Macbeth by Jo Nesbø

Published by Crown/Hogarth on April 10, 2018

The new police commissioner, Duncan, has vowed to sweep corruption out of the police department. Duff, the head of the Narco Unit, is on Duncan’s side. A tip encourages him to believe he can bring down the Norse Riders motorcycle gang and Sweno, its leader. He turns down help from Macbeth, who is sitting on the sideline with Banquo, Angus, and other members of the SWAT team in case Duff needs help. Also watching from the sideline is Hecate, the richest drug dealer in town and the man who tipped off the police about Sweno’s receipt of a new drug supply that the Norse Riders are about to offload from a Soviet ship.

One thing leads to another and Macbeth commits a foul deed in support of Duff, whose own deed is even more foul. Not long after that, three sisters sent by Hecate prophesy that Macbeth will be promoted to head the new Organized Crime unit. His wife, Lady, is pleased, but sees that the only path to the top for Macbeth is to kill Duncan. Lady is a cunning manipulator who owns a casino and wants Macbeth to advance so he can shut down a competing casino, but is she as cunning and manipulative as Hecate?

Duncan’s death alone will not bring Macbeth to the top; Malcolm must also go. That creates a conflict between Macbeth and loyal Banquo. Eventually Duff and Angus are also in Macbeth’s sights. No one who opposes the mad police commissioner is safe.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a relatively straightforward play about Macbeth’s descent into madness that accompanies (causes? is caused by?) his lust for power. Shakespeare purists might not like the liberties Jo Nesbø has taken, but given that the point of the Hogarth Shakespeare series is to draw upon the themes of Shakespeare’s plays to tell a modern story, I think most Shakespeare fans will be pleased with the way Nesbø has reimagined Macbeth as a modern crime story. Parallels to the play are evident. A drug called “brew” substitutes for witch’s brew. Three sisters brew the drug for Hecate while denying rumors that they add toads’ glands to the tank. Macbeth is haunted by the ghosts of his victims and sees dead men in traffic lights. Lady soaps her hands until they turn red. The city is at war, but it is a war between the police and two criminal gangs that also war with each other. Macbeth is sure that no man born of woman can kill him but . . . well, you know how that works out.

And of course, the parallels to the play are evident in the novel’s themes: ambition, manhood, corruption, guilt, betrayal, weakness, and in the end, justice. Nesbø uses Lennox to suggest that weakness is a natural reaction to threats made by those with power; cowardly submission to immoral commands may be shameful, but self-preservation is a powerful instinct, and it is difficult to judge people who submit to manipulation by more powerful forces rather than forfeiting their own (or their childrens') lives. Weakness is also a facet of Macbeth’s love of Lady, as described by Hecate: “The desire to be loved and the ability to love, which gives humans such strength, is also their Achilles’ heel. Give them the prospect of love and they move mountains; take it from them and a puff of wind will blow them over.”

The story mixes in modern themes, as well, including the excessive use of force as a law enforcement tool and manipulation of public opinion to support authoritarian action even when those in authority act lawlessly. Small moments of decency set ordinary people apart from powerful Macbeth and his corrupt followers, suggesting that decent but seemingly unimportant people have the power to change world. When a radio reporter urges listeners to “take to the streets and depose Macbeth,” the reader imagines that people might actually be able to empower themselves with collective action against despots and autocrats.

Nesbø illuminates the complexity of Macbeth’s character: villainous at times but troubled by a conscience; merciful at times, but not when mercy would stand in the way of ambition; a murderer, but as Duff points out (perhaps too charitably), reluctant to kill the innocent. He is driven more by his need to please Lady than by power for its own sake.

The Hogarth Shakespeare novels supposedly “retell” Shakespeare’s plays. The entries I’ve read have been good, but this is the only one I’ve seen that is penned by a crime novelist. Nesbø was a fitting choice to write about the murderous Macbeth. His choices are sound and his use of imagery is stunning. More importantly, Nesbø does justice to a play about justice.

