Control by Andy Diggle

Published by Dynamite Entertainment on March 28, 2017

Control is a graphic novel with a modern noir feel. The artists are Angela Cruickshank and Andrea Mutti.

Control feels like the storyboards from an episode of a television cop show. It combines action with a mystery, develops typical police characters who squabble with each other, and touches on the kind of themes that are familiar to cop show fans, including a vast conspiracy to control wealth and power.

Kate Burnham of Metro PD stars in Control. Her partner dies in the early pages as he and Kate are investigating a murder, so of course she wants to find his killer. She soon encounters a senator and a sex scandal. Naturally enough, her bosses order her to leave the senator out of her investigation. Naturally enough, her bosses also order her not to talk to anyone in the media. And naturally enough, Kate ignores those orders and does what needs to be done, because that’s how cop shows work.

The senator has been pushing a privacy bill, and the reader will quickly understand that his political efforts have something to do with the murder mystery. So Control gives us political intrigue, media intrigue, bickering-police-detectives intrigue, and other conventions that will be easily recognizable to cop show audiences.

The story takes Kate into some bad neighborhoods where she meets good and bad people. As one would expect from a cop show, the bad ones try to kill her and the good ones reluctantly do the right thing. Eventually she stumbles onto a plot that’s just a little over-the-top, but that’s also something viewers expect from cop shows. Cop shows like to have cops investigating crimes and conspiracies of powerful people that rarely happen because it would be too politically risky to focus on the crimes and conspiracies of powerful people that happen all the time.

Of course, Control is a graphic novel, not a cop show. The art is pleasant but uninspired. The story is almost all told in words rather than art, which is a waste of the graphic novel format. Given the limited amount of text and dialog that can be squeezed into a graphic novel, art needs to pick up the slack, conveying nuance that a reader would get from the extra words in a novel or story or from the expressions/gestures/backgrounds in a teleplay or film script. The art doesn’t do enough in Control to supplement a story that never transcends the ordinary.

Control isn’t badly done, but it doesnt do enough that's fresh or new. Familiarity, in this case, breeds indifference.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Good Assassin by Paul Vidich

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on April 18, 2017

“Evil does not betray you” is the theme of The Good Assassin. Like all good spy novels, betrayal is at the novel’s heart. Betrayals pop up at regular intervals as the story moves forward, taking many forms.

The Good Assassin takes place five years after An Honorable Man. George Mueller, now retired from the CIA, is sent to Cuba in 1958 as an “outsider” to take a reading on Toby Graham, a CIA agent with whom Mueller is acquainted. It is feared that Graham might be unduly sympathetic to Castro’s revolution (as opposed to the Batista dictatorship that the CIA clandestinely supports), and that Graham might be funneling weapons provided by the CIA to Castro rather than Batista.

Mueller is met and instantly disliked by the FBI’s man in Havana, Frank Pryce. He’s also disliked by Graham, with whom he has a dark history that includes a woman who is also a key character.

Cuba in 1958 is not a safe place to be unless you’re Ernest Hemmingway. The story places Mueller in jeopardy from Castro’s rebels and Batista’s troops, but danger may also be lurking closer to home. Mueller has plenty of things to worry about in this relatively brief but captivating story.

Is Graham a traitor? Or is he simply a realist who follows orders but complains about the hypocrites who issue them? Graham is clearly tired of “the persistent contemplation of evil,” an occupational hazard that “weakens the soul.” If he is a traitor, what should be his fate? In the game of espionage, the novel suggests, it is impossible to separate the white hats and the black hats. There are only shades of gray. There are no innocents, no souls untainted by corruption.

Paul Vidich handles those themes adeptly, as he did in An Honorable Man. The apparent simplicity of the story masks its depth. The novel ends in ambiguity, and while that’s how most things end, readers who like stories to wrap up neatly might be affronted by the lack of clear answers. I think the ending fits the story and its themes.

I am drawn to spy fiction in part because of the moral questions that characters so often confront, at least when the themes are deeper than “patriotic Americans kill bad people.” Vidich confronts moral issue in a thoughtful way. The Good Assassin is not as surprising as An Honorable Man, but Mueller continues to be a surprising, morally complex character.

RECOMMENDED

Little White Lies by Ace Atkins

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on May 2, 2017

The official title of this book is apparently Robert B. Parker's Little White Lies, but Parker has been dead for six years. Adding the names of dead authors to titles of books they didn't write is a questionable marketing gimmick and not one that reviewers need to promote.

Ace Atkins is a seasoned writer with a biting sense of humor. Little White Lies is his sixth Spenser novel, after the forty that Robert B. Parker wrote. Atkins captures Parker’s voice, which I think of as a more sophisticated Mickey Spillane.

A right-wing pundit who passes himself off to cable “news” programs as a former CIA agent has swindled Spenser’s latest client in a land deal. The client happens to be a patient of Spenser’s girlfriend. Spenser’s effort to track down the swindler leads him to an equally unsavory owner of a gun range. The two men seem to be working together to sell shady investments, while one or both of them may be making illegal sales of a different kind.

Spenser’s inability to abide a liar puts him at odds with the con man, and his effort to expose the scam takes up the first half of the novel. By the second half, he’s in Atlanta, dealing with gun nuts and a megachurch preacher, all of whom are engaged in swindles or worse. Of course, Spenser’s buddy Hawk has his back, often playing the straight man for Spenser’s sarcastic remarks as they explore Atlanta’s underbelly. Another buddy, Tedy Sapp, plays a similar role while adding some sexual orientation diversity to the cast of good guys.

Little White Lies is a classic detective story, with a few murders sprinkled among the other crimes that Spenser investigates. Between lunatics who think that Jesus carried an AR-15 and the cynical “preachers” who exploit their fears and prejudices, Spenser has his hands full.

Little White Lies isn’t particularly surprising or memorable, but those are not qualities I would expect to find in a franchise that has lasted this long. Little White Lies is a fun, quick read, an entertaining visit with familiar characters. It easily lives up to, but does not surpass, expectations.

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City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by Broadway Books on May 2, 2017

Epic fantasy almost always follows a well-established path. A heroic figure embarks on a quest to overcome a force of evil. I don’t read much modern epic fantasy because so much of it is predictable and boring. But whatever genre Robert Jackson Bennett chooses (he often straddles fantasy and science fiction), I read his work with great anticipation because he is never predictable.

City of Miracles is the third novel in an excellent trilogy. It seemed to me that the first novel was so good, there was no need for a second. I enjoyed it but I felt a bit let down because the characters and setting were no longer fresh and startling. Still, as soon as I started reading City of Miracles, I was swept up in the sense of wonder that enveloped me as I read City of Stairs. Part of that stems from the novel’s focus on Sigrud, one of Robert Bennett Jackson’s most complex characters and by far my favorite in the trilogy.

Shara Komayd has not been prime minister for ten years, but she still has enemies. City of Miracles opens with her assassination — the first of many surprising elements in story — the news of which deeply disturbs Sigrud. Naturally, he vows to find the killer. That leads him back into the quest established in the first novel and advanced in the second: to overcome the divine entities that pose a threat to humanity’s future.

There shouldn’t be many divine entities left after the first two novels, but it turns out that the divinities had children, and there are any number of those, although the most powerful of them wants to wipe out the rest and absorb their power, strengthening his ability to expand his realm (nighttime itself) until nothing is left that is warm and light and, well, alive.

Along the way, Sigrud fights the requisite battles that an epic hero must face, but the interesting thing about Sigrud is how he changes over the course of the trilogy. In part, the change is physical — something happened earlier in his life that (as the reader will have noticed in the last book) gives Sigrud an improbable ability to overcome divine obstacles — but he also changes emotionally as he struggles with his past, his pain, his dark nature, the death of his daughter, the death of Shara, his sense that he has never been free to define his own identity, and his uncertainty about the identity he would want to define if given a choice. Sigrud describes himself as “a man whose moments are little more than slit throats, and sorrow, and skulking in the dark.” He is an unlikely epic hero, but he is also selfless and duty-bound, a man whose means are at war with his ends. Bennett always creates strong characters, but the conflicted Sigrud is one of his best.

City of Miracles is an excellent action/adventure novel. On another level, it can be read as an allegory about the isolation of abandoned or abused or orphaned children, about the consequences of failing to provide them with stability and guidance. And it is a novel of epic themes:  the need to let go of grievances before they become all-consuming; the difference between justice and vengeance; the eternal struggle of the privileged few to control the masses; the desire to defeat time; the meaning of freedom and happiness; the remarkable ability of humans (and deities) to destroy just about anything that’s good.

By removing the story from the political quarrels that impair clarity of thought, science fiction and fantasy can use a world (or time) that is not our own to shed light on the failings and virtues of the world (or time) that is our own.  Bennett uses that opportunity to say something important about our world and our lives by directing our attention to a fictional world that is very different from, but significantly similar to, the world that humans are always trying so hard to destroy.

The first book in the trilogy was so good that I was almost sorry to see it continue. Having read the third book, I’m sorry to see it end.

RECOMMENDED

A Single Spy by William Christie

Published by St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books on April 25, 2017

“We gather information by many means, but a single spy in the right place and at the right moment may change the course of history.” With that encouragement, a 17-year-old Russian boy named Alexsi is sent to Germany, where it is envisioned that he will spend years rising to a position that will allow him to uncover great secrets for the benefit of the Soviet Union.

A Single Spy begins as Alexsi, struggling to survive, joins a group of Shahsavan tribesmen, nomads who roamed between Iran and Azerbaijan until the Soviet army began to do serious border patrol. Escaping a Soviet ambush in 1936, Alexsi, at the age of sixteen, is again on his own. Alexsi speaks Russian, German, and Farsi, among other languages, and is improbably literate, which makes him attractive to the NKVD. Like it or not, Alexsi becomes a spy.

Alexsi’s first task is to infiltrate a group that opposes Stalin. To do that, he must take advantage of a girl he knew in the orphanage where he spent part of his youth. That gives William Christie an opportunity to write scenes that flash back to the corrupt and inhumane setting of a Soviet orphanage. Other flashbacks illustrate Alexsi’s pre-orphanage years and explain how Alexsi later came to be living with Shahsavan tribesmen.

In the present, Alexsi serves the Soviets while pretending to serve the Germans in Berlin and Tehran, eventually stumbling onto a plot that may indeed change the course of history. While the plot might be a bit farfetched, that’s not unusual in modern thrillers, and Christie sold me on the story’s credibility.

Alexsi isn’t a complex character and some of the other characters are little more than stereotypes, but that’s common in a thriller that depends on plot more than characterization. The plot earns points for departing from the mold for most spy stories. It also earns points for being smart. Not brilliant, but smart.

The focus on a Russian from the Middle East who infiltrates the Germans during World War II is something I haven’t seen before, and I’m always happy to find a spy novel that isn’t just a variation of stories that the masters of espionage novels have already told. The story moves quickly, particularly in the action scenes that bring the novel to its finish. The themes of betrayal on which all spy fiction depends are sharply developed. Shortcomings of characterization notwithstanding, A Single Spy is a winning contribution to the genre of spy fiction.

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