Comrade Koba by Robert Littell

Published by The Overlook Press on November 10, 2020

Robert Littell has written some good spy novels, including Company and The Sisters. He’s also written some historical fiction that is less successful. Comrade Koba falls into the latter category.

Comrade Koba imagines a ten-and-a-half-year-old child named Leon Rozental whose father, a physicist, died from radiation poisoning. He’s living with his mother, a Jewish doctor, in Soviet housing. From a hidden room, he watches the NKVD arrest his mother. He later learns that she was arrested with many other Jewish doctors who are accused of conspiring to poison Stalin.

The NKVD seals shut the apartment door. Leon knows of hidden hallways that let him connect with other kids who have been effectively orphaned within the building. He also knows of a hidden tunnel that will let him leave the building unobserved to forage for food. While returning from one such trip, he notices another passageway that takes him to a basement room where he meets a grumbly old man who claims to be Stalin’s aide. As the man, who calls himself Koba, narrates his story to Leon, it quickly becomes clear to the reader that Koba bears a striking resemblance to Stalin himself. In fact, that question of identity arises so quickly that it isn’t a spoiler to mention it here.

So that’s pretty much the story. Leon listens to Koba every day and hangs out with is friends at night. Leon is a clever kid with a winning personality. Koba is Koba: unrepenting, blaming others for Soviet atrocities or blaming the victims who, in his view, had it coming. He certainly isn’t as nuanced as the book’s blurb suggests. The story is interesting and Littell’s dialog is rich and surprising, but it doesn’t add up to much. If the novel is meant to remind us that Stalin was evil and anti-Semitic . . . well, history reminds us of that.

Unlike history, the novel doesn’t ring true. A kid who wanders through tunnels accidentally encounters a Soviet dictator? Stalin secretly likes kids and wants one to write his biography? Stalin — as we learn at the end — has a sentimental side? I might have been willing to suspend my disbelief if Littell had written a meatier novel, but the rewards of Comrade Koba are too few to earn a full recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Galway Epiphany by Ken Bruen

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on November 3, 2020

A priest has an incurable disease that will ravish him before it leaves him dead. He wants to speed the process but it’s bad form for a priest to commit suicide. The priest asks Jack Taylor to kill him. When Taylor argues that murder is a mortal sin, the priest responds, “You have so many sins, will God notice?”

Taylor weighs the decision to kill the priest after a different priest confesses that he intends to kill a satanic child who, for a time, befriended Taylor. Such is Jack Taylor’s life. Those are only two of the plot threads that weave together in A Galway Epiphany.

Children are at the heart of the novel, both as abuse victims and as abusers. One of the villains in the story is burning down buildings, including one that might be occupied by kids. Another villain is a man who beats his six-year-old daughter. Another is a child whose bullying caused another child’s suicide. The remaining villain — the murderous child — is creating fake miracles that the gullible are only too happy to believe.

Taylor makes clear his disgust with a religion that fails to protect children from its priests. Still, he decides to go on something like a religious retreat where he will try to recharge while avoiding contact with nuns and priests. To the nun in charge, avoiding contact seems like a fine idea.

Taylor’s relationship with Catholicism is both strained and ambiguous. He is inclined to believe that all miracles are fake until he experiences one of his own. He’s hit by a car, wakes up from a coma with no serious injuries, and actually feels better than he has in years — until the novel’s end. Rarely does a Jack Taylor novel end well for Taylor. This one is no exception. Taylor might actually be on the verge of an epiphany until the last page. Like many of Ken Bruen’s last pages, it changes the narrative entirely.

Along the way, Taylor makes jaded and pithy comments about politics and praises a variety of crime writers, some of whom I’ve read and some I haven’t. Reading a Jack Taylor novel always makes my reading list grow.

I could complain that Taylor novels are formulaic but I like the formula. The books always move in sprints, occasionally pausing for Taylor to drink and exchange cross words with, well, everyone who speaks to him. Taylor’s dark struggles with whiskey and evil make him philosophical without being pedantic. He is one of the most troubled characters in crime fiction and, for that reason, among the most interesting. The Galway Epiphany is about average for a Jack Taylor novel, making my recommendation virtually automatic.

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Hidden in Plain Sight by Jeffrey Archer

Published by St. Martin's Press on November 3, 2020

Jeffrey Archer has been chronicling the early career of his fictional creation, William Warwick, who appears later in life in Archer’s Harry Clifton novels. In Nothing Ventured, Archer described Warwick’s efforts to thwart art forgers, a gig he scored by virtue of his degree in art history. Warwick begins Hidden in Plain Sight with a promotion to the rank of Detective Sergeant and reassignment to a new team that is chasing the big dog of London drug smuggling. “The Viper” runs a good chunk of London’s illicit drug market from the top three floors of a building that houses his manufacturing and distribution business. The location, however, is a mystery to the police.

