Never Far Away by Michael Koryta

Published by Little, Brown and Company on February 9, 2021

Thrillerworld has a plentiful supply of “mother fights ferociously to protect her children” novels. Most of them aren’t very good. Never Far Away is well above average.

Michael Koryta’s plot has quite a few moving parts, but the story avoids needless complexity. At its center is a woman named Leah Trenton. At least, that’s her current name. When she was Nina Morgan, she gave the FBI information about her employer, the Lowery Group. The information caused trouble for Corson Lowery and his family. Lowery came after her and she didn’t want her family in the line of fire. For the sake of her husband and two children, she faked her death and disappeared.

Ten years later, Leah has made a new life for herself as a wilderness guide in Maine. She’s a former Air Force pilot but she didn’t let the seaplane pilot with whom she had partnered know about her flying skill, for fear that her background would make her easier to trace. They’ve invested in six remote cabins that they are remodeling as part of their wilderness excursion business.

Things seem to be going well until Leah’s husband dies in an accident. Following instructions her father drummed into her years earlier, Leah’s daughter Hailey calls Leah, believing Leah to be an aunt she has never met. Leah takes custody of her son Nick and daughter Hailey, then brings them to Maine, hoping that Lowery will not suspect that she is still alive.

Seasoned thriller readers can imagine where the story goes from there. Lowery sends killers after Leah, who makes it her mission to protect her kids. One of the killers, appropriately named Bleak, is a quintessential thriller villain, devoid of conscience or empathy. Leah tries to get help from the friend who helped her fake her death but worries that contacting him has imperiled his life. The two killers are eventually joined by a mysterious man named Dax Blackwell, whose family has done business with Lowery in the past. Shootouts ensue.

The story is enlivened by Hailey’s teenage attitude. She doesn’t appreciate being removed from her home and her friends. She really doesn’t like the Maine woods, where she can’t get consistent cellphone reception. She sort of likes a student at her new school named Matt Bouchard, who has an obvious crush on her, if only because Matt has promised to help her gather information that Hailey might need to get back home. Hailey is no fan of Leah, whom she regards as an aunt who never bothered to visit. Before Leah can explain that she’s actually Hailey’s mother, a conversation that might not go well, the aforementioned shootouts intrude on their family drama.

The shootouts give Leah a chance to prove that she’s no pushover. When Matt and her business partner find themselves in harm’s way, Leah’s priority of saving her kids is joined with her need to save other innocents who have been dragged into her thriller plot. All of that gives Leah a chance to shine, both as a thriller hero and as a decent human being.

Koryta keeps Never Far Away moving at a steady pace while taking the time to define his characters with sentences like, “The man had a shaved head and dark, observant eyes and was all lean muscle, no body fat, as if he bench-pressed any incoming carbohydrate before he ate it.” Writers who craft such imaginative prose will always keep me reading if they use the prose to tell an interesting story. Koryta does that.

Unlike most modern thrillers, I never questioned the credibility of Koryta’s plot. His characters seem fully capable of getting themselves into the predicaments that drive the story. Tension builds nicely until the story reaches a satisfying conclusion. Prose, plot, and characterization combine to make Never Far Away a transcendent take on the overused “mother protects her kids” thriller.

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Kindred by Octavia Butler

First published in 1979; anthologized by the Library of America in Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories on January 19, 2021

Kindred, Octavia Butler’s first and most widely praised novel, tells the story of a black woman who is repeatedly transported from Los Angeles in 1976 to Maryland in the years before the Civil War. Dana Franklin makes the journey each time the life of her ancestor, Rufus Weylin, is threatened. Her trips have a purpose: to save the life of Rufus, the white son of a slave owner, so that he can make a slave named Alice pregnant and begin the lineage that will eventually lead to Dana’s existence.

Dana makes about a half dozen trips to the past, one time bringing her white husband, Kevin, with her. From her perspective, some of the journeys last for months. She only returns to her own time when she experiences an intense fear of death. In the present, she realizes she has only been missing for a few hours.

In a time when people who live on the fringe continue to celebrate the Confederacy and its generals, when southern schools still teach children that the Civil War was “the war of Northern aggression,” Kindred should be — and is, in any schools — required reading. Butler’s description of slavery is vivid. The lives of slaves are depicted in the same detail as the lives of their masters, the key difference being the status of slaves as property. Butler emphasizes the ease with which their masters accept their entitlement to use their property as they wish. Slaves have no right to refuse orders, whether to labor in the fields or sleep with the master. Disobedience is punished with the whip. More severe punishments are inflicted on slaves who try to run away. The most troublesome slaves — those who won’t be broken — are sold to Southern states where life will be even worse. Education of slaves is prohibited because it might encourage them to think of themselves as equal to whites. Yet many whites are also poorly educated; Rufus can barely read.

