Win by Harlan Coben

Published by Grand Central Publishing on March 16, 2021

Remember those crazy protesters who were flinging Molotov cocktails around in the early 1970s? You probably don’t because there were too few to remember. The story told in Win imagines a group called the Jane Street 6, perhaps very loosely based on the Chicago 7. The Jane Street 6 threw two Molotov cocktails at an empty building during a protest. An errant throw frightened a bus driver who drove into river, killing his passengers. Authorities were quick to blame the "hippy" protesters for the bus driver’s careless failure to maintain control of his bus, but that’s neither here nor there. The Jane Street 6 disappeared, amazing the public with their ability to remain hidden, except for one who reappeared, served a brief sentence, and disappeared again.

Flash forward to the present. A man is murdered in a luxury New York City apartment. The victim had possession of an expensive painting that was stolen from the Lockwood family. Circumstances bring Windsor Home Lockwood III into the investigation, in part because a suitcase believed to be his is found at the murder scene, making him a potential suspect. The murder victim turns out to be Ry Strauss, one of the Jane Street 6.

We soon learn that Patricia Lockwood, the daughter of the younger brother of Win’s father, was abducted when she was eighteen and held in a building where multiple young women had been tortured and murdered. Her father was killed during her abduction and two Lockwood paintings disappeared from the family estate. The reappearance of a painting in Strauss’ apartment suggests that he had some involvement in the abduction and perhaps the torture of multiple young women decades earlier.

The story follows Win as he tries to piece together the connections between the art theft, his sister’s abduction, and the fates of the various members of the Jane Street 6. Win’s investigative efforts bring him into contact with a couple of people, including a member of the underworld, who have a reason to seek revenge for the inadvertent deaths associated with the Jane Street 6. Making all the connections entails a fair amount of legwork, distracting Win from his normal routine of shagging rich women and beating up people who, in his judgment, deserve a good beating. He eventually uncovers family secrets that surprise him — not that he is particularly bothered by unpleasant surprises, as any aspect of life that doesn’t have a direct impact on his pursuit of gratification barely registers with him.

Fortunately, I don’t necessarily need to like the characters to like a book. If Win were real, I would dislike him intensely. He’s smug, self-righteous, and he answers the phone by saying “Articulate.” How annoying is that? He excuses all sorts of morally unsound behavior by claiming that life is full of gray areas about which we make judgment calls. I agree with that but disagree that gray areas excuse mayhem. His philosophy of life is based largely on “I’m important and you’re not” coupled with “might makes right,” although only when he is the one who exercises the might. Win is a friend of Myron Bolitar, a Harlan Coben character I really like, and I frankly don’t understand why someone like Bolitar wouldn’t detest someone like Win. But they aren’t real people and they have been fictional buddies for years, so I’m not going to fret about it.

It is enough for me that Coben, an inconsistent storyteller, assembled a clever and reasonably credible puzzle in Win. And Win Lockwood is admittedly an interesting character, if only because he’s irritating and a bit loathsome but not quite reprehensible. His presence is tolerable as long as he advances the plot, and he manages to carry the story forward at a steady pace. Win is in many ways enjoyable, but I’ve been waiting five years for a new Myron Bolitar novel. While Win is a decent supporting character in a Bolitar novel, I’d rather spend my time with Bolitar.

RECOMMENDED

The Power Couple by Alex Berenson

Published by Simon & Schuster on February 9, 2021

Most novels that involve a kidnapped child — “a parent’s worst nightmare,” the blurbs usually say — emphasize parental anxiety. Those novels tend to be intolerably weepy and overly obvious in their manipulation of the reader’s emotions. They also tend to be formulaic. Either a resilient parent or a determined cop, or both acting together, foil the captor just before their child is about to be defiled or murdered, The End.

Alex Berenson gives the kidnapped child novel a new twist. Kira Unsworth is a lucky teen vacationing with her brother and parents in Europe. Rebecca works for the FBI and Brian is a coder for the NSA. Those jobs have decent pay — and they need it, the way Rebecca burns through money to signal her social status — but their financial security came from the two million dollars that Brian made, out of the blue, by developing and selling a gambling app.

