“He, (Ned), told me he was disgusted with the way Ocean Catch was fishing,” Thomasina says. “He didn’t say why but I figured they must have been exceeding quotas or trawling illegally. You know, breaking some sort of sustainable fisheries things. But I was surprised, because he never cared about this stuff before. ‘Let the environmentalists worry about the environment,’ he used to say.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (MAY 11, 2014)

North of Boston is Elisabeth Elo’s debut novel, and to me it is a real winner. It certainly held my interest and I found that, at times, I was unable to put this books down.

Pirio Kasparov, heir to a very successful perfume business which her Russian immigrant parents founded, is our protagonist. sponsored: Royal Vegas Casino – when you make three initial deposits, you receive up to 1200 Canadian dollars for each coupled with 30 free spins. She is a gritty, smart and complex woman. When Pirio’s mother died, the girl was just 10 years old. Her deceased mother’s will stipulates that when Pirio turns 21 years old, she will inherit her mother’s share of the extremely successful business, Inessa Mark, Inc. and that if she wants full ownership, the company would revert to her upon her eccentric father’s death. Pirio has joined the company where she works as “CEO in training.” Scent permeates much of the novel – the scent of perfume, ambergris, herbs, flowers, etc. And the smells of the sea also play an important part in the author’s descriptive passages.

Pirio’s fisherman friend, Ned Rizzo, has recently acquired a lobster boat, the Molly Jones. He bought it for $1.00. Ned had been a star employee at the Ocean Catch Company in Boston, (where much of this tale is set), and then, out of nowhere, he quits. His parting gift, a sort of severance pay, is the brand new lobster boat, a far cry from the usual gold watch. But why would someone, or some corporation, just give away an expensive boat? And why did Ned, after working 20 years on corporate factory trawlers and long liners, switch to catching lobsters? Is it because his new boat is precisely for that purpose, or is the reason more complex?

Ned finds himself short of crew one foggy day and recruits the totally inexperienced Pirio to stand in for the usual experienced fishermen. Pirio, wanting to help a friend, expresses her doubts about working as a pure novice. Ned teaches her to bait traps before they leave the harbor. He also tells her that he will teach her the ropes as the day progressed,  essentially on-the-job training. When a freighter collides with the Molly Jones, the ship sinks quickly, taking Ned with it. The huge freighter moves off, never bothering to search for possible survivors – an oceanic hit-and-run!

Pirio jumps free of the submerging ship and is thrust into the icy cold waters off the Boston coast. She manages to survive for 4 hours in 42 – 48 degree Fahrenheit water, a heretofore feat rarely heard of. Pirio seems to possess a physiological quirk that makes her almost immune to hypothermia. So Pirio can now be entered into Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!  Her miraculous survival causes the Navy Diving Experimental Unit to request that she stop by for testing. They fly her to Florida, their home base, for just that purpose. “We have no idea how that happened, a Navy doctor tells her. “We’ve never seen that in a human before. She becomes sort of a local heroine, called “The Swimmer.”

Pirio is, if nothing else, tenacious. Her instincts tell her that the collision was no accident. Ms. Kasparov simply wants answers: who rammed their boat and why? But the coast guard seems to consider it an unfortunate accident and not a high priority. When she starts asking questions on her own, it’s clear someone is very unhappy with her involvement. After exhausting her inquiries in Boston, she persists in her quest for the mysterious freighter and soon is hot on the trail of a wide-ranging mystery that ultimately takes her far north of Boston, to the whaling grounds of Canada’s Baffin Island.

Pirio meets a mysterious man at Ned’s memorial service who now seems as eager as she to find the truth surrounding the accident…if it was an accident. This man becomes an important figure in the narratve.

To complicate matters further, Pirio spends much of her time consumed with helping her old school friend Thomasina, an alcoholic and gadabout, with her young son, Noah. Noah also happens to be Ned’s son, and Pirio has a strong connection with him as his godmother.

North of Boston, Elisabeth Elo’s novel, is a winner. It is so much more than a mystery. The characters are well fleshed out, the mystery and ominous ambiance are thrilling at times, the storyline is a strong one, the Arctic setting is fascinating, and the supporting cast of characters is interesting.

I highly recommend North of Boston and look forward to reading the author’s future work.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 61 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pamela Dorman Books; First Edition edition (January 23, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elisabeth Elo
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Boston: Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

Bibliography:

• North of Boston (January 2014)

“She knows that she is the obvious — the inevitable — literary agent for this project. And there’s also one very obvious acquiring editor for the manuscript, a close friend who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, no matter how ludicrous, no matter what level of lunatic the author. He used to have impressive success with this type of book, even by some of his less rational authors; there’s apparently a good-size book-buying audience out there that inhabits a space beyond the margins of sane discourse. He’ll be motivated to publish another. Especially this one, about these people.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (APR 6, 2014)

Isabel Reed, a literary agent for ATM, spends all night reading, The Accident by Anonymous, the new manuscript from her assistant Alexis who was very enthusiastic about it. The book has startling information about Charlie Wolfe, a major media figure with major political connections that is hoping to run for office himself. The information in the manuscript, if true, would certainly end Wolfe’s career as it describes a crime he apparently covered up while a student at Cornell University.