Kindred is not just an indictment of slavery. Butler explores the economic and social forces that motivated the South to rebel rather than recognize that black people were entitled to the same rights as white people. Rufus is not an entirely evil man, although he is not a good man. He loves Alice but, after he buys her, he feels he has the right to rape her — an act he regrets only in its aftermath. He is more kind to Dana than he is to his slaves but rescinds the kindness when he feels a need to punish her. He struggles with whether he should free the children he fathers with Alice. Rufus is the son of a man who values slaves only for their ability to work and to breed children that he can sell. Rufus has not fallen far from the tree but progress in American history has been incremental. Rufus is Butler’s example of a white man who has taken the first baby steps toward attitudinal change.

When Kevin is stuck in the past after Dana returns to the present, Dana worries that the intervening years before they reunite may have altered Kevin’s view of race. That fear is a product of Dana’s understanding that society shapes perceptions and that resisting the pressure of racial peers to see the world from their perspective requires strength and courage. That understanding helps Dana fight to retain her identity when slaves mock her for dressing like a man (she wears pants) and talking like a white person. Yet she can’t do much to help the slaves with whom she lives — she understands the boundaries she must not cross — because the scant protection she receives by posing as Kevin’s property won’t save her from brutality if she tries to force twentieth century beliefs upon eighteenth century slaveowners.

The complexity of Dana’s character is also illustrated by the moral choice she must make when Alice — who was once a free woman — is prepared to die rather than continue living as Rufus’ mate. Dana can well understand that feeling, but if Alice dies without giving birth to the child who will be Dana’s ancestor, Dana will never be born. She encourages Alice to stay with Rufus not just to save Alice’s life, but for the more selfish purpose of assuring her own survival.

The Trump administration was justly criticized for advocating a sanitized version of American history that it characterized as “patriotic.” The curriculum advocated by Trump's Department of Education surely has no place for a book that reveals historical truth as effectively as Kindred. Americans can’t expect to move past racial division until every child understands that slavery wasn't just another form of employment. Flying the Confederate flag, memorializing generals who fought to maintain the institution of slavery, and whitewashing American history are not the acts of patriots. An education grounded in American exceptionalism rather than the truth of America's past is founded on dishonesty and exclusion. Every student — and every adult — who gets a sense of the true meaning of slavery by reading Kindred will have a deeper understanding of how racial division continues to be shaped by dehumanizing attitudes that were widespread in the years before the Civil War.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Khalil by Yasmina Khadra

First published in France in 2018; published in translation by Doubleday/ Nan A. Talese on February 16, 2021

Written in the first person, Khalil is an impressive examination of the key months in a young terrorist’s life. Yasmina Khadra imagines how a man whose mind has been twisted by religious zealotry might respond when his mission of destruction goes wrong.

Khalil was raised and lives in a suburb of Brussels, along with his twin sister Zahra (whose husband repudiated her after a brief marriage) and his older sister Yezza (who works in a sweatshop). Apart from Zahra, Khalil resents his family. Yezza has mental health issues that may have been exacerbated by an exorcism, or perhaps by religious traditions for which she is ill-suited. Khalil views his parents as parasites. He considers his buddies to be his family, the streets to be his home, the mosque to be his private club. He happily dropped out of high school with his best friend Driss. Under the tutelage of a man named Lyès, Khalil found a path that gave his life purpose: “to serve God, and to avenge myself on those who had reduced me to a thing.”

As the novel begins, Khalil is in Paris, one of four suicide bombers who have been chosen to attack the city. Driss will blow himself up after joining the crowd leaving a soccer stadium; Khalil will explode his vest while standing in a crowded line to board a train. To Khalil’s shame, something goes wrong and his vest does not detonate. He spends much of the novel trying to understand what happened; the explanations he receives leave him puzzled.

The reader is encouraged to understand why Khalil is a terrorist, despite being surrounded by Muslims — including Rayan, another childhood friend — who deplore terrorists. He does not want to reveal the crime he tried to commit, but he occasionally argues with people who have a very different view of what their mutual religion teaches about love and violence. Rayan tries to persuade him that “God’s not a warlord, much less the boss of a criminal organization” and that the Quran teaches “that if someone kills a human being, it’s as if he’s killed all humanity.” Yet Khalil rejects Rayan for marrying an infidel, choosing pleasure over restraint, and abandoning God. Whether Islamism is Islam is a question that pervades the novel.

