it up. His next one, War in 2020, had another message, which was watch out cocky westerners, the tricksy Asian and wicked Muslim are coming to get ya.

Perhaps trading on his Fox News fame, he now has a new one called the War After Armageddon. I think he has a message, which appears to be that the evil Muslims will launch a wave of attacks leading to the creation of a religious state in the United States and the obliteration of ALL Muslims. So there, Islamic terrorists.

He gets points for making everyone, with an exception of those in the military, out as wicked, but loses points for the crappy writing. I suspect this one will be popular with those that like One Second After, the thriller about a particularly unlikely scenario, an EMP attack on the United States.

Neuropath

Scott Bakker is best known for his constructivist fantasy series called The Prince of Nothing. I liked the books at first, but thought they were too slow moving and was more interested in cramming critical theory into fantasy novels than in writing a story. Also, I couldn't stand weepy one of the main characters became.

Still, I think he is quite talented, so I picked up his first thriller, called Neuropath. I didn't make it too far, as the main character drove me nuts and it looked like more of the things are not what they seem. In the fantasy novels it was all about how love, society, religion and so on are social constructs to be exploited by those who see clearly. In this book, love, society, religion and so on are creations of the chemical reactions in our heads, and they can be exploited or something.

Anyway, a bad guy starts making people do evil, hideous things and it turns out the cocky protagonist used to know him, so the Feds bring him in to fight him.

Anyway, wasn't for me.

Blood's A Rover

So I've finished Blood's A Rover and I am happy to say that my initial enthusiasm carried throughout the entire read. I was so sad to see it finish, which is rare for a crime novel. While I tend to think the best crime novels are the equal of the best litfic, there are those that disagree. Genre snobs should consider the book a literary work and note that while its story line is like that of a thriller, the depth of character, the singular use of language and syntax and the emotional depth of the story will win over the more effete readers. Unless of course you can't stand the over the top vulgarity.

Past fans of Ellroy will note many consistencies with his earlier books. There are a pair of men with a complicated relationship who weave back and forth across the good and evil line. There is an unsolved crime scene around which much of the plot revolves, although it is often unclear why. There is the uneasy sense that the power structure is completely corrupt and there is little chance for hope for the good.

If you want to scare yourself this Halloween, but don't like traditional horror stories, you should pick this up. All the conspiracy theories that nagged you about the 60s and early 70s are true. What's more, in Ellroy's dark world, no one is truly innocent. The left is populated by the deluded, the self-important, the idiotic and the ineffectual. The right is populated by a range of terrifying monsters perfectly happy to grind up anyone in their path. The path chosen by the book's few survivors makes perfect sense after the hell they have been through.

My only regret after reading the book is my fear that Ellroy now has no place to go. He has completed his major work started with the Black Dahlia, the first in the LA Quartet and continued with the Underground America trilogy. His story line has been so epic for so long, I am not sure how he goes back to simpler plots or how he would continue this story. My only solace is that his creativity and vision are strong enough to do just about anything.

Death in the ice

I am all for a little mindless monster fiction every once and again. Or every week if it is any good. Lincoln Child co-created one of the great modern monsters with Relic and his latest Terminal Freeze is good fun as well.

This one will immediately remind you of Who Goes There/ The Thing with a far North scientific expedition uncovering what seems to be a saber tooth tiger in the ice. Not long after that a Discovery Channel-like documentary crew helicopters in and takes over the exhibition. They are such total bastards that you wonder if Mr. Child has had some run-ins with Hollywood in the past. A couple are so eggregious that they may as well be wearing I Am Going to Die....Badly shirts.

So it isn't exactly original and it telegraphs some of the bodycount, but it is still a good read. Child knows how to build and sustain tension and he gives just enough detail and background to enrich the story without weighing it down. Some times he moves a little too fast, there is one sub-plot that he seems to have felt needed extra tension, but it felt like a throwaway.

The monster is cool, especially in his gruesome attacks. For most of the book, when asked to describe it, survivors just started gibbering and going mad. I thought he was going to go down the too-terrible-to-describe Lovecraft path, but worry not, he eventually reveals and I think it works well.