Isabel’s agency and the book business in general have not been doing well, and she knows immediately that this new book is one that will make a lot of money for everyone. She also knows she needs to be careful with whom she works with or it could get out from under her control. She therefore goes to one of her best friends, Jeff Fielder, an editor for McNally & Sons, Inc. Soon after meeting with Jeff, Isabel visits her assistant Alexis to make sure she has not given away the manuscript but she finds her dead in her apartment. This leads Isabel to fear that the wrong people may be working to assure The Accident is never published.

The author of The Accident is very intent on assuring the book is published and has gone to many lengths to stay hidden and to assure that the book is given to the right people. Slowly throughout this novel, more and more information is given about the author, his life and what he has done to assure the story about Charlie Wolfe is revealed. Some of what is revealed is not that surprising while others are major twists that only add to making this an even more enjoyable read.

Hayden Gray, a CIA operative apparently working on his own time, is working with Charlie Wolfe to assure that The Accident is never published. He seems willing to take whatever means are necessary to find out who and where the author of the book is and to eliminate all copies of the manuscript. These conflicting objectives and challenges lead Isabel Reed, Jeff Fielder and many others on one long adventurous day in this very entertaining book.

Pavone includes a lot of characters in the book, along with lots of twists and really you need notes to keep track. I normally do this when reading a book I’m reviewing, but if you are not one to do it, you will need to do it for this one or you probably will get lost. Pavone also likes to change the point of view through many of these characters as well. He rewards the reader with a great story if you can keep up, but otherwise you may be frustrated. Pavone also uses his many years in the book business to provide a realistic and interesting portrayal of the people and difficulties they face.

I was fortunate to meet Chris Pavone in Bouchercon in Albany last year, but at the time I did not know anything about him, although I certainly enjoyed my time talking to him. I was impressed though that he, along with a few other authors, were volunteering in the Concierge area where I was also volunteering. I was happy to see later that he won the Anthony for The Expats, his first novel and that I was able to obtain a copy of The Accident in my Bouchercon book bag. (As as a Boucheron volunteer, I obtained a few extra books and I made sure this was one of them.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 98 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown; First Edition edition (March 11, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Chris Pavone
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of another murder story: Death of a Writer by Michael Collins

Bibliography:

• The Expats (2012)  / 
• The Accident (March 2014)

“When you live in a house of mirrors, the only way to stay alive is to believe that every reflection is real.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (MAR 18, 2014)

The Cairo Affair takes place in Egypt and Libya during 2011 with flashbacks to Serbia in 1991. It is set during the period when the regimes of dictators Hosni Mubarek, Egyptian President and military commander from 1981 to 2011, and Muammar Gaddafi, a Libyan revolutionary and the de facto ruler of Libya for 42 years, came to a violent end. The revolutionary events of the “Arab Spring” brought to conclusion various repressive Arab governments. The “Arab Spring” is widely believed to have been instigated by dissatisfaction with the rule of local governments, though some have speculated that wide gaps in income levels may have had a hand as well. Numerous factors led to the protests, including issues such as dictatorship or absolute monarchy, human rights violations, political corruption, (demonstrated by Wikileaks’ diplomatic cables), extreme poverty, and a large percentage of educated, jobless and dissatisfied youth. The storyline of  The Cairo Affair, takes place around the above events…and the events are often current, which makes this novel more interesting.

FLASHBACK: It is September 20, 1991, Sophie and Emmett Kohl are on on their honeymoon and madly in love. “Enthusiasm, imagination and commitment” are the qualities she most admires in her spouse. The newlywed couple choose to travel through Eastern Europe for a holiday. From their TVs at Harvard they’d watched the crumbling of the USSR with excitement. At age 22, Emmett has been to Europe previously, but Sophie has never traveled there. She longs to see Paris, the left bank cafes and the wonderful museums. Emmett tells her that they should go to places where “history is happening.” He wants to take a detour from the tourist attractions of Western Europe and travel to Eastern Europe. He tells Sophie that they would travel “the road less taken”…and she agrees.

They wait until September to make the trip so as to avoid the summer heat and the tourists. After four days in Vienna, where they wander down the broad avenues with their wedding cake buildings and museums, they visit the Sacher, the Stephansdom and the Kunsthalle and the cafes Central and Hofburg. Emmett comments that the city reminds him of Graham Greene’s 1949 British film noir, “The Thin Man.” On the fifth day they board a train to Prague. The couple moves on to Budapest and then they make an unexpected detour to Yugoslavia.

Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the dictator of Yugoslavia died in 1980, leaving the country, a socialist federation, without cohesive leadership. In March and April 1981, a student protest in Pristina, the capital of the then Yugoslav and Serbian province of Kosovo, led to widespread protests by the Kosovo Albanians demanding more autonomy within the Yugoslav federation. After Tito’s death in 1980, tensions between the Yugoslav republics emerged, and in 1991 the country disintegrated and went into a series of brutal wars that lasted the rest of the decade.