Khalil offers a serious look at how a terrorist might be created and how, faced with the unexpected consequences of a terrorist act that hit close to home, a terrorist might begin to question his own dogma. Khalil isn’t a likable guy — apart from contemplating mass murder, he’s incredibly judgmental about most people, particularly women who don’t cover their faces — but the story is intended to make us understand Khalil, not to admire him. The novel builds tension as Khalil positions himself for another suicide assignment. Khalil is young; whether his destiny has been written is a question the reader will ponder until the last page reveals a satisfying answer.

RECOMMENDED

Relentless by Mark Greaney

Published by Berkley on February 16, 2021

Action thrillers with shootouts and fist fights and Middle Eastern terrorists usually range in quality from mediocre to bad. Mark Greaney’s novels are a happy exception. He’s produced ten Gray Man novels since 2009. The protagonist, Court Gentry, hasn’t changed much over the course of the series — apart from falling in love and stressing about feeling vulnerable because of it — but Gentry doesn’t really need to change. He’s an action hero. His job is to save the world and to entertain readers while he works. Thanks to Greaney’s ability to link action scenes together like cars on a runaway train, Relentless is another thrill ride.

Gentry starts the novel in a hospital bed, recovering from stab wounds and a nasty infection. That doesn’t stop the CIA’s DDO, Matt Hanley, from giving him a new assignment after being assured that Gentry might live for at least a week if he’s unplugged from his IV. Gentry is an off-the-books deniable asset, one of a few who are pressed into Hanley’s service when he doesn’t want an operation to leave American footprints. Another off-the-books asset, Zack Hightower, went to Venezuela to interrogate Clark Drummond, an NSA computer scientist who left his job, taking with him a database of every spy in the world and new facial recognition software that will tag the spies whenever they are captured by a camera. Unfortunately, Hightower was tagged by the software so it’s Gentry’s turn to track down Drummond.

A couple of gun battles later, the task is finished, but not before Gentry discovers that he’s not the only person looking for Drummond. An elite team of mercenaries working for an Israeli-owned company has been hired by the United Arab Emirates. They confront Gentry in Venezuela, not quite knowing why Gentry is there. They’re soon chasing Gentry around the globe as their mission expands.

Speaking of mercenaries, Gentry’s girlfriend, Zoya Zakharova, a former Russian spy and another of Hanley’s deniable assets, has infiltrated Shrike Group, a mysterious company that has recruited operatives from espionage agencies around the world. She begins working on a project that monitors Iranian activities in the EU. Zoya assumes that the client is Israel but Shrike doesn’t let its employees know anything about its clients. We eventually learn that any assumptions made about Shrike and its clients are likely to be false.

That setup all occurs early in the story. Greaney throws a lot of information at the reader before going turning the action up to 11. Gentry learns that Zoya has likely been outed to her former Russian masters so he goes to Berlin to watch her back. What seems to be an Iranian plot to attack the American embassy in Berlin sets the stage for a more sinister plot by someone who isn’t technically an American enemy. Gentry and Zoya team up, eventually bringing Hightower back into the story, and chapters are filled with flying bullets and exploding drones as our improbably unkillable heroes take on an army of terrorists and mercenaries.

I appreciate the fact that in most of these novels, Gentry is fairly apolitical. He goes after bad guys without demonizing them because of their nationality. He avoids killing innocent people because he doesn’t see humans as collateral who can morally be sacrificed as part of a risk assessment. He trades quips with Hightower and worries that Zoya, who appreciates fine art, is too good for him. In short, at least in recent books, there’s no reason not to like Gentry. That makes it easy for an action novel fan to like the Gray Man books, regardless of the reader’s politics.

Gentry’s career has gone through an evolution, from agent to outlaw who was unfairly hunted by his agency to independent contractor. The end of the novel changes his life again. It’s good to keep a series fresh and, so far, the Gray Man series shows no signs of growing stale.

RECOMMENDED

The Mission House by Carys Davies

Published by Scribner on February 16, 2021

“Why is it a condition of life that we are made to love things if we are only to lose them?” Hilary Byrd asks himself sad questions throughout The Mission House. Whether he will find satisfactory answers to any of life’s riddles is the question that drives the reader’s interest in Byrd’s unremarkable life.

