Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on December 3, 2024

Gabriel’s Moon is the sort of book that Hitchcock would have filmed. It has a plot he favored — an innocent man is caught up in a cloak-and-dagger world, manipulated by people he thought he could trust until they try to kill him, forcing him to use his wits to survive.

The story takes place during the Cold War. It builds on evidence that President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to assassinate the Congo’s new Prime Minister because of his paranoid belief that Patrice Lumumba was too cozy with communists. The CIA has never been a friend of democracy.

Gabriel Dax is a London-based travel writer. He’s also something of a part-time spy. His brother Sefton works for the Foreign Office and, although they are not close (“both of them recognized their essential incompatibility”), Sefton occasionally asks Gabriel for a favor — hand delivering a small package to someone in Copenhagen, for example. Gabriel’s work, including a position with a leftwing magazine, gives him an excuse to travel, and he doesn’t mind earning extra money by performing clandestine tasks that seem reasonably safe.

Gabriel is working on a book about rivers, juxtaposing familiar waters like the Mississippi and unfamiliar (to the British anyway) locales like Hattiesburg. Rivers are a familiar metaphor for the flow of a life, and Gabriel recognizes that his own runs “underground, more like a sewer than a river.”

A writing assignment for the magazine takes him to Léopoldville, in the newly independent republic of the Congo, where an old friend from university is now the Minister of Health. He records an interview with Lumumba, who rambles a bit about Eisenhower’s plot to assassinate him, spearheaded by three names Gabriel doesn’t recognize. After Lumumba is murdered, the tape recordings prove to be more dangerous for Gabriel than any clandestine work he does for his brother.

Flying back from the Congo, Gabriel notices an attractive woman reading one of his travel books. After he encounters the woman again, he learns that their meetings are not a coincidence, that she — Faith Green — is also a spy. Soon he finds himself doing favors for her. Faith sends him to Spain to purchase drawings from an artist and deliver them to someone else. The "someone else" turns out to be Kit Caldwell, the CIA station chief in Madrid. The tasks pay well and Gabriel gets a buzz from working undercover.

As the story progresses, it becomes unclear whether Caldwell is a good guy or a bad guy, but Gabriel helps him when he seems to be in a pickle, perhaps because he senses that labels don’t matter in the shadowy world of espionage. Caldwell seems to be a decent person regardless of his ideology. The truth about Caldwell comes as something of a surprise, but there are bigger surprises to come. That’s one of the joys of spy novels; characters are so often not what they seem.

The story opens with a fire that burned down Gabriel’s childhood home. Gabriel has always lived with the belief that a candle in a moon-shaped nightlight in his room caused the fire. He has untrustworthy memories of seeing his mother on the kitchen floor and knowing that she was dead before he was rescued. His adult sessions with a therapist to treat his insomnia give the reader insight into his personality. Gabriel recovers important memories after following his therapist’s advice to learn more about the events surrounding his mother’s death, developing a critical story within the larger plot.

Gabriel’s personality evolves during his relationship with Faith, about whom he becomes a bit obsessive. Gabriel gains self-confidence as he overcomes obstacles, including near-death experiences, but is he sufficiently confident to deal honestly with his attraction to Faith? The question becomes moot when he discovers her true nature — and his own.

Ultimately, Gabriel’s Moon is about the birth and maturation of a spy. By the end, Gabriel would like to return to his life as a writer, but like joining the mob, once you enter the world of espionage, there’s no way to leave. Perhaps that means that Gabriel Dax will turn up again. As a spy novel fan, I can only hope that’s true, as William Boyd knows how to mix suspense, intrigue, and amgibuity, the key ingredients of a good spy thriller.

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The Answer Is No by Fredrik Backman

Published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on December 1, 2024

Love is not for the selfish. Fortunately for Lucas, he is happy to be selfish and doesn’t care about being unloved. Lucas believes that “responsibility” and “commitment” are “two of the easiest ways of ruining any perfectly good day.” Lucas prefers to be free to do what he wants when he wants without considering the competing desires of other people. He also understands the danger of starting conversations. “If you ask people what they think, they start thinking, and that’s how wars start.”

Narrating “The Answer Is No,” Lucas tells the reader that there is something perfect about not having to share a pint of ice cream. He recommends “being really content with your life and not immediately thinking: Wow, now everything is really perfect, maybe we should have a baby?” Because a baby introduces another person in your life, and other people are the source of all unhappiness.

It's not that Lucas dislikes other people. He just has no need to interact with them. He appreciates the people who cook his pad thai and those who deliver it to his door, but he is happier if he doesn’t need to speak with them. To those who maintain that humans are herd animals who need to be together, he counters that “humans have historically proved to be in-need-of-therapy animals,” the need for therapy being triggered by keeping company with other humans.