Kira meets a young stud in a bar in Paris, then agrees to meet him again the next evening in a bar in Barcelona. She thinks she is being careful during her drinking and dancing spree, but she ends up being kidnapped. Her frantic parents use their law enforcement pull to get the authorities to search for her, but the captors were smooth and didn’t leave behind any obvious clues. Kira frets that she’s not being held for ransom but will be sold to a sheik as a hot American sex toy.

The first half of The Power Couple is interesting but ordinary, somewhat formulaic without making a concerted attempt to tug the reader’s heartstrings. In fact, sympathizing with either of the parents would be difficult, because they are both unlikable. That’s what makes the first half interesting. Rebecca is a workaholic who runs the marriage and (until he made two million bucks) always viewed her husband as being insufficiently ambitious and perhaps a bit slow-witted. Brian probably does lack ambition but he views his wife as an emasculating, power-hungry woman who doesn’t appreciate the contributions he brings to the table. Apart from decent parenting, Brian’s contributions are mostly nonexistent before he contributes money from the app, but that doesn’t stop Brian from resenting his wife for resenting him.

The story changes completely in the second half for reasons that, to avoid spoilers, I won’t discuss. The plot kicks off in a new and much better direction, encouraging the reader to rethink the reason for Kira’s kidnapping. The characters remain unsympathetic, apart from Kira who demonstrates some ass-kicking resilience that she probably inherited from her mother. If anything, her parents become even more unlikable: Brian, because he becomes more callous and self-centered (apart from his apparent love of his kids); and Kira, because (like most thriller cops) she’s quick to abuse her authority when the law gets in her way, and she’s more interested in vengeance than justice.

The novel’s ending is a bit disappointing — it's predictable and anticlimactic — but that doesn’t detract from the better chapters that precede it. This isn’t Alex Berenson’s best book, but the familiar beginning and disappointing ending bookend an entertaining plot that rises above the typical kidnapped child thriller.

RECOMMENDED

Fast Ice by Clive Cussler and Graham Brown

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on March 9, 2021

Who knows how much Clive Cussler contributed to Fast Ice and how much was written by Graham Brown? Cussler died about a year ago, but the Cussler factory is still going strong. If Cussler contributed at all, I imagine his contribution was something like this:

Cussler: “Okay, here’s the idea. A steerable iceberg. Cool, right? The bad guys are using it to, get this, create a new Ice Age. Then Kurt Austin steps in and saves the world. How’s that for awesome?”

Brown: “How are the bad guys creating an Ice Age?”

Cussler: “Do I have to do all the thinking here? Get me a first draft of the manuscript by Thursday. And send in my son. I’ve got a great idea for a new Dirk Pitt novel.”

Brown: “I’m on it boss.”

Okay, maybe I’m wrong, but Fast Ice certainly has the feel of a factory novel. The NUMA Files novels have always had co-authors, so how much of the writing is Cussler’s has always been unknown. Fast Ice is all action, doing little to build on characters that Cussler co-developed over the course of the series. That’s a hallmark of factory fiction; factory writers don’t feel free to alter characters who were brought to life by their original creators. But factory novels that trade on the name of a dead author, whether Ludlum, Parker, Crichton, or Cussler, can be good books, even if the odds are stacked against them. Fast Ice is no better than average.

Writers of modern thrillers seem to be competing to outdo each other with outlandish plots. The idea behind Fast Ice (apart from the steerable iceberg) is the notion that someone who views global warming as a signal that humanity needs to change decides to change the world by wiping humanity out. Not entirely, but mostly. Ryland Lloyd buys up islands and stretches of land along the equator that are likely to avoid the worst impact of the new Ice Age he wants to create. He and the others he invites to live there will survive to repopulate the planet with environmentally sensitive descendants after the ice recedes.

Preposterous? Oh yeah. A good bit of animal and vegetative life that the Ice Age will wipe out will never return, so the idea that Lloyd would believe he’s doing a good thing is hard to accept. But Lloyd is a madman so set that aside. Surely even a madman would understand that every government with a military (meaning every government) will eventually try to seize and claim the equatorial region as its own. Lloyd doesn’t have a military, so his belief that property ownership will mean anything as most of the planet freezes is too naïve for even a mad genius to embrace.