The reader is not told much about Hilary Byrd, but we know that his life was touched by tragedy during the Troubles. His sister Wyn may be his last friend, but even that relationship is strained. Byrd is in his early 50s. He spent half his life as a librarian in the UK.  Byrd particularly enjoyed the library’s alcove of dictionaries in multiple languages and was disheartened when they were replaced by computers. He was fond of discovering words that had fallen out of use and felt saddened by their demise. His favorite forgotten word of the Norn language is dagw’’ilj’’ (pronounced dag-wall-gee), a word that means “to work continuously with poor result.” The unwanted dictionaries and forgotten words (particularly dagw’’ilj’’) might be symbolic of Byrd’s life.

Now Byrd is traveling and has made his way to India, a country that is much too hot for him. Taking a train to the mountains, where the heat is reputed to be less oppressive, he meets a kind Padre who offers him a good rate on a bungalow near the Padre’s church. The cottage was last occupied by a Canadian missionary named Henry Page.

Byrd is happy with the simple life that the cottage offers. He engages a fellow named Jamshed to drive him to the village each day in an auto rickshaw. Byrd uses these excursions to purchase food and browse books in the village library, where he learns how British rule has affected the town and the Toda people who are indigenous to the mountain region. Byrd occasionally converses with Jamshed but usually ignores him. Jamshed keeps a journal of his interactions with Byrd and fantasizes about having an enduring friendship with the man.

Jamshed’s nephew is Ravi, who works as the town barber and dreams of becoming a country-western singer. He has acquired a Stetson hat and a horse named Stephen. Ravi might also be hoping to acquire Priscilla, the young woman who lives in the presbytery with the Padre, who hopes to one day find her a suitable husband, suitable meaning “a good Christian man.” Priscilla has a short right leg and no thumbs, disabilities that, in the Padre’s view, might make her unmarriageable.

The foolishness of aging men is a central theme of The Mission House. At first with fear and then with hope, Byrd wonders whether the Padre might be thinking of him as a suitable husband for Priscilla. As he warms to the idea, he searches his conversations with the Padre for clues and gives them an optimistic spin but is invariably disappointed when the Padre mentions other potential suitors. He fears being judged a fool if he expresses any interest in Priscilla, even as he considers purchasing an engagement ring. “As long as he held it all inside himself, his feelings and everything he is doing, it seemed to him as if anything was possible.” Priscilla thinks of Byrd as a kindly uncle because he is helping her learn to sew and make scones and read English. Whether she will return Byrd’s affection seems unlikely, but who knows what might happen?

Byrd’s longing for Priscilla builds the foundation for the novel’s gentle humor. Byrd begins to dress in Henry Page’s clothes in the hope that they will make him look younger. He begins to attend church (despite having renounced Christian faith) because the Padre thinks Priscilla should have a Christian husband. (Nobody has consulted Priscilla, who views religion with a jaundiced eye.) Jamshed’s fascination with Byrd and Ravi’s pursuit of a country music career add to the story’s comic appeal.

Despite its humor, The Mission House is ultimately an exploration of lonely people who are discouraged by life. In both the Bible and the fairy tales that Priscilla is learning to read, she sees “considerable suffering and occasional joy and people doing all kinds of ugly things to each other,” an observation that sums up life as experienced by most of the novel’s characters. Like Byrd and Priscilla, Jamshed and Ravi and Henry Page are all vaguely disappointed with their lives. But The Mission House is also a novel of hope. Byrd comes to realize that his trip to the mountains in India has changed him for the better. The changes are small, but he had new experiences, learned new things, and even experienced a new love. Perhaps embracing small improvements in life rather than obsessing about unfulfilled desires is the key to living a good life.

Yet living a good life might mean putting aside one’s own desires and making sacrifices for the benefit of others. The novel’s unexpected ending is inspired by the rise of a Hindu nationalist party in India and, like nationalism everywhere, an intolerance of different religions and people who come from other places. The ending isn’t quite out of the blue — it is foreshadowed by Byrd’s reading and by chance remarks — but it changes the novel’s tone in a way that is almost shocking. There’s no need to be put off by that warning because the ending is left open, giving optimistic readers a chance to believe that good things might ultimately happen to people who prove their goodness in unexpected ways.

Still, the novel is more personal than political. The depth of its characterization and the unanswered questions it poses are as nourishing as Carys Davies’ meticulous prose. The juxtaposition of decent characters and the indecent world they inhabit makes The Mission House a layered novel that springs a new surprise with every chapter.

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