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Twisted Prey by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 24, 2018

Twisted Prey would earn my recommendation just for this sentence: “Survivalists fantasize about SHTF day, when Shit Hits The Fan — Mexico invades Arizona, the gasoline runs out, all the chickens get eaten, and anybody who doesn’t have a root cellar in the backyard fully stocked with AR-15s, camouflage hats, hunting bows, and gold coins is doomed to a life of sexual slavery or death by cannibalism.” Like, totally. Fortunately, I don’t have to rely on a single sentence to recommend the latest Lucas Davenport novel, because the rest of the book is nearly as entertaining.

A senator’s SUV is sideswiped on a gravel mountain road, forcing the SUV over the edge and into a tree. The crash kills Senator Smalls’ lover. Smalls is sure that the accident was deliberate, but accident investigators tell him that there is no sign of a second vehicle’s involvement. The senator is from Minnesota, so he naturally calls Lucas Davenport for a second opinion.

Lucas is a U.S. Marshal these days, but his boss regularly lends him to politicians who need a criminal investigator because keeping politicians happy is good for the Marshal Service’s budget. Smalls believes Minnesota’s other senator, Taryn Grant, was behind the assassination attempt. He needs Lucas to prove that a crime was committed and to find out who committed it. Lucas obligingly heads to Washington and appropriately checks into the Watergate Hotel.

Lucas’ investigation leads him to a business that deals with military procurement contracts and to a number of shady characters connected directly or indirectly to that business and less provably to Grant. When a target of the investigation is murdered, Lucas has to deal with the victim’s brother (a lieutenant colonel) and lover (a CIA assassin), both of whom have been led to believe that the target was killed by Lucas.

As that story gets rolling, Lucas is distracted when his wife Weather gets into a car accident — or was it? His Marshal friends Bob and Rae join the investigation as Lucas tries to get to the bottom of the assassination attempt and a series of killings that are apparently related. He even finds himself working with the FBI, which gives John Sandford a chance to make fun of humorless, career-minded FBI agents. While the FBI is an natural target for Sandford’s humor, he also pokes fun at DHS, whose agents, for the sake of job security, pretend every crime they investigate is an act of terrorism.

Sandford often works a political environment into his stories, but he’s evenhanded about making both Republicans and Democrats the bad guys. (In this novel, a Democrat is the villain.) None of it is mean-spirited, but Sandford does have a clear-eyed view of the nation’s political environment. At one point, Lucas laments the impossibility of reading anything on the internet (including comments left on a website that gives home construction tips) that doesn’t quickly descend into caustic name calling by people on both the right and the left. “I mean, why?” he asks. “Is there a difference between a right-wing and a left-wing two-by-four?” That’s another sentence that makes the novel worth reading.

Politics aside, Lucas is more humane than most thriller characters. He’s a tough guy, but unlike most protagonists in tough guy novels, he doesn’t feel the need to let the world know how tough he is or how much he loves his guns. He’s secure, he’s self-deprecating, and he thinks of villains as people; he has no use for ideologues who dispense death casually.

The plot holds together plausibly, a rarity in modern thrillers. The ending might be predictable but it’s satisfying. In fact, the entire novel is satisfying as another example of Sandford’s reliable ability to tell a fast-moving story about down-to-Earth characters who are competent without being full of themselves.

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Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip Kerr

Published by Marian Wood Books/Putnam on April 3, 2018

Having returned to Germany at the end of Prussian Blue, Bernie Gunther is now Christof Ganz, a hospital mortuary attendant. He washes the dead, a fitting job for a man whose life has spent his life surrounded by death. A second job as a pallbearer suits him just as well. But being near Munich, it’s only a matter of time before a cop recognizes him as an ex-cop.

The cop spends his off-duty hours working as a private detective. The founder of the All-German People’s Party (GVP) has hired the cop to determine whether the GVP’s new donor is still a Nazi. The cop is planning a double-cross and threatens to expose Gunther if Gunther doesn’t help him carry out his plan.