Lucas likes to be left alone so he can drink wine and play video games. He feels sorry for people who want something to happen in their lives. Lucas “lives in an apartment, which he would consider the perfect form of storage for people, were it not for the great virus of civilization: neighbors.” His default response when a neighbor wants something is to tell them no.

Some of Lucas’ neighbors want him to help solve the mystery of a frying pan that a tenant discarded outside — almost on the sidewalk! — and Lucas has just managed to talk them into going away when his downstairs neighbor appears. She’s upset that he changed his internet password and is affronted when he accuses her of stealing his internet. It isn’t stealing, after all, if she only takes the little bit of the internet that leaks into her apartment.

Craziness ensues, primarily in the form of a large and ever-growing junk pile that originated with the frying pan, a committee of three crazy residents who place Lucas in charge of the pile, and a group of men who worship Lucas because they are convinced he is an angel. Eccentric people are Fredrik Backman’s bread and butter, the kind of people who make random comments like “I usually keep my peanuts next to a jar of peanut butter, so they understand what I’m capable of!” Other characters, like a woman who is hiding from an abusive husband by pretending to be in a coma, are more poignant. Backman also pokes fun at official and unofficial bureaucrats, protestors, middle managers, Facebook groups, and self-help advice.

Lucas might not be a reader’s ideal neighbor, but he sometimes expresses wise thoughts, including his recognition that some people are more interested in blaming and punishing people for the problems they cause (like a discarded frying pan) than in solving the problems (by, for example, picking up the frying pan). When the lone frying pan turns into a pile of trash (it’s easier to break the rules when someone else has paved the way), everyone in the neighborhood tries to guess at the culprits’ identities, “which somehow always seem to be people who don’t look like the people who are doing the guessing.”

Naturally, Lucas will feel himself making connections as the story progresses. He might despise himself for behaving socially, he might feel feverish as he comes down with a case of empathy, but working together with neighbors helps him solve some problems (although yes, other people are always the problem). But that doesn’t mean that Lucas needs to change his entire philosophy of life. His final plan to avoid responsibility and commitment is fitting and funny.

This is a short story, but sufficiently long — and sufficiently entertaining — that readers in need of a laugh might not feel bad about paying a couple of bucks to enjoy it.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

The House of Cross by James Patterson

Published by ‎ Little, Brown and Company on November 25, 2024

I’m not a huge fan of Alex Cross, in part because I can’t take FBI profilers seriously. Fortunately, Cross (who left the FBI but still works for the agency as a contractor) does no profiling in The House of Cross. The novel is essentially an action thriller with little crime detection but lots of gunfire.

Series fans might be pleased to note that recurring supervillain M, who leads a vigilante organization called Maestro, returns in The House of Cross. His identity and origin occupy a good chunk of the story. The mystery begins when Ryan Malcolm’s car crashes on a mountain road as he’s being pursued by killers. Malcolm founded a data-mining company that contracts with American intelligence agencies. Poor cell service prevents him from calling Cross during the car chase, but he leaves a Tor message to explain the “things I want to tell you so that you may bring to justice those responsible for my death.” He should have skipped the preamble and spit out the facts because the message ends when his vehicle goes off a cliff.

Who is M? The story delves into his background. All I’ll say is that thriller writers too often rely on evil twin brothers to explain criminal behavior. The mildly refreshing twist here is that both brothers are evil, even if one is worse than the other.

The main plot, in keeping with the modern thriller custom, is outlandish. A newly elected but not yet inaugurated president is making a list of potential Supreme Court appointments so she will be prepared if a position becomes vacant. Before the inauguration can occur, one of the candidates near the top of the list is shot between the eyes, another is stabbed in the kidneys, and a third (because the assassin apparently ran out of ideas despite testing a new superweapon) is shot to death. The killings are orchestrated by Maestro with the intention of changing the balance on the Supreme Court. That plan will require multiple vacancies on the Court, so the final chapters follow Cross, his buddy John Samson, and his wife Bree Stone as they try to thwart assassinations.

Now, the idea that an appointment to the Supreme Court can be influenced by killing all the potential nominees who don’t satisfy M, in anticipation that the president will appoint the three he doesn’t kill, is just nonsensical. The list of potential justices is always fluid. Hell, George Bush wanted to nominate his personal lawyer before senators quietly told him she wasn’t remotely qualified for the job. When candidates are scrubbed from the list, more candidates are added. Will Maestro just keep killing them until he approves of all the survivors? And since all the potential nominees are likely to share roughly the same ideology, it's unclear why Maestro views some as better than others (apart from some silliness about one candidate being insufficiently supportive of Indian treaties, as if treaty law issues are a burning issue in the Supreme Court).