Apart from the silly premise, Fast Ice reads like a typical thriller. Austin and his buddy Joe Zavala travel to a ship that is about to sink because a former NUMA member may have been aboard. The former NUMAn was investigating a phenomenon that involves algae and a Nazi plan to block ports by clogging them with fast-growing ice. They eventually tumble to Lloyd’s scheme, which sends them to Antarctica, where chases ensue on snowmobiles and iceboats. Various action scenes involving shootouts, explosions, a helicopter ride during a hurricane, and an attempt to capture an iceberg keep the story moving so that the reader doesn’t have to think about its implausibility.

The characters are true to their previously defined personalities, trading quips as they go about their business of saving the world and avoiding death. Neither the characters nor the quips are particularly interesting. The characters never seem to be in actual danger. Bullets fly but, at worst, they might mess up the part of Austin’s hair. The scenes on the iceberg, in fact, seem entirely too easy. But the story moves quickly and has enough entertaining moments to distract fans of action novels as they await a more credible action novel with greater depth — a scarce commodity in the modern world of thrillers.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

2034 by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis

Published by Penguin Press on March 9, 2021

2034 is a geopolitical thriller set in — you guessed it — 2034. It blends diplomacy with military fiction to create the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse. Will the world end in nuclear strikes or will cooler heads prevail? I won’t tell, but I will say that I didn’t know how the story would end until it ended.

The primary boogeyman in 2034 is China. Russia and Iran and the United States contribute to the unnecessary escalation of hostilities while India plays a surprisingly central role after the war heats up. The tension begins as China continues to assert its false claim of sovereignty over all of the South China Sea. The US Navy is patrolling the area to minimize Chinese aggression when the Chinese reveal their cyber supremacy by disabling communications and most electronic systems on the Navy’s ships and airplanes. They also sink a couple of American warships and hack the communications systems of the US government. Meanwhile, Iran uses the same technology to take remote control of an American F-35 that has not-so-accidentally strayed into Iranian territory to test its new stealth capacity. Frankly, any country that breaks the rules to see if they can get away with it should have its toys taken away, but the American government obviously doesn’t see it that way.

A character with a John Bolton attitude toward American supremacy tells the American president to retaliate. Sandeep Chowdhury, a deputy national security advisor, is a voice of moderation in the administration but he doesn’t have the president’s ear. Lin Bao is a voice of moderation in the Chinese government, but he becomes a convenient scapegoat when things go wrong. Chowdhury’s uncle in India, Vice Admiral Patel, makes an informal attempt to act as peacemaker — as in, “you guys make peace or else” — leaving the reader to wonder whether good sense will prevail over an increasing escalation of strikes that will eventually assure the absence of winners.

Other notable characters include Major General Qassem Farshad, who doesn’t appreciate Iran’s role in this mess and is rewarded for expressing that opinion by being tasked with defending the Hormuz Strait islands against a Russian invasion. The pilot who lost his fighter to Iran, a man named Wedge who is the fourth generation in a family of Marine pilots, relishes the opportunity to lead a squadron of Hornets in an attack against China. The Hornet is the only available aircraft that can still be flown after all their electronic communications systems and computers are ripped out to prevent them from being hacked and hijacked. Sarah Hunt, the commodore of the squadron that mostly sinks in the initial conflict with the Chinese, does not relish her return to command after she learns that the war is about to become very ugly.

Road to Military Apocalypse novels have been around for decades. The plot’s familiarity does not detract from the story’s ability to engage the reader. The authors build tension by personalizing the story, showcasing characters who know what they stand to lose if hawks and despots prevail. It is, after all, the impact of events on people, rather than events themselves, that give a novel its heart. If Wedge comes across as a clichéd character, he is at least a likable cliché. Hunt could use an infusion of personality. Choudhury, Lin Bao, and Farshad are better characters simply because they each display more than one dimension.

While the action scenes are exciting — Wedge’s attempt to elude superior fighters in his stripped-down Hornet is a particularly entertaining segment — the authors made a smart choice by giving more attention to political conflicts than military battles. Spreading those conflicts across China, Iran, and the US (rather than focusing solely on American players) contributes to the story’s interest. The authors give the story a twist by making a convincing argument for India as a key global player. The anti-Chinese sentiment of Americans who don’t know the difference between a Chinese-American and a Chinese politburo member adds another nice touch to a story that, in the end, reminds us that America is about opportunity and unity, not supremacy and division.