By the time that story concludes, Gunther has a new job as an insurance adjuster. His boss send him to Athens, where a claim has been made for a ship that was lost in a fire at sea. The ill-tempered German owner of the ship is a bit mysterious, in part because he carries a gun wherever he goes, in part because he’s refusing to make a claim for artifacts he recovered on a dive that he says were lost when the ship sank.

One murder later, Gunther finds himself chasing a Nazi war criminal named Alois Brunner who has adopted a new identity and whose connection to the ship owner is not immediately clear. Gunther also needs the help of a German scapegoat who is sitting in a Greek prison, the only German the Greeks have been able to find who might have some connection to the Nazi occupation, so they want to throw the book at him. Gunther hopes the man can lead him to a bigger fish and thus appease the Greek authorities he’s helping so they don’t hang him for the murder, notwithstanding their knowledge that he didn’t commit it. Gunther also needs to help a Mossad agent from Israel or face the prospect of catching a bullet in the back.

Greeks Bearing Gifts features the moral conundrums that make Bernie Gunther novels so worthwhile. Is it morally acceptable to betray a casual friend if the friend enriched himself at the expense of Holocaust victims? Is it morally acceptable to enrich yourself at the expense of Holocaust victims who are going to die anyway? Is it morally acceptable to withhold information about marital status from a woman who is interested in you if you fear that the woman plans to shoot you after she seduces you? Bernie is far from perfect, but his life is instructive as he struggles toward morally sound answers to those questions and others.

The plot of Greek Bearing Gifts has elements of a whodunit and a police procedural, but it isn’t either of those. Bernie manages to puzzle out all the connections between the sunken ship and the dead bodies, but as is usually the case, the real puzzle is not whether Bernie will get the girl (although he has a chance to get one), but whether he will still be alive at the end of the story. The plot ultimately turns on complex international relations after World War II, but the story works because of the morally complex life of Bernie Gunther.

It seems like each new Gunther novel shifts the direction of Gunther’s life, and this one is no exception. I’m not sure I will like the new direction Gunther is taking (I would hate to see him freed from the moral quandaries that define him), but we’ll see. While not as suspenseful as some Gunther novels, Greeks Bearing Gifts pushes all the morally ambiguous buttons that fans of the series have come to expect.

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West by Carys Davies

Published by Scribner on April 24, 2018

John Cyrus Bellman leaves his daughter Bess at home in Pennsylvania so that he can take a journey, initially following the path blazed by Lewis and Clarke, with such detours as might be necessary to accomplish his objective. His wife is dead; his sister will take care of Bess, although his sister regards Bellman as a fool who will not survive the journey.

Bellman read a news article about huge mammoth bones dug up in Kentucky, and he believes such creatures, much larger than buffalo, are still roaming in the unexplored west. The article produced “a fierce beating of his heart, a prickling at the edge of his being, and there was nothing he wanted more now than to see the enormous creatures with his own two eyes.”

The consensus of opinion, shared by all but Bellman’s daughter, is that Bellman is a fool and a half-wit who will never be seen at home again. His neighbors suspect he is having a midlife crisis (although that term hasn’t yet been invented), to which most men respond by buying a new horse or a fancy hat and taking up with other women. But Bellman views the journey as the choice between staying at home with “the small and familiar” or “being out here with the large and the unknown.” The reader, having the advantage of historical hindsight, knows Bellman will not find the creatures he seeks, but the courage of the failed explorer is no different than the courage of explorers who discover something wondrous and new.

West is the story of Bellman’s journey, accompanied by a young Shawnee guide named Old Woman from a Distance. While West celebrates the spirit of the explorer, it also asks whether it is preferable to undertake a quixotic journey or to be content with the “small and familiar.” In their absence, Bellman comes to appreciate the business he built, the daughter he misses, the people he knew. It is up to the reader to admire Bellman for chasing a dream or to fault him for abandoning his responsibilities.

