The Last Agent by Robert Dugoni

Published by Thomas & Mercer on September 22, 2020

The Last