RECOMMENDED

The Scapegoat by Sara Davis

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on March 2, 2021

The Scapegoat is proudly promoted as a postmodern novel. “Postmodern” is a red flag that often warns “this novel won’t make much sense.” The narrator, who views himself as a “glorified secretary” employed by Stanford’s medical school, decides to investigate the death of his father, who taught there as a professor. A school official is aware that the narrator’s father has “moved on” from Stanford but seems unaware of his death. Perhaps the narrator is confused about his father’s death. That would not be surprising, as the narrator is in a constant state of confusion, which necessarily leaves the reader confused.

The narrator describes his dreams, then sees people he recognizes from the dreams, people who disappear when he looks again. He sometimes mistakes one person for another — unless the person has transformed from one to the other. A key character who is about to meet an unfortunate fate seems to be a guest lecturer and then a graduate student and then the narrator’s mother, all within minutes. Sometimes characters have conversations with the narrator despite his failure to speak a word (or to remember that he has spoken), answering questions he didn’t ask (or doesn’t recall asking).

The narrator is doing his best to ignore people but sometimes recognizes them, almost as if he does so against his will. The narrator’s father was apparently absent quite often during the narrator’s childhood, or at least that’s what the narrator recalls. The narrator evidently has unhappy feelings about the mother who raised him. Perhaps this accounts for the narrator’s isolation, his determined attempt to avoid all social contact despite the characters who keep intruding on his solitude.

The narrator “herds” himself “from one confusion to the next” in a story that attaches great importance to a hotel room, a briefcase, and a paperweight shaped like a whale. The guest lecturer keeps popping into his life, apparently holding but concealing the key to some of the novel’s mysteries. What are the circumstances of his father’s death, assuming his father is dead? Why did his father check into a hotel using a fake name? Or is Shriver actually his name?

The hotel seems to have been built on the site of a California mission where a genocidal event occurred — perhaps it is now a tourist attraction for that reason — but how does the narrator’s father connect to the hotel that he apparently played some role in opening? What was his father doing in the hotel? Did the briefcase that the narrator found in the guest lecturer’s hotel room belong to his father? Is a briefcase that he later retrieves from the hotel the same briefcase, given that it is no longer covered in or stained by blood? Don’t expect any of these questions to be answered. The few answers that suggest themselves are not necessarily reliable.

As I understand it, the idea of postmodern literature is the recognition that meaning is subjective, that a story can have many meanings, or whatever meaning you want to ascribe to it. That seems true of all art, but postmodern writers often manufacture ambiguous, contradictory, or impossible events and then challenge the reader to interpret them. But why should I? a reader might ask. Perhaps the question is a sign that the reader is too lazy to engage in interpretive thought, or perhaps the reader thinks that the author is being lazy by stringing together a bunch of nonsense and saying, “You figure it out.” Both viewpoints are valid — in fact, in the postmodern world, everything is valid.

I am not a big fan of postmodern fiction, so perhaps I am one of those lazy readers who thinks the author should take responsibility for telling an intelligible story, perhaps leaving room for the reader to interpret ambiguities or symbols or to imagine what happens after the final chapter without sacrificing the coherence of traditional storytelling. There’s nothing wrong with making a reader think, but if I wanted to invent my own story, I’d be writing novels, not reading them. And if the story’s events are just a fiction within a fiction, are the events worthy of attention? If there’s no difference between a story and a dream, shouldn’t the story, like a dream, be quickly forgotten?

If I were to interpret The Scapegoat, I might guess that the narrator has a brain tumor, which would explain his apparent tendency to faint or black out or misremember or misperceive. But that interpretation might add a level of rationality to a novel that is intended to operate under rules that don’t exist in the rational world.

I have enjoyed some postmodern novels simply because they are whacky and playful, or because they accomplish the postmodernist goal of making me see the world in a different way. I was intrigued by The Scapegoat — the novel held my interest — but, promotional promises notwithstanding, I wasn't sufficiently "mesmerized" to spend significant time trying to make sense of it. The narrator tells us several times that nothing in his world makes sense. I agree, making it a world that I wouldn’t want to visit again, interesting though it might be.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS