High Stakes by Iris Johansen

Published by Grand Central Publishing on September 7, 2021

Credibility is not a prerequisite for the modern thriller. Writers know that they can ignore credibility if they craft a plot that encourages the reader to gloss over the story’s more unlikely events. Iris Johansen manages that task, albeit just barely, in High Stakes.

The novel begins with two hunters in a Russian forest trying to find and kill a 19-year-old woman named Lara. Fortunately, this isn’t another novel that spins Richard Connell’s famous story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” The hunt occurs early in the story, ends quickly, and sets up the action that follows.

The hunt is one of many contests created by Lara’s father, Anton Balkon, and a Russian crime boss, Boris Volkov. The two men wager on whether Lara will prevail. Sometimes she’s tasked with stealing things. The latest wager is on Lara’s survival. It resulted from Volkov’s displeasure at his recent losses to Anton as Lara used cunning and planning to succeed in her tasks. Her death will be Volkov’s revenge.

Lara is an improbably competent person. She has mastered a variety of life skills at a young age, from lock picking to hand-to-hand combat, but she is also a world-class pianist. Her ability to play Tchaikovsky attracted the attention of a Russian criminal named Kaskov, who (for multiple reasons) wants to extract Lara from Russia before Volkov manages to kill her. To that end, Kaskov hires Logan Tanner, the world’s best poker player. Tanner owns several casinos but he used to make a living extracting individuals from dangerous environments. Tanner is willing to do a favor for Kaskov if Kaskov will use his connections to locate Tanner’s mentor, a fellow named Sandrino, who has disappeared. By the kind of happy coincidence that only a thriller writer can imagine, the Sandrino story and Lara’s story are linked.

The plot follows Tanner as he extracts Lara and deals with the aftermath as Volkov and Anton come looking for her. Tanner and Lara travel to a compound in New York and then to a safe house in Vegas with Lara’s feisty mother in tow. They thwart killers while making a plan to take down Volkov and Anton. The plan leads to a climax that is filled with gunplay and explosions, including the obligatory helicopter crash.

Tanner would be shallow but for the depth of his testosterone. He spends about half his time setting up the much younger Lara for seduction while nobly claiming that he can’t seduce her because it just wouldn’t be right. Whether they will end up in bed is never a serious question. The story’s romantic angle is a bit cheesy, but even if Tanner had conquered Lara and then dumped her, it wouldn’t have bothered me. Lara is impossibly petulant. She manages to manipulate Tanner into doing everything her way, which usually involves taking Lara into dangerous situations, and then makes Tanner apologize for ever thinking he should do things his own way instead of deferring to a 19-year-old’s wisdom. It seems clear that Tanner only acquiesces because putting Lara’s life at risk is necessary if he ever expects to get her into bed.

I can’t say I liked any of the characters, with the possible exception of a gruff fellow who was also Sandrino’s friend and who threatens Tanner with death whenever Tanner admits that he hasn’t yet learned Sandrino’s fate. Like Tanner, he’s one dimensional but the dimension is entertaining.

Johansen has written a couple of dozen novels in the Eve Duncan series and a few novels in each of two other series, as well as several standalones. I don’t know whether High Stakes is intended to launch a new series. It isn’t one I would be excited about, simply because Lara is both annoying and too perfect to be real, while Tanner suffers from a serious personality shortage. I can recommend the book as an average modern thriller simply because it moves quickly and the action is fun, but it isn’t a book that thriller fans need to place high on their stack of unread books.

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Welcome to Cooper by Tariq Ashkanani

Published by Thomas & Mercer on October 1, 2021

Cooper is a desperate, desolate town in Nebraska, a place where people live when they are out of options. For being a nothing town, Cooper is a hotbed of criminal activity. Much of it is controlled by a gangster in Omaha named Marchenko, who also controls a local police detective named Joe Finch.

Joe is partnered with a new arrival in Cooper, a former DC detective who made drug busts, stole the drugs, and used them recreationally with his girlfriend before she died. Thomas Levine saved his skin by giving evidence against his partner in DC, who was selling his share of the stolen drugs. With help he probably didn’t deserve, Thomas found a new home in Cooper. History repeats itself as Thomas discovers that his new partner is corrupt.

Joe commits a murder, frames Thomas for it, and uses the threat of Thomas’ arrest to coerce Thomas’ assistance in an armed robbery. The man Joe kills may have murdered a woman whose eyes were gouged out — the latest in a series of similar murders — but Thomas comes to believe that the murder victim wasn’t the killer at all. Thomas attempts to find the true killer while dealing with his corrupt partner and a state cop who threatens to expose Thomas’ crimes.

The novel is written in the first person, although it isn’t always narrated by the same person. Most of it is narrated by Thomas, but the shifting perspectives add another layer of interest as the reader tries to identify each storyteller. Only at the novel’s end do we understand the significance of the narration.

Welcome to Cooper initially struck me as an attempt to emulate the classic noir of the 1930s to 1950s, but this is noir on steroids. The story is gruesome and gory at times, but not particularly graphic. Life is bleak for Thomas. He remind us of his darkness more often than is necessary. He blames himself for his girlfriend’s death and for all the other tragedy that comprises his life. Near the novel’s end, he seeks a form of redemption but Tariq Ashkanani doesn’t give Thomas the kind of life that leaves room for a lightened soul.

At its best, Welcome to Cooper is the story of two damaged loners who briefly find each other. We don’t see much of Cooper — this isn’t an atmospheric novel — but we’re told that the town is pit, a haven for the lost and abandoned. A bartender named Mary illustrates the kind of life that condemns someone to Cooper. Mary befriends Thomas, almost against his wishes. They form the kind of momentary connection that can change a life just by suggesting possibilities, even if the possibilities will never be realized.

Welcome to Cooper grew on me. I wasn’t expecting much after the first chapter, but as the story accumulates force, it becomes impossible to look away from the crash and burn that the reader anticipates.

Ashkanani’s characterization of Mary and Thomas is the novel’s strength. The key villain, a killer who Thomas ends up chasing, is an underdeveloped stereotype of evil, but the relentlessly bleak plot is compelling in a cringeworthy way. “Life sucks, then you die” isn’t the philosophy that drives bestsellers, but it describes the reality of certain noir novels, including Welcome to Cooper. Yet the novel’s ending, while far from happy, does suggest the slightest bit of hope for a better future for those who survive the present, the possibility that even the worst villains might feel empathy under the right circumstances, and the recognition that connections with other people, even fleeting connections, are all that really matter.

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Carry the Dog by Stephanie Gangi

Published by Algonquin Books on November 2, 2021

Carry the Dog is told in the first person by a woman who is nearing the age of sixty. Berenice (or Bea or Bean or Berry) Marx-Seger is still trying to find herself. She has a moderately famous ex-husband named Gary Going, a dying father named Albert, a brother she hasn’t seen in years named Henri (or Henry or Hank), a 22-year-old half-sister named Hannah (or Echo), no children, and temporary custody of a neighbor’s dog. Her immediate problems are a cancer scare, a potential museum exhibition of her dead mother’s controversial photography, and a growing feeling of loneliness that might be exacerbated by her hookups with her unfaithful ex. The dog’s indifference to her existence isn’t helping.

Bea is the child of Miri Marx, who was nearly charged with child pornography for featuring her nude children (including Bea) in photographs. Whether their poses were artistic or salacious is a matter of opinion. Bea’s opinion is unresolved, although she still feels the discomfort of being known as one of the Marx children.

Henry’s twin brother died in a fire while the boys were still young. Miri committed suicide a few months after taking photos of children at Woodstock. Bea twice married and divorced Gary, a rock star in an opening-act band who is now seventy but still seeking the spotlight. Bea wrote Gary’s biggest hit but has no ownership interest in the song. Judging by the lyrics, it’s a good song.