It is at this time of enormous tension when Emmett and Sophia choose to visit, knowing full well the dangerous situation in the country. They wind up in the city of Novi Sad where they become involved with an exuberant bunch of 20-something locals who insist that the American couple accompany them to a nearby disco. All their newly made friends are from Vojvodina, the city-state where Novi Sad is located. One such “friend” slams  “Miloševi?, took away our political autonomy. Ours and Kosovo’s. It stinks!” It is in a bar, late at night, when they meet Zora Balasevic, an attractive, hard looking woman in her 40s, who overwhelms the couple by discussing, (a one-sided conversation), Serbian history. “We are happy – you see? – to get rid of the Slovenes, but Croats want to steal our coast. Who pay for these beaches? (sic). Bosnia is next. There will be fire…”

FLASH FORWARD: It is winter 2011. Five politically active Libyan exiles have seemingly vanished from the face of the earth at the same time. Jibral Aziz, is a CIA agent working out of Langley and Cairo, and, with increasing frequency, over the border to Libya. He is a young Libyan American whose father was executed by the Gadhafi regime. Aziz is in Cairo under nonofficial cover, although he meets occasionally with Harry Wolcott, head of CIA activities in Egypt. Awhile back Aziz had concocted a plan, “Stumbler,” whose purpose was to have the US literally high-jack the revolution in Libya, using the exiles and revolutionaries as their front, (sound familiar?). The plan had the CIA turning a popular revolution into a CIA coup, thus giving the CIA complete control over the country’s development…. and, of course, OIL! Oil reserves in Libya are the largest in Africa and the fifth largest in the world. For a variety of reasons, “Stumbler was tabled.” So when it appears someone else has obtained a copy of the blueprints, Aziz alone knows the danger it represents as the players converge on the city of Cairo.

In the winter of 2011, Sophie and Emmett Kohl are stationed in Hungary where Emmet’s official title is “deputy consul.” They had worked/lived in Cairo before the transfer. Sophie, however, doesn’t really have “a life.” She is a 42 year-old lady of leisure, who graduated with honors from Harvard. She has tea with the wives of other diplomats, makes small talk at embassy cocktail parties, has her nails and hair done…and is bored out of her mind. On the evening of March 2, 2011 she meets her husband at a fancy restaurant and proceeds to tell him that she has been having an affair with his boss, Stan Bertolli, who is still in Cairo. She believes she loves him and he has certainly expressed his love for her.

Emmett, in a state of anger and betrayal, confides a long kept secret that had been bothering him. He had met, just once, with the infamous Zora Balasevic, from Serbian days. She is now a spy at the Serbian embassy in Cairo and she attempts to recruit him by blackmailing him. He right out refuses and so Zora backs-off. After the main course at dinner, a thug pops into the restaurant and shoots Emmett in the head in front of his disbelieving wife!

In shock, Sophie flees to Cairo and into Stan’s arms. She doesn’t know why the murder happened or who the perpetrator is. Stan will help her, she thinks. And she is in no shape to return to Massachusetts for Emmett’s funeral. Determined to find out why her husband was assassinated, she follows a trail that leads to the American Embassy in a tumultuous Cairo; to the revolution under way in neighboring Libya; to Langley, Virginia; and to her own ill-fated honeymoon in Eastern Europe.

There are many characters in this story, most with hidden identities, multiple roles, and many betrayals which unravel slowly but inevitably as we view events from several characters’ viewpoints. The fact that the narrative unfolds with a current events background makes this novel appear to be real…and perhaps some of it is. And the portrait the author paints of Cairo really brings the city to life with its colors, smells, people, etc.

Olen Steinhauer’s The Cairo Affair is a complex, well fleshed-out story of the Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, the CIA, a marriage and an affair, “that leaves the reader with the unsettling feeling that, despite all the information won, lost, and put to use, the world of intelligence is no stronger than the fragile, fallible humans who navigate it.” Here allegiances are never clear and outcomes are never guaranteed.

I highly recommend The Cairo Affair…especially for those readers who are fans of Eric Ambler and John le Carré.

NOTE:  There are no “spoilers” here. The review information takes place in the first few chapters of the novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Minotaur Books (March 18, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Olen Steinhauer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Tourist The Nearest Exit

Bibliography:

Cold War Eastern Europe Series:

• The Bridge of Sighs (2003)
• The Confession (2004)
• 36 Yalta Boulevard (aka The Vienna Assignment) (2005)
• Liberation Movements (aka The Istanbul Variations) (2006)
• Victory Square (2007)
• The Cairo Affair (March 2014)

Milo Weaver trilogy:

• The Tourist (2009)
• The Nearest Exit (2010)
• An American Spy (2012)

“So,” Vail said, “William Shakespeare, white bread legend of national and international stature, wasn’t a white church-going Catholic but a black Jewish woman.” Okay, I can see that not sitting well with some. “But that was over four hundred years ago, and my job is to assess the threat as it stands now.”

“Fine. Fast-forward to the present. There’s considerable unrest among a rising minority base in this country. British society is under pressure from an Arab Islamic population that’s growing rapidly. And there’s a substantial population of disadvantaged minorities that are aligned against the white establishment, an establishment that supports the Shakespeare fiction through high-browed elitist organizations like the government backed British Shakespeare Academy.