West is also the story of Bess, who waits at home for her father’s return, listening to her aunt complain about all the things she dislikes. Both characters face perils. Bellman’s are those of an explorer in conflict with nature; Bess’ are those of a girl who has no father to protect her from the various men who view her with predatory intent. And finally, West is the story of Old Woman from a Distance, who is on an adventure of his own, hoping in the end to have earned self-esteem as he navigates among white men who refuse to teach him their languages.

West has the feel of a stillborn legend. Bellman is just a bit larger than life, but his actions are well within the realm of possibility, and we know he will never find the creatures he pursues. Coincidence or fate plays a role in the story, but the plot does not feel contrived. Carys Davies tells the story in graceful but straightforward prose, creating a convincing historical setting without adding unnecessary detail. The story does not blink from the harsh and arbitrary realities of life, the mistaken impressions that lead to misguided judgments, but it conveys the sense that even in the face of tragedy, hope should never be abandoned.

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The Kremlin's Candidate by Jason Matthews

Published by Scribner on February 13, 2018

The Kremlin’s Candidate is the third novel in a trilogy that features a Russian spy who has agreed to provide intelligence to the CIA. The spy is a beautiful woman named Dominika who was trained as a “Sparrow” — female Russian operatives who are wise in the ways of seduction. In the first novel, Dominika targets a CIA agent named Nate Nash, only to fall in love with him when he recruits her as a double agent.

In The Kremlin’s Candidate, Nash again encounters a beautiful spy who has been trained in the art of seduction, but this one is a Nightingale, the Chinese version of a Russian Sparrow. Nate has trouble keeping his hands off beautiful spies, which has more than once caused trouble with his CIA superiors. Nash is in Hong Kong after visiting Macao to encourage the defection of a Chinese general who has embezzled state funds to cover a large gambling debt. When Nash meets the Nightingale, he wants to recruit her as a source, given her presumed access to sensitive information as the assistant manager of a hotel frequented by the rich and powerful. Nash doesn’t know that the Nightingale is a Chinese spy but she knows all about Nash. She’s been assigned not just to seduce Nash so that she can learn the name of the Chinese traitor he is recruiting, but to kill Nash for having the audacity to spy on the Chinese.

Before all of that happens, the novel follows the path of the earlier books as Dominika engages in clandestine acts, occasionally meeting with Nash for a debriefing followed by (or following) a romp in bed. Dominika has become the CIA’s best Russian source, thanks to her proximity to Putin and her possible ascension to the top ranks of the SVR. But a Russian mole in the American military is being considered for a position as the next CIA director. Even if she doesn’t get the job, the CIA has been ordered to give all of the candidates briefings that would at least indirectly reveal Dominika’s identity as a CIA source and ultimately lead to Dominika’s torture and execution.

The politics in this novel are more pronounced than in earlier entries. Jason Matthews clearly has no use for politicians who believe that oversight of the CIA is needed to keep it from breaking the law, despite the CIA's history and culture of lawless behavior. The novel's insufficiently hawkish American president (now in his fifth year) isn’t mentioned by name, but it isn’t difficult to understand who Matthews had in mind when he derided the president’s “social progressivism.” Matthews complains that his fictional president failed to take a hard line on Russia, a criticism that seems misplaced when compared to the current and all-too-real president, who touts his friendship with Putin, refuses to implement congressional sanctions against Russia, and ignores Russian interference with American elections. In any event, Matthews portrays Putin as a canny and ruthless character, an assessment with which nearly everyone but Donald Trump would agree. The novel's political tone didn't trouble me because Matthews doesn't let politics get in the way of storytelling, which is all I ultimately care about in a spy novel.

Character and plot development in this series have been strong, and the work that went into the first two books pays dividends in this one. The plot takes a couple of unexpected turns before arriving at a surprising but credible ending. The novel includes enough action to keep the story racing forward without becoming a mindless action novel. Tension arrives in waves and then peaks in the penultimate chapter. Fans of spy novel tradecraft will be happy with the series, and readers who want to admire heroes will enjoy the droll wit and fierce resolve of Americans (and the Russian Dominika) who are unwavering in their belief that free nations treat their people decently and that the fight against authoritarians is always worth waging.

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