Stephanie Gangi juggles several dramatic plot elements. Bea’s life is full of unresolved issues and regrets. She regrets her age, her inability to attract the touch of a young man. She doesn’t know how to respond to MOMA’s request for access to a storage unit filled with her mother’s photographs and notes. Perhaps she should instead sell everything in the unit (she needs the money), but is that the right thing to do? She finds footage shot by a documentarian in the storage unit and comes to understand the impact that the documentarian had on her mother and on her twin brothers. She feels that she has been betrayed by the significant actors in her life: her mother, Gary, and most recently, Echo. Sometimes she’s right and sometimes she makes assumptions based on incomplete information, as dramatic people tend to do.

A series of events force Bea to reevaluate her life. Did she abandon her family or did they abandon her? Should she try to reconnect with her living brother or is it too late? Did her mother abuse her by photographing her in the nude or is that something she’s been told by people who don’t understand the creation of art? Did her mother have demons of her own that drove her to exploit her children? Are Bea’s memories of her childhood accurate or has she suppressed trauma? In one of the novel’s most insightful moments, Bea realizes that she needs to organize the memories of her past so they take up less space, making room for the present.

Bea has collected a good amount of baggage in her life, but the plot never seems forced. Bea’s unusual life has produced unusual problems, but Gangi makes them seem like real problems, the kind of problems that someone who was raised by a self-absorbed parent and who ran away as a teen with an older rock star might have. Bea is never weepy about her circumstances and the reader is never asked to pity her, but it is easy to sympathize with Bea’s difficulty coping with her accumulation of life-changing issues. When, at sixty, she takes small and indecisive steps to start cleaning up the mess, her decisions seem completely natural.

This is difficult material for a writer to handle without going over the top, but Gangi crafts Bea as a credible, sympathetic character whose coping skills are constantly tested. When Bea says “Half the time I feel like I’m invisible to the world and the other half I am disappearing myself,” she’s expressing authentic feelings that are shared by a large group of people.

With fluid and straightforward prose, Carry the Dog teaches a valuable lesson — we are the sum of our parts, all the parts, not just the trauma. Life is always changing and the story isn’t written until it ends. It is a verity of psychologists that confronting the past is the only way to escape from its grip. Bea’s journey, her stops and starts as she gains the courage to examine her life, to define herself by her entire life and not just its worst moments, to live in the present instead of the past, makes a compelling story.

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The Alchemist by Paulo Cuelho

First published in Brazil in 1988; first publised in English translation in 1993.

The Alchemist is one of those books that I’ve heard about for years but never got around to reading. I was finally nudged to read it, as well as The Giver, when Aaron Rodgers recommended them during the book club segment of his Tuesday appearances on Pat McAfee's show.

The plot is simple. A boy named Santiago is a happy shepherd in Andalusia, leading his sheep from village to village, selling their wool and dreaming about a village girl he finds particularly attractive. Wondering if the girl is his destiny, he asks a Gypsy to tell his fortune. She tells him that he will find treasure and, in exchange for a tenth of the treasure, directs him to the pyramids in Egypt.

Santiago’s journey connects him with several people who offer advice about living. An old man who calls himself the King of Salem tells Santiago that the world’s greatest lie is that “at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.” From the old man, Santiago learns the importance of discovering your Personal Legend and understanding that “whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it’s because that desire originated in the soul of the universe.” Personal Legends seem clear in youth, when we are not afraid to dream, but become cloudy as we age and begin to believe that our Personal Legend is unattainable.

Santiago travels to Africa, where he works for a time for a crystal merchant, meets a professor whose Personal Legend is the study of alchemy, and moves on to an oasis in the desert. There he falls in love with a desert woman and meets the alchemist the professor is trying to find. From the various people he encounters, and from the sand, the wind, and everything around him, he learns secrets of the universe. Those secrets can be derived, the alchemist tells him, from even a single grain of sand, because everything is connected to everything else, all originating in the soul of the universe.

At various points, Santiago believes he should abandon his quest for treasure, perhaps to return to Andalusia and his life as a shepherd, perhaps to stay in the oasis. At various points he suffers setbacks (thieves and tribal wars are particularly vexing), but always finds new omens because the universe will always help us achieve our Personal Legend if we know how to understand the messages it sends us.

The novel fits into the book club’s self-help theme. We often hear from famous people that if you just persevere, you too can attain your dream. Perseverance is important, but it also helps to have the traits that success demands. Perhaps, however, our Personal Legends are always built from the traits we know we have.