Sometimes, I wish I were Catholic, I don't know why

Conspiracies make for great fiction. Like ghosts, vampires and other hidden terrors, they are the sort thing we would like to believe exist, but our rational mind tells us they do not. Conspiracy fiction lets us enter a fantasy world, usually a political one, where the evils of politics are not forced by the realities of compromise, but by wicked forces.

Thanks to Watergate and the collapse of trust in institutions the 70s were a hey day with movies like Three Days of the Condor and the Parallax View. The X-Files ushered in a new era of paranoid drama in the 90s, reviving the notion that the government and the aliens were engaged in a long term struggle of which we caught occasional glimpses. The funny version was Men in Black, the creepier version was Taken.

In the book world, the most successful of conspiracy stories is of course Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. It will be interesting to see if his Lost Symbol creates the same excitement. If successful, we can be sure that tourism will spike in his chosen settings and interest in previously unpopular subjects like the Templars will sky rocket.

It was the Catholic Church as a whole that sat at the center of the Da Vinci Code and its predecessor. And why not? Is there an organization as large, ancient, culturally pervasive and powerful as the Catholic Church? (the Illuminati, maybe?) They have cool commandos in the Jesuits, and their own Majestic-12 in Opus Dei.

Portugese author Luis Rocha explored the mysterious death of Pope John Paul I in his first book, the Last Pope. He has just followed it up with the Holy Bullet, which continues the intrigue. In this book, it is the attempted assasination of Pope John Paul II that drives the plot. This time the CIA, Opus Dei, the British SIS, an Islamic visionary and the unfortunate heroine of the first novel chase after the truth behind the near death of the Polish Pope.

The book can be a challenging read. Rocha writes in a indirect European style that is far more elliptical than the writing you usually find in American novels. The chapter ordering is also out of the ordinary. The chapters set in the current day are in order, but the many chapters in the past are not, which requires close reading.

The book forces you to pay attention, and I appreciate that the book assumes you know something about the Church and European politics. At one point, we see mention of "the German, Ratzinger." Now, hopefully we all know that is the current Pope. Plenty of other thriller writers would contrive some means of relating who Ratzinger is to those who are unsure. I am happy Rocha assumes we read newspapers.

Dark and nasty, but oh so good

I imagine that, at one point or another, most people have experienced the terrible feelings of wrong and hopelessness that come late at night when you cannot you sleep. When dawn comes, a more measured view takes hold. The main character, and in fact most of the characters, in Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects lives permanently in that state. Rejected by her cold, cruel patrician mother in favor of her dead sister and her eventual much younger sibling, Camille is a bundle of neuroses. Her relationship to sex is particularly troubling and it complicates the task that brings her back to her small town Missouri home after years of self imposed exile.

Her editor sends her back to write a story about two girls, one dead and one missing. Camille reluctantly agrees and soon finds herself in combat with her mother, the local police and her former friends. Her hometown's wealthy cattily stalk one another and trample on the weak, all done with smiles. The younger generation is just as bad. Camille's younger sister leads the bullying popular pack of girls that torment the rest of the town's children.

It's the writing and the depiction of the evils of how people treat one another that make the book shine. There is a mystery at the heart of the story, but the end isn't much of a shocker. Like Camille we watch the everday and not-so everyday horrors inflicted by those that can do it, whether parents, friends or neighbors. This one isn't for the whodunit reader, who will be disappointed and potentially repelled, but for those who want a look into damaged lives and communities.

Something for the top of your reading pile

Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind is one of my favorite of the many good literary thrillers. Set in post-war Barcelona, it is a tragic, sad mystery centered on a love story and the love of books. His most recent book, the Angels Game, is a much more conventional than the first book, with a simple structure, a familiar plot and familiar characters. It is a testament to Ruiz Zafon's great strengths as a writer that this book is just as an enthralling as the first book. I may even like it better and plan to re-read Shadow of the Wind to be sure.

The main character, David Martin, works at a newspaper thanks to the help of a wealthy benefactor. He begins to write lurid potboilers for the paper and finds a following. He gains a number of successes as a writer and attracts a mysterious patron who wants him to write a special book. The writing of the book and his purchase of a dark, forbidding house begin a spiral into a tale worthy of his own dark stories. There is much more of course, including the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a few love stories, and tragedies aplenty.