“Given everything the government’s dealing with, keeping the peace, if proof emerged that Shakespeare was actually a minority woman, it’d almost be too much for the country to bear.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (FEB 6, 2014)

Karen Vail finds herself in a different role and a different country in No Way Out, the fifth book in the series by Alan Jacobson. Karen, an FBI profiler, is sent to England to assist Scotland Yard in a theft of a key document that she finds out may show that Amelia Bassano Lanier, a woman who also happens to have been Jewish and black, actually was the author of all of the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare. Karen, though soon realizes that something is just not correct with Gavin Paxton, the curator of the gallery that owns the Shakespeare document. She suspects that he may have been involved in the bombing attempt to destroy the document. She also doesn’t fully understand why Hector DeSantos is there (as Hector Cruz) and pushes him to tell the truth. He is slow to bring her into his covert operations which only annoys and fuels Karen more. He eventually tells her that she may be right about Paxton as they suspect he is Hussein Rudenko, a terrorist who sells deadly weapons to the Taliban, the Northern Alliance and other terrorist organizations. She is soon pulled into a very much different adventure that finds her traveling all over England and at times being on the wrong side of Scotland Yard that she is there to help. Overall, Jacobson has written an interesting well researched adventure.

There is humor in this generally fast paced book, especially with Karen and her misunderstanding of the “improper” English of the British.

As they reached the second landing, Reid said, “Oh—what was that about the guv’nor being a bad Frisbee player?”
Vail shrugged, “He said he’s been known to throw a wobbly.”
Reid snorted. “It means to throw a tantrum, have a fit.”
Vail stepped outside, into the rain. “Why can’t you Brits just speak English?”

I read some “action thriller” books, but over the years, I’ve been reading less and less primarily since they tend to be a bit too unbelievable and are not as much character based as I prefer. To me, the best thrillers keep me interested from start to finish and are so well paced that I can ignore how fast things occur and how ridiculous some of the circumstances and the character decisions are. No Way Out has a lot of these situations with Karen and Hector doing things that no person, no matter how well trained is likely to do. Jacobson obviously has experience and research on his side to present what appear to be accurate historical and present day accounts of England (only a few guns but a lot of video cameras everywhere!). This is somewhat of a balancing act however in presenting interesting and believable background that could, in the wrong hands, slow down the pace too much. For the most part, Jacobson keeps the story moving although it is a bit uneven at times. This story may not work for everyone but overall I can recommend this book, especially to those that really enjoy action thrillers.

As a first-time reader of this series,  I was missing some back story about Karen Vail, especially since she was really not using her profiler skills that much. I wondered whether any of the US characters were in other books and if I should know about past relationships. Nonetheless, a new reader can follow along and enjoy the story. I certainly enjoyed the book enough to order (at a discount) the first two books in the series so I’ll eventually know if I was missing any key back story about Karen and the other characters.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 56 readers
PUBLISHER:	Premier Digital Publishing (September 17, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alan Jacobson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	In the company of conspiratorial thrillers: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

Bibliography:

• False Accusations (1999)
• The Hunted (2001)
• Hard Target (2012)

Karen Vail Series:

• The 7th Victim (2008)
• The Crush (2009)
• Velocity (2010)
• Inmate 1577 (2011)
• No Way Out (September 2013)

“Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not.

Maybe your next-door neighbor found one of his movies in an old box in her attic and never entered a dark room alone again.  Or, your boyfriend bragged he’d discovered a contraband copy of At Night All Birds Are Black on the Internet and after watching, refused to speak of it, as if it were a horrific ordeal he’d barely survived.  

Whatever your opinion of Cordova, however obsessed with his work or indifferent—-he’s there to react against.  He’s a crevice, a black hole, an unspecified danger, a relentless outbreak of the unknown in our overexposed world.  He’s underground, looming unseen in the corners of the dark.  He’s down under the railway bridge in the river with all the missing evidence, and the answers that will never see the light of day. 

He’s a myth, a monster, and a mortal man.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 11, 2014)

This psychological, genre-bursting/ busting literary thriller took me on a high-speed chase into a Byzantine rabbit hole into the quirkiest, eeriest, darkest parts of the soul. Investigative reporter Scott McGrath is on a quest to exhume the facts of a young piano prodigy’s tragic end. Ashley Cordova, 24, daughter of cult-horror film director, Stanislav Cordova, was found dead–allegedly a suicide. The now reclusive director (30 years isolated from known whereabouts) is the reason for McGrath’s ruined reputation five years ago, and Scott is hungry to turn things around, upside down, and inside out to pursue Cordova again and save himself. And to disinter the “truth,” which itself can be an illusory concept in this cat and mouse thriller.

Along the way, McGrath assembles a motley group of two with their own agendas for chasing after the true story of Ashley’s death. It’s almost unbelievable that Scott would let these potential loose cannons join up with him, a virtual loner, but Pessl gives it cred by keeping the reader in an ever-tunneling and tumbling maze of intellectual, emotional, and horror-filled murk. Whatever mental notes you take as the narrative builds, the ever-widening cast and real, random, red herring, or suspect clues keep you from perseverating too long on the questionable partnerships. Each untangled knot corkscrews around to create ropier more entangled ones.