The assassin keeps the aforementioned weapon (something about sonic waves) in reserve until the novel’s end, but by that point everyone (including the new president) understands what’s happening, so you’d think the Supreme Court Police, the US Marshals, and the FBI would manage to protect Supreme Court justices until the assassin is caught. Of course they don’t. Naturally, it all comes down to Cross in the end, because that’s how thrillers work.

So the plot makes no sense, but how often do plots in modern thrillers make sense? For the sake of enjoying the story, it’s best to ignore the plot’s foundation and view the book as an action novel. From that perspective, James Patterson succeeds in delivering some exciting chase scenes and gunfights. The snowmobile chases made me feel cold (not necessarily a plus since I hate being cold, but my point is that Patterson creates a vivid albeit chilly atmosphere). Naturally, being a supervillain, M finds a need to gloat before giving Cross and company a chance to escape. That’s a standard Bond movie formula and is routinely mocked, but readers don’t want the supervillain to win, so the formula is one way to assure the heroes’ victory. If there is a better way, Patterson didn’t find it. Still, readers expect a thriller to deliver thrills and this one does, ridiculous plot notwithstanding.

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The Collaborators by Michael Idov

Published by ‎ Scribner on November 19, 2024

Ari Falk is a CIA operative. His job as a media investor is a cover for his covert assignment — “helping Russian opposition journalists find and run stories damaging to the Kremlin.” Ari’s biggest success is funding a popular and openly gay Russian blogger named Anton Besmanny. Anton exposes corruption but “the unspoken compact between the Russian people and their masters has always been that each looked away while the other stole whatever wasn’t bolted down.”

When Anton humiliates a deputy minister of defense, Falk knows he needs to keep Anton safe. He gets Anton a ticket for a flight to Riga, but the flight is diverted to Minsk by Russian military jets. Anton is convinced that the plane is being grounded because of him and gives a speech that apologizes to the other passengers for the trouble that he’s caused.

At the airport, Anton is placed in a room with a man and woman. Shortly after they are removed from the room, Anton hears two gunshots. To save himself from a similar fate, Anton makes a video in which he apologizes for “glorifying descriptions of a degenerate lifestyle.” The plane returns to the air, bound for Riga, but Anton is swept off to Istanbul.

Falk knows the plane made an unscheduled stop but he expects to see Anton at the airport in Riga. Instead, he sees a Russian bagman. Falk forces the bagman to reveal that Anton is now in Turkey. Falk promptly flies to Istanbul, where he nearly meets his death.

Having established its setup, the story shifts to Maya Olbrecht, who at 22 has tried to kill herself twice and completed two stints in rehab. Maya’s father has just committed suicide by jumping over the side of a yacht at night near Portugal. Paul Olbrecht is a billionaire whose wife is disturbed to learn that much of the money he had been managing for wealthy investors is missing from the investment fund. Paul leaves behind a makeshift will that gives Maya a house in Portugal, where she goes to get away from her mother.

The two storylines converge after Russian shooters kill Falk’s co-workers at the media company he established as a cover. Falk investigates the shooting while Maya investigates her father’s death. When the two investigations link, Falk becomes sexually (albeit casually) involved with Maya because he expects to never see her again. Fate, of course, has other ideas. Saving Maya will eventually become Falk’s mission, although he takes on a bigger mission when he learns why the money that Paul Olbrecht was managing disappeared.

Russians have always made the best spy novel villains. I'm always happy to encounter a story that forces western spies to match wits with their easten counterparts. While this isn’t a novel of tradecraft and double agents, Falk makes use of his skills and clandestine contacts to get to the bottom of the triple mysteries — why did Russian spies go to so much trouble to capture Anton, who were the man and woman that the Russians removed from the plane, and what did Paul Olbrecht do with the money? The mysteries have credible solutions that most readers will not easily guess (at least I didn’t).

Given her troubled childhood and struggles with addiction, Maya is a sympathetic character. Falk’s personality is developed in sufficient detail to make him an interesting character, if not a memorable one. The pace is steady and Eastern European locations give the novel a credible atmosphere (no doubt assisted by Michael Idov's familiarity with Riga, the city of his birth). Idov’s prose has no rough edges. My recommendation, however, was won by clever plotting and surprising plot twists. The world of spy fiction is hungry for new practitioners. I happily welcome Idov to its ranks.

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