As I mentioned the plot veers closely to familiar territory. At more than one point, I thought I was re-reading another thriller. This isn't the case, although the similarities are often great. I was happy to look past this thanks to the wonderful writing. Ruiz Zafon's prose is densely atmospheric and he sets up a wonderfully gothic story that has its fair share of surprises. The characters themselves provide impressive surprises. While he follows thriller formula in terms of pacing, he uses pace to drive the story and to excite, not to distract from plot holes or the absence of characters.

I used to grouse that this guy was never going to write another book, it took so long between the two. I am happy for him to take this long if the book will be this good.

I should note that much of my enjoyment of the book, originally written in Spanish, is due to what seems to me to be a fantastic translation. The book reads as if it were written in English, a tribute to the skills of Lucia Graves, the book's English translator.

You could have it so much better

So I was pretty excited for Warren Fahy Fragment, a heavily promoted novel about a lost island with a divergent ecosystem, said to be in the spirit of Jurassic Park and the Ruins. Well I read it, and it isn't like those books. Let's start with the Ruins. That book is, I think falsely, viewed as a thriller. Like Smith's only other book, the amazing A Simple Plan, the book is a rich study of torment, both emotional and physical. Fragment is many things, but it is not strong on emotions or characters. The death toll has no apparent impact on the characters other than to make them grimly determined. The book's two rivals, meant to portray different versions of science, are laughably stereotypical, one angelic and one eeeeeeevviilllll.

The comparison to Jurassic Park is also inapt. Crichton always (after Andromeda Strain, at least) put story before science. He let it support and ground the story, but not derail it. Fahy just loves his material too much. He provides paragraph after paragraph of example, theory and idea. The examples are the worst, where one might suffice, he is happy to provide five. He also chops up the action with a bit too much description of the monsters.

When it comes time to tell the story, the book works pretty well. The set-up is great as a reality show science expedition stumbles onto the Lost World, a violent ecosystem similar to that in the Skinner. We get a pair of redshirt holocausts, political infighting and a number of imaginative horrors. The book shifts from adventure mode to political thriller as changed viewpoints lead the surviving characters in a race against time.

If this were a movie (and I am sure it will be), I would say you should Netflix it. As it is, head down to the library for this one. I tore through it, but my pleasure decayed as the book continued. I hope the next one is better.

Scandal in the Asquith Cabinet

Once I find a writer I like, I tend to binge on them. I stop when I have had enough or when I realize I am about to exhaust the oeuvre. In the mid-90s I read all of Robertson Davies and was sad when I all I had left was personal letters and the like. I similarly tore through Patrick Robinson's and Dennis Lehane's crime novels and the Barset Chronicles by Anthony Trollope. Robert Goddard's body of work turned out to be too large to consume all at once. Already in the teens when I started him, I read four or five in a row. loving them all, and then moved on. His books were great, but I guess I had enough of moody, English thrillers for the time.

I had forgotten about him until Stephen King came out calling him his top read for 2008. I picked up a copy of Past Caring late last year and just got to it this week. It was actually even better than I recalled.

Past Caring is lengthy, but that is because it has to fit in the diaries of a long dead British minister as well as the historical research of the less than ideal Martin Radford. Radford is a failed academic and teacher who seems to enjoy drink more than books. A chance visit to Madeira leads him to hunt down the story of Edwin Strafford, a rising political star in 1910 who disappeared from politics for mysterious reasons. As he digs deeper, Radford finds that there are those who wish to keep the story buried along with Strafford.

This book works better than most thrillers because he is interested in his characters as well as his plots. This makes the book twice as long as many similar books, but it is well worth the investment. At many points in the back half, I thought I could tell where the book was going only to have the plot shift in a surprising way. The ending was also true to the characters and did a great job tying it all together.

I think I am going to get on another Goddard jag now.

Blasphemy

Douglas Preston, of the Preston Child writing duo, writes some of the better techno/scifi thrillers out there. His most recent novel Blasphemy is another fun one, but it feels a bit calculated to create controversy. There is a disclaimer in the back about how the book is not anti-religious, since the hero is a practicing Catholic and former monk.

Still, the book involves crazed fundamentalists creating acts of intense mayhem and a crooked television preacher riling up the rubes. The end of the book also calls into question the notion that the book isn't anti-religious.

With this in mind, the book is a good thriller, with red herrings, mounting tension and lots of action. It isn't his best, but it works pretty well.