Mind games and magic, or mind games vs magic, is explored in a way that transports you to the most subterranean reaches of the human psyche. Pessl’s penetrating use of symbolism, allegory, literary allusion, and metaphor saturates the story with a weighty unease and anxiety that reflect her incomparable understanding of the human condition–(not to mention a rarefied channeling of hallucinogenic experiences). In Night Film, mind over matter is a daring question with a dangerous reckoning.

Pessl is obviously familiar with Hitchcock’s work, as well as the films of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrik. Additionally, the iconic 40’s noir films infuse Night Film with oblique shadows and moral ambiguity and imbue it with mixed media from the Internet age. Throw in a little Stephen King to the mix, too. However, Pessl’s use of pastiche is brushed and buffed into her own variegated style, with a voice that is strikingly poetic. She winks at and pays homage more than she mimics.

The gritty and shadowy streets, railway tracks, bridges, and warehouses of New York; the dark silhouette of the Adirondacks against a night sky; mansions sitting like a pit bull on a bluff; the mist obscuring the hand or a face or the gnarled limb of a tree–all Pessl’s ethereal images suffuse the story with an almost sepulchral ambiance. There were times I jumped while reading, certain I heard a cup rattling on a shelf, or saw a light flickering behind a curtain. At other times, my heart melted, especially when Scott would successfully enlist his five-year-old daughter to help his investigation. She was uncannily guileless but aware and persuasive.

The overriding theme can be found in the first lines of the book, a quote from Stanislav Cordova that begins the prologue:

“Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?”

What happens when we break through our cocoon and walk to the edge and back? Are we blinding ourselves to our true nature, and to the nature of others, when we attempt to hold desperately onto those we love?

“Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing down.”

This is at turns comical, disturbing, terrifying, tragic, tender, and spiritually poetic. The pace is breakneck and pitch-perfect electric, despite its florid and exuberant sentences, and the prose is evocative, aphoristic, savvy. It’s relentless and addictive, no time to catch your breath before you are falling through another black hole.

If you prefer a straight-up horror or crime-solving genre, this may not please you. Pessl breaks the rules and the mold, and the narrative is as much philosophy and metaphysics as it is mystery and mysticism. I was chasing shadows and rainbows in equal measure.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 562 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (August 20, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Marisha Pessl
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Bibliography:

• Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006)
• Night Film (August 2013)

“When I think of Nilsen now, how he came and vanished again in the one day, I don’t feel any warmer towards him in the remembering than I did when he was here.  I don’t even feel grateful for what he gave me, because he and his kind kept it from me for so long.  But I do think of the difficult journey he made, and why he made it.  What set him off, he told me, was seeing me being interviewed on television, after Khalil Khazar’s death.  He said he’d watched the interview over and over.  He’d wanted to feel what I felt.  But you cannot feel what another person feels.  You cannot even imagine it, however hard you try.  This I know.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (DEC 28, 2014)

On December 21, 1988, almost exactly twenty-five years ago as I write, Pan American flight 103 from London to New York was brought down by a bomb and crashed over the small town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people aboard and eleven more on the ground. Although others may have been implicated, only one man was convicted of planting the bomb, a Libyan national who was released several years later on compassionate grounds; he died of prostrate cancer in 2012. His death may well have been the trigger for Scottish author James Robertson’s imaginative and morally profound novel; it is certainly the event with which it opens. Not that Robertson mentions real names: the airline, places, and foreign countries involved are left anonymous, and the convicted bomber, his presumed accomplice, and the chief witness are given pseudonyms. But as every detail that Robertson does give — even down to the date, time, and 38-minute duration of the flight — are precisely the same as the Pan Am crash, he is clearly not trying to disguise his intended subject.

Or rather, not his subject. For although he goes into the crash and subsequent investigation in detail, his focus is on aspects of such a story that are not put to rest by a simple verdict. Do law enforcement agencies ever bend the facts to fit a politically expedient narrative? Can vengeance be exacted against a scapegoat who may not in fact be guilty? Is there such a thing as true closure? What happens when a man’s grief turns to an obsession that prevents him from leading a meaningful life? When truth is found, will it stand out like a pristine shining object, or will it be a tarnished affair of accident and compromise?

Alan Tealing is a Lecturer in English at a new university in an old Scottish town (I imagine Stirling). After losing his American wife and six-year-old daughter in the bombing, he devotes his research skills to following the case in every aspect. But some things at the trial convince him that they have got the wrong man, and he takes his doubts public. As the book opens, he is giving a television interview proclaiming that the death of the convicted bomber will change nothing. But it does change something. It brings to his door a former CIA/FBI operative named Nielsen who needs to make peace with his own conscience before dying. What he tells Alan will send him off to Australia, where the novel reaches its climax in the midst of a series of devastating bush fires. The antipodean leap from the first part, entitled “Ice,” to the second, “Fire,” is the one weak point in an otherwise superb novel, requiring that the reader shares Alan’s obsession enough to follow even the slimmest of clues. But his encounters with the two principal people he meets there will propel the story into new depths, and open him to disasters other than his own. The action climax is magnificently handled, but even more magnificent is the quiet settling that follows it, so much more meaningful than a pat solution to some mystery or conspiracy theory. A truly fine book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press (September 10, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on James Robertson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another real event fiction: An Accident in August by Laurence Cosse The Submission by Amy Waldman

Bibliography:

• Close: Stories (1991)
• Ragged Man’s Complaint: Stories (1993)
• Scottish Ghost Stories (1996)
• The Fanatic (2000)
• Joseph Knight (2003)
• The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006)
• And the Land Lay Still (2010)
• Republics of the Mind (2012)
• The Professor of Truth (2013)

“I’ll tell you what this is, it’s two gallons of shit in a one-gallon bucket.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (NOV 17, 2011)

The hardscrabble desert land of New Mexico is the perfect setting for Percival Everett’s new novel, Assumption, mainly because it mirrors the protagonist’s character incredibly well. Ogden Walker is a deputy in the sheriff’s office in the small town of Plata, where he serves after a brief stint in the army. Plata might be where mom Eva Walker lives but Ogden finds her presence not enough of a comfort to overcome his unease with his mixed African American heritage (he is biracial) or his general malaise with what seems to be a dead-end career. He finds it hard to be content hunting for the small fish even if a colleague tells him, “A big fish is fun, I suppose, but so are small ones sometimes. Depends on the water. If I catch a ten-incher in a creek that’s two foot wide, that’s a big fish.”

One day, when an old lady in town is shot dead in her own home, Walker is not sure quite where to begin. His investigations eventually lead him to discover that she might have been part of some hate groups — it’s a hard paradox to serve the very people who might wish you harm. Before this murder is completely resolved, there’s more trouble. The body count rises again, this time through a seemingly unrelated murder on the other end of town.

This incident has Walker chasing down prostitutes in seedy sections of Denver. This mystery snowballs into a third one where a fellow law enforcement agent is shot and again, nobody knows what happened and how. As Everett goes about putting all the pieces together, the writing increasingly reaches a feverish pitch and one wonders if anybody is keeping count as the body count ratchets up easily and steadily. “Warren moved on to the next structure, knowing nothing more than that he was confused,” writes Everett of Ogden’s coworker, Warren Fragua, “More so with each piece of this puzzle, if in fact these were pieces, if in fact this was a puzzle.” That same disorienting sensation works itself on to the pages of this fast-paced novel.

Assumption is full of razor-sharp dialog and Everett does a wonderful job of capturing the gritty landscape but the disparate story threads and sudden detours in the action occasionally make the book trying.

With the twists and turns in the story, the moral of the novel might well be to assume nothing. But it sure feels like Everett goes to great lengths just to make that point. After a while the story is not so much genre-bending as genre-defying. Readers who like their suspense stories resolved well will find Everett’s latest novel frustrating. Even the surprise ending might not help redeem matters in such a case.

On the other hand, readers who love the chase as much as the outcome, will find Assumption entertaining and a fun ride. When one of the characters in the novel points out that the whole mess is “hinky as hell,” they will only be too happy. After all, when it comes to murder mysteries, “hinky” is good.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (October 25, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Percival Everett
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Terror of Living by Urban Waite Crossers by Philip Caputo

Bibliography:

• Suder (1983)
• Walk Me to the Distance (1985)
• Cutting Lisa (1986)
• The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair: Stories (1987)
• For Her Dark Skin (1990)
• Zulus (1990)
• The One That Got Away (1992)
• God’s Country (1994)
• Big Picture: Stories (1996)
• Watershed (1996)
• Frenzy (1997)
• Glyph (1999)
• Erasure (2001)
• Grand Canyon, Inc. (2001)
• American Desert (2004)
• Damned If I Do: Stories (2004)
• Wounded (2005)
• The Water Cure (2007)
• I am Not Sidney Poitier (2009)
• Assumption (October 2011)

“There was no such thing as an escape-proof prison, because to sustain life inside the prison you need support from the outside.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (OCT 31, 2011)

Hell and Gone, another nail-biting read from author Duane Swierczynski is the second volume in the Charlie Hardie Trilogy. In part one, Fun and Games middle-aged Charlie Hardie leads a driftless life as a house-sitter moving continually from gig to gig. Hardie hails from Philadelphia but left his wife and child after a shootout he blames on himself, and which caused the death of his long-time friend. Hardie reasons that his family is safer without him and never recovering from the guilt and depression of a case that went horribly wrong, Hardie finds it easier to take on the low-level stress of house-sitting gig. In Fun and Games, Hardie arrives in L.A. to housesit the remote Hollywood Hills home of an affluent composer. The house is supposed to be empty, but as it turns out troubled Hollywood starlet Lane Madden has taken refuge inside the home and claims that Hollywood star whackers want her dead. Hardie, while skeptical at first, discovers the hard way that Lane is telling the truth.

Part 2—Hell and Gone picks up where Fun and Games left off. Hardie, once more, has pissed off the wrong people. After being drugged and offered the choice of being recruited as a member of “The Accident People,” Hardie, who naturally has refused to be part of the team, is sent for permanent incarceration in the secret underground facility known as Site 7734. Hardie, however, isn’t a prisoner. Supposedly he’s the new warden, and he answers to the nebulous Prisonmaster:

“You call it in, the Prisonmaster has it sent down. He also controls the environmentals—-heat, cooling, water temperature. Without a warden, the Prisonmaster’s been just sending down the bare minimums, enough to keep the facility running. Even environmental requests were ignored.”