When he’s not throwing footballs, Rodgers talks about embracing the present, opening the mind to new people and experiences, and not being deterred by obstacles. Those lessons are central to The Alchemist.

Paulo Cuelho’s message resonates with an enormous number of people. It is one of the bestselling books in history. There are denser, more complex novels that explore the same lessons in greater depth, sometimes with greater realism (Santiago’s ability to turn himself into the wind, or at least to communicate with the wind, the sun, and the hand that made all, make the novel allegorical rather than realistic). Perhaps The Alchemist is valued for its simplicity and the directness with which Cuelho spells out the novel’s inspirational lessons. Read on a different level — the level that had greater appeal to me—the novel tells an engaging adventure story about a likable boy who arguably comes of age by pursuing his dreams. Self-help enthusiasts will probably want to put The Alchemist high on their reading lists, although I’m guessing that most readers in that camp will have discovered the novel long ago.

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The Family by Naomi Krupitsky

Published by ‎G.P. Putnam's Sons on November 2, 2021

The Family isn’t quite a feminist version of The Godfather, but it does spotlight the role of two young women in a male-dominated crime family. Much of the time, their role is to fret and worry, but the two central  characters become an argument for the empowerment of women as they change the family dynamic.

Before World War II, two girls are born into an Italian crime family in New York. Sofia is the daughter of Joey Colicchio. Joey and his friend Carlo worked for Tommy Fianzo. Carlo wanted out of the Family business. To facilitate that goal, he began to skim some of the money that he has been tasked with collecting. Tommy noticed and Carlo disappeared. To assure that Joey didn’t turn against him, Tommy gave him a piece of the Family’s operation in Brooklyn in exchange of a slice of the profits.

For years, Carlo’s widow is a broken shell of a woman. She raises their daughter Antonia with the Family’s help. Sofia is Joey’s daughter. In their childhood, Antonia and Sofia are inseparable. They understand what happened to Carlo but they never talk about it. Separating family from the Family, they both realize, is a complicated task.

The story follows Antonia and Sofia into adulthood. Their lives are similar but with key differences. The same is true of their personalities. Antonia is reserved; Sofia is bold. They both marry men who work for the Family, despite the warning Antonia receives from her mother not to speak to boys with slicked back hair, Antonia views her husband as a security blanket. Sofia bases her choice on passion. She falls in love (and gets pregnant by) with a young Jewish man. Her husband must sell his soul to avoid Joey’s wrath.

Much of the novel focuses on the differences between the two women as they drift apart and come back together. Antonia is happy to be a wife and mother but would like to escape to a place that exists far from the Family that took her father away. Sonia wants something more than a domestic life. The Family might be the answer to her dreams if she can convince her father to let her play an untraditional role in a man’s world.

To the extent that The Family is a story about families, the story of Sonia’s husband, although saved for the last quarter of the novel, is its most compelling component. He is uprooted by the war, wonders if he will ever see his mother again, is made to disavow his heritage, and gets a glimpse (courtesy of a Jewish gangster) of the life he should have had and still desperately wants. He makes a dangerous choice that gives the novel its late-blooming drama.

Tension is slow to build, in part because Naomi Krupitsky devotes redundant passages to explaining exactly what Antonia and Sofia are feeling at all times in their lives. Neither woman has a moment of insecurity or regret that Krupitsky fails to express. A bit more showing and a bit less explaining would have tightened the story. Even at the end, a dramatic, fast-moving scene is slowed by a dissection of what the characters are feeling and what they recall of their past feelings. The reader just wants to know what’s going to happen. The walk to the story’s resolution should have been a sprint, or at least a jog.

The novel's redundant recitation of feelings is offset by Krupitsky’s fluid and evocative prose. The last quarter of the story is suspenseful and the ending is surprising. Sofia’s refusal to play a role written by the Family men seems to be the heart of the novel until Antonia has her own moment of truth — a moment that gives her a chance to grow as a woman in a man’s world of crime. The Family is a fresh and original take on the crime family genre.

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