How Reacher came to be Reacher

Lee Child's Jack Reacher books tend to elicit extreme responses. (Boy, that website is something, note how the smoke moving across the page flows from the cigarette of Child on to the nearly shirtless Reacher actor. Steamy!) Anyway, people either love the hard-boiled prose, the violence and the twisty mysteries, or they view the prose as overly staccato, Reacher as an unrealistic superhuman and the violence as disturbing. I count myself in the former group, but I can see how it isn't everyone's cup of Double Bergamot Earl Grey.

I've just read the Enemy, which is a sort of Reacher Origins story, to take a comic book concept. The year is 1990 and Reacher is still an MP. On New Year's Eve, he is called in to investigate the death of an Army general found naked and dead in a no-tell motel. As soon as Reacher tries to investigate he finds himself stymied and in danger, grave danger. The story shows a little of Reacher's family history as well as the starting point for his departure from the Army.

We learn that Reacher's military unit is a special police unit that is set outside the normal military chain of command, so that it can better investigate anyone up and down the military hierarchy. This helps explain how the lone wolf Reacher of the books set later in his career could stand to work for an organization like the Army.

Child is particularly good at misdirecting the reader, an essential trait in a mystery. While I had a sense of where things were going, he managed a couple of nice surprises. I also quite liked the Army setting. We get a nice does of intra-Army politics and infighting as well as life on the base.

I didn't love the ending I have to admit. I liked the very end, as the darker Reacher finally emerges, but the climatic revelations went on a bit long. The ride beforehand is great though. This book could even be a reasonable entry point to the series as it is more reflective of the style of other books in the series than the ghoulish Killing Floor, the first book in the series.

Lords of Corruption

Africa has long been a setting for thriller/suspense writers. While the likes of Graham Greene and William Boyd have written cautionary tales of the dangers of Western complacency and arrogance in Africa, Frederick Forsyth, John Le Carre and Michael Crichton have set action oriented tales, with varying degrees of political message, on the continent. With Lords of Corruption, thriller writer Kyle Mills joins the latter group with a fast-paced tale involving a mysterious aid agency, a thuggish dicator and a dose of Southern Gothic.

Thanks to a unfortunate choice in his youth, MBA all-star Josh Hagarty can't get a job. So when he is approached by a secretive international aid agency to manage a project in Africa, he vacillates, but eventually decides to go, mostly because it gives him the chance to help his sister escape rural poverty and attend school.

Once in Africa, things rapidly become problematic. The project for which he is hired is beset by tribal arguments, menacing thugs and insufficient resources. Hagarty meets a few Westerners including an old Africa hand who serves as voice of cynical experience and a Swedish aid worker who represents fatalistic optimism.

The book's strength is the rapid pace, the escalating threats and the surprises Mills throws in along the way. There is also some commentary about the efficacy of international aid and the impact of the West on Africa here, but the focus is on the relentless development of the story. It makes for good, topical escapism.

Good, but not great

Thomas H. Cook's The Chatham School Affair is one of my favorite suspense novels. Cook is particularly strong at setting up situations that lead to tragedy and then exploring the long-term damage of the tragedies. Anyone who likes suspense novels should pick it up. After reading it, I knew I wanted more. Cook has written a pile of novels so I picked up Instruments of Night more or less at random. Given my book buying to book reading ratio, I am getting to the book about a year after buying it. While it is good, it is not at the same level of Chatham School Affair.

The book's main character is Paul Graves who writes a series of suspense novels featuring a vile killer who is constantly one step ahead of his pursuer. You can tell something is amiss with our Paul as he is given to imaging dark backstories with every person he sees. He is highly introverted and it comes as no surprise that his books might arise from a horrific event in his past.

We watch him slowly come to terms with this event, as he explores an even older tragedy at the behest of the owner of large country estate. It seems her best friend was murdered in 1946 and the case was never resolved. In order give solace to the victim's aging mother, Graves agrees to imagine what might have happened to the girl.

This twin mysteries, what destroyed Graves and who killed the girl, are developed throughout the book. While I quite liked how the story progressed, I didn't like the resolution of either story. One becomes fairly obvious early on and one felt insufficient somehow. The best part of the book is Graves himself. Although he is not an attractive person, he provides some insight into how writers, or some at least, do their work.