“So you want me to talk to this Prisonmaster guy and ask him to turn up the heat?”?

“If you would,” Yankee said with a smile that was meant to be charming but came off as slightly overeager, bordering on homicidal. “And there’s also the food situation.”

At Site 7734, paranoia reigns, and for this reader the hierarchal benefits of being the warden or one of the psychotic guards differs only slightly from being one of the prisoners. While the prisoners are “crammed into poorly lit rusty cages,” everyone lives nervously in poor living conditions. Both sets of people are given the same bland diet; both sets of people are essentially prisoners. The big difference is who gets to wield the batons.

By creating Site 7734, Swierczynski involves the reader in his psychological experiment. We are along for the ride as Hardie, much the worse for wear, tries to figure out and then game the system. Should he accept the role of warden and try to bring some sanity to the horrendously inhuman system? Can he relieve the suffering of a handful of anonymous prisoners who are subjected to brutal dehumanizing treatment on a daily basis? Hardie never was much of a team player:

“Hardie was a born loner. Not only did he not play well with others, he couldn’t fucking stand others.”

Site 7734 is rigged with various “death mechanisms” so that the successful escape of one resident will result in the deaths of those who remain behind. In an incarcerated-lord-of-the-flies scenario, Hardie tries to figure out just what is going on in this hellish dungeon, and the reader also tries to solve the puzzle as jail breaks, underhand deals, back-stabbing and betrayals guarantee that the day-to-day life in Site 7734 will be as evil, disruptive and as paranoid as possible.

While Fun and Games was non-stop action, a roller-coaster ride of explosions, chases and high-tech weaponry, Hell and Gone offers psychological suspense. My first reaction to the book was a shade of disappointment at the novel’s complete change of pace, but after mulling it over and as the story develops, I have nothing but respect for Swierczynski. He brings the action and motion of Fun and Games to a screeching halt and then digs in for long-term head games in Hell and Gone. Then there’s the issue of believability. Given the recent headlines,  secret Hollywood Star Whackers, in Fun and Games Swierczynski stretches the possibilities only marginally. But in Hell and Gone, “The Accident People” are clearly much more powerful than previously imagined, and while the power-brokers of Fun and Games could, theoretically be publicity agents and studio heads on a bloody, maniacal power trip, in this sequel, it’s clear that those who pull the strings can even fuck with the FBI. While Fun and Games Swierczynski offers an action thriller, in Hell and Gone, Swierczynski stretches genre seamlessly and cleverly so by the end of the novel, elements of science fiction appear.

The Third and final novel: Point and Shoot is scheduled for publication in 2012. It’s almost cruel to make us wait….

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mulholland Books; Original edition (October 31, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Official blog for Duane Swierczynski
EXTRAS:	Mulholland books page on Hell and Gone
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Fun and Games

Bibliography:

• Secret Dead Men (2005)
• The Wheel Man (2005)
• Severance Package (2008)
• The Blonde (2007)
• Expiration Date (2010)

Charlie Hardie trilogy:

• Fun and Games (June 2011)
• Hell and Gone (October 2011)
• Point and Shoot (March 2012)

“I understand you’re doubly arrogant. First you thought I wouldn’t figure out your genius scheme, and then when I did, you thought you could deal with me all by yourself. No help, no backup, no arrest teams. Just you and me, here and now. I have to ask, how dumb are you?”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (OCT 22, 2011)

What’s a writer to do when his action hero ages? One option is to go back in time.

In The Affair, Lee Child flashes back to 1997, when Major Jack Reacher (his thirty-six year old protagonist and first-person narrator) was an army MP. Leon Garber, Reacher’s commanding officer, sends Jack to Carter Crossing, Mississippi, to monitor a potentially explosive situation. The body of Janice May Chapman, twenty-seven, has been found with her throat cut. Since the army has a base in the area, there is reason to suspect that a rogue soldier may have committed this and other grisly crimes. Although Reacher is a highly skilled and meticulous investigator, Garber makes it clear that under no circumstances should he conduct his own inquiries. A fellow MP named Duncan Munroe will be on hand to ask the tough questions. Of course, it is laughable to expect Reacher to sit on the sidelines while Munroe does the heavy lifting. 

We have long admired Reacher for his intelligence, toughness, passion for justice, and ability to scrutinize the evidence for subtle clues that the average cop would miss. In addition, he is independent and rarely accepts anyone’s word at face value. As ever, Jack is low-maintenance, carrying no excess emotional or physical baggage. Since he has a clock in his head, what use would he have for a watch? As the weeks pass, Reacher realizes that the Chapman case has significant political and legal ramifications; he will have to watch his back carefully if he is to emerge unscathed.

Lee Child has great fun placing Jack in challenging situations that force him to use his brain power and formidable fighting skills to defeat his opponents. All work and no play, however, makes Jack a frustrated soldier. Therefore, he is delighted to learn that the town’s sheriff, Elizabeth Deveraux, a former Marine, is gorgeous and available. The two gradually get to know one another a little better. Unfortunately, complications ensue that may put a damper on their promising relationship.