Despite Warwick’s shift to the drug task force, an interesting plot thread continues the art theft plot that drove Nothing Ventured. Miles Faulkner, whose sentence for art fraud was suspended, attempts to foil Warwick’s marriage to Beth. Miles is having marital problems of his own, problems that motivate him to engage in a couple of new crimes to thwart his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s effort to take his house, his art collection, and pretty much everything he owns. By novel’s end, the degree of his success will be in doubt, setting up the continuation of the story in the next novel.

Hidden in Plain Sight takes place in 1986, when it was still considered wise to declare war on drugs rather than treating them as a public health problem. While the drug plot has Warwick playing a significant role in the effort to find the Viper’s den, Warwick learns that his nemesis Faulkner is also involved in drug distribution, at least with regard to his elite friends. Warwick recruits an informant who helps him catch Faulkner with drugs, but whether the evidence will stand up in court leads to a trial that provides another plot point.

The courtroom theatrics are provided by Warwick’s father, representing the Crown, and his sister, who prosecutes as her father’s junior. I always enjoy courtroom scenes and this one is entertaining, in part because a prosecution witness turns out to be unreliable. Still, while discussions of courtroom strategy are always fun, cases turn on evidence and the evidence made the outcome fairly predictable, strategic considerations notwithstanding. As Rumpole sometimes mused, it is easy to prove that guilty person is guilty. Getting a guilty person acquitted is the real courtroom challenge.

My only knock on William Warwick as a character is his stalwart and unblemished nature. Warwick is known as “choirboy” because he is resolutely proper in everything he does. My sense is that Archer means him to be an exemplar of the British upper-crust at their best (Warwick’s father, Sir Julian, is a QC and his sister seems destined to become one). People of resolute moral character, at least in fiction, tend to a bit one-dimensional. All members of the Warwick family dispense bits of trivia so we know they are learned, but it takes more than an ability to explain the origin of “Bob’s your uncle” to give a character a memorable personality. I’d like to see Warwick let his hair down and show us his naughty side, except he doesn’t seem to have one.

Warwick’s moral rectitude does, however, set up a personal conflict (can he remain a police officer if he must serve a corrupt master?) that remains at the end of the novel. Since the Harry Clifton novels answer that question, it isn’t a cliff-hanger, but the novel does set up a (presumably) final conflict between Warwick and Faulkner in the next novel.

On the whole, I enjoyed Hidden in Plain Sight more than Nothing Ventured. There are fewer scenes of Warwick family gatherings that tended to slow the first novel, while the plot moves more quickly and in more directions. Readers who want their crime novel protagonists to be righteous defenders of the law and virtue will likely admire Hidden in Plain Sight.

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The Dirty South by John Connolly

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on November 3, 2020

The Dirty South goes back in time to tell the story of Charlie Parker’s first investigation of a homicide after the death of his wife and daughter. Series readers know that Parker’s wife and daughter were murdered, that Parker quit his job as a New York homicide detective to pursue their killer, and that he was eventually successful. When The Dirty South takes place, Parker has only recently started looking into other killings to see if he can find a pattern that will lead him to his family’s killer. That investigation brings him to a small town in Arkansas.

The Cade family owns a good bit of land in Burdon County. Nothing in Burdon County is worth much, but a company called Kovacs is debating the merits of building a new plant in Burdon County rather than a competing site in Texas. The plant would bring much needed employment to a dirt-poor community. The Cade family is doing its best to seal the deal, which means sweeping away any dirt that might discourage Kovacs from building on land owned by the Cades. One of the sweepers is Jurel Cade, who happens to be a deputy sheriff. Jurel has a brother, a sister, and a father who, even more than Jurel, are varying shades of evil.

Among the secrets that the Cades have an incentive to conceal are three murders of young women. The presence of a serial killer might discourage Kovacs from investing in the county. The most recent murder comes to light when Tilon Ward finds Donna Lee Kernigan’s young body in a ditch. Ward’s distress is amplified by the fact that he was giving Donna Lee money in exchange for sex. Ward earns a living cooking meth and was supplying Donna Lee’s mother so that she would look the other way.

Parker is in town taking a look at the two earlier killings, including one that is fairly recent, to decide whether they shed light on the murders of his wife and daughter. They don’t, but his curiosity earns him a night in jail. Donna’s killing takes place while Parker is locked up. When the police chief discovers that Parker is a former New York City homicide detective, he asks Parker for help. The chief knows that giving the investigation to the deputy sheriff will lead to its burial, lest it disturb the decisionmakers at Kovacs.