Child colorfully depicts life in a rural southern enclave, with its cholesterol-laden food (cheeseburgers, fries, and pies are consumed in alarming amounts), irritating busybodies, and obnoxious louts. The author’s terse, no-nonsense prose style keeps the story moving briskly. As usual, Reacher does not rely solely on his formidable fighting skills. He taps into his network of army buddies to unearth vital information and uses old-fashioned legwork and sharp analysis to unravel a mystery that he was never meant to solve. Child keeps us turning pages with scenes of violent confrontations, a torrid romance, a juicy murder probe, and an intriguing back story that helps explains why Reacher left the army so suddenly and became a solitary wanderer.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 492 readers
PUBLISHER:	Delacorte Press; First Edition (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lee Child (and Jack Reacher!)
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Worth Dying For 61 Hours Gone Tomorrow Nothing to Lose Bad Luck and Trouble The Hard Way The Enemy

Bibliography:

• Killing Floor (1997) /
• Die Trying (1998)
• Tripwire (1999)
• Running Blind (2000)
• Echo Burning (2001)
• Without Fail (2002)
• Persuader (2003)
• The Enemy (2004)
• One Shot (2005)
• The Hard Way (2006)
• Bad Luck and Trouble (2007)
• Nothing to Lose (2008)
• Gone Tomorrow (2009)
• 61 Hours (2010)
• Worth Dying For (2010)
• The Affair (2011)
• A Wanted Man (2012)
• Never Go Back (September 2013)

Movies:

• Jack Reacher (May 2013)

“If I’d known this was our last morning, I’d have rolled over in bed and held her. But of course, if it had been possible to know something like that — if I could have somehow seen into the future — I wouldn’t have let go. And then things would have been different.”

Book Review:

Review by Chuck Barksdale  (OCT 15, 2011)

The Accident, the latest thriller from Linwood Barclay, is an exciting, quick and enjoyable read. The book is told primarily in the first person of Glen Garber, the owner of Garber Contracting, a small home construction company struggling in the current economy in Milford, Connecticut. Glen cannot believe or accept it when the police tell him his wife Sheila caused the death of herself and others while she was parked drunk the wrong way on an off ramp. Although everyone tells him he must accept his wife had a drinking problem, he just refuses to believe she did or would have driven while drunk. Things get only worse, when the other people killed in the accident file suit against him for failure to identify and act on his wife’s drinking problem that led to the accident.

Glen’s life gets even worse when a report on an electrical problem that led to a fire damaging one of the homes he was building indicates that the fire was traced to faulty cheap electrical components. He immediately blames the electrician he uses on the job. However, he begins to doubt that assessment was correct when his most trusted employee and second in command Doug Pinder becomes implicated when similar parts are found in his truck.

As the accusations against Glen’s wife grow, Glen’s 8 year-old daughter Kelly is chastised by the students in her school and no one wants to be her friend. When she has an opportunity to have a sleepover with her only friend, while playing a game, she overhears a strange telephone conversation that her friend’s mother is having while Kelly is hiding in the mother’s closet. The mother finds Kelly in the closet and tells her not to say anything to anyone about what she may have heard. Kelly gets so upset that she calls her father to come pick her up immediately. While Glen is on his way, the friend’s mother leaves the house apparently to meet with someone she was talking to on the phone. That night she is found dead in what at first appears to be an accident but the reader knows that some other person was involved in her death. Later, the friend’s father presses Kelly for information on the phone call which only makes Glen angry and leads to a fight.

As the story progresses, Linwood Barclay provides the reader some insight through third person discussions between Sheila’s friends that are slowly uncovered by Glen Garber. This changing perspective works very well and of course, the key information is withheld from the reader until uncovered by Glen. Along the way, we learn about different things people will do to gain some money in difficult economic times that they probably would not otherwise do. These lead them into dealing with criminals who are not very reasonable or patient and very dangerous.

This book keeps the reader’s interest going from the beginning to the end. Barclay gives some real and false clues along the way and we trust and believe in Glen Garber as he tries to understand why and what happens to his wife. Of course, Barclay has us distrusting people along the way that may be guilty of some things but not everything. This keeps his twists mostly unexpected as he gives them to us along the way and especially at the end.

This is the first book that I have read by Linwood Barclay and I’ll be sure to read some more. He certainly kept me interested in the book from start to finish and kept me guessing to the end. His characters are believable and did not do the stupid or improbable things that often get in my way of enjoying a thriller.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 73 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bantam (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Chuck Barksdale
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Linwood Barclay
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Live Wire by Harlan Coben Fragile by Lisa Unger

Bibliography:

Zack Walker series:

• Bad Move (2004)
• Bad Guys (2005)
• Lone Wolf (2006)
• Stone Rain (2007)

Thrillers:

• No Time for Goodbye (2007)
• Too Close to Home (2008)
• Fear the Worst (2009)
• Never Look Away (2010)
• Clouded Vision (June 2011) (Quick Read)
• The Accident(August 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Last Resort (June 2011)