Parker’s investigation brings him into contact with a number of corrupt individuals, including several suspects who might have committed one or all of the murders. One of the suspects has been missing and presumed dead for about five years. Others include a bartender, a reverend with aspirations for a bigger church, Tilon Ward and the people for whom he cooks meth, and locals with a grudge against the Cades who might want to scuttle the Kovacs deal. All the suspects give the reader a chance to ponder clues and to view the story as a whodunit.

Yet Connolly uses mysteries as a springboard to explore evil as it coincides with human nature. Part of that exploration involves the question of what makes a killer kill. The Dirty South makes the point that monsters often contribute to their own creation, although every monster is shaped by other monsters.

The Dirty South also examines a more encompassing evil. While Burdon County residents might be uncomfortable with the knowledge that a serial killer may be preying on local women, the victims have been black and everyone in the county is likely to benefit from the Kovacs plant, so the business community — and even the state government — has no interest in making waves. A “see no evil” attitude elevates corruption and self-interest above the community’s interest in protecting its most vulnerable members from harm.

Many Charlie Parker novels are grounded in the supernatural. Apart from Parker having a conversation with the ghost of his daughter, the supernatural is only hinted at in this novel, largely by a character who believes the county’s land was poisoned by bad blood in an earlier century.

Depth of characterization and striking prose always characterize Connolly’s fiction. I would say The Dirty South is one of Connolly’s better novels except that Connolly is such a consistent writer that every novel is at the same high level. Instead, I’ll say that The Dirty South is one of the better novels of 2020 for thriller fans to enjoy.

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The Shortest Day by Colm Tóibín

Published digitally by Amazon on November 3, 2020

“The Shortest Day” is a short story that is easily consumed in less than an hour. The story is available through Amazon as a “Kindle edition.”

Professor O’Kelly, an archeologist, has spent his career investigating an ancient burial chamber at Newgrange. As a scholar, O’Kelly focuses on facts supported by evidence. He does not speculate about things he cannot prove. When people ask him about spirits of the dead people who were buried in the tomb, he reminds them that spirits are beyond the remit of an archeologist.

What O’Kelly does not know is that spirits do dwell within the chamber. The spend their afterlives telling each other stories. Only one spirit, a woman named Dalc, is able to add new information to their collective knowledge because only she can leave the tomb and roam around in the world.

Once a year, on the winter solstice, a beam of light illuminates the chamber. The spirits are sustained by the light — it renews their energy — but they do not want the outside world to invade their resting place. “We need to be separate from the mortal world,” a spirit argues. “No one ever planned that this sacred space might be shared with anyone.”

In her only contact with a mortal, motivated by fear that archeologists would discover the beam of light, Dalc told a villager that the annual illumination of the chamber is a secret “that does not belong to the world.” Dalc explained that “we must all know our place in the great scheme of things. We respect mystery and silence and spirit.”

Dalc made the villager swear to keep people away from the tomb on the solstice. The villager took her vow seriously. While current villagers are aware that the winter solstice is the one day the tomb is not to be disturbed, the secret has not spread beyond the community. Until, that is, a drunken villager rambled about it while O’Kelly was visiting a local tavern.

When O’Kelly chooses the solstice for one of his visits, the villagers fret that the spirits will be disturbed. By the story’s end, the reader will be invited to ponder the impact of O’Kelly’s discovery.

The foundation of this story is true, in that Michael O’Kelly did discover the phenomenon in 1967. Why the tomb was designed to illuminate on the shortest day of the year is unknown. The illumination clearly required careful planning and ingenious design. According to the Newgrange website (the place is a tourist attraction now), locals did tell stories about the annual lighting of the chamber, although they didn’t reveal exactly when it would happen.

I always admire Colm Tóibín’s prose and his ability to create atmosphere. Like all of Tóibín’s work, the story is interesting and thought provoking. What thoughts Tóibín intended to provoke is something of a mystery to me. Perhaps, as an Irish writer, he couldn’t resist writing a ghost story and that’s all there is to it. But I have struggled to reconcile the spirits’ fear with the story’s ending, which seems to suggest that the fears were groundless. If the lesson learned by the fretful spirits is supposed to teach a larger lesson, it eludes me. Surely not all fears are groundless.

O’Kelly’s lucky discovery enriched the living by revealing an amazing bit of ancient engineering. I suspect Tóibín’s point is that unscientific fears harbored by villagers should give way to the revelations of science. That interpretation might permit the light illuminating the chamber to be seen as light that chases away the dark fears of superstition. But maybe not. Maybe I’m only projecting my own frustration with people who reject reason and science. In any event, I like the story. Maybe it’s my dimness that prevents me from fully appreciating it, but the fact that a story is challenging isn’t a reason not to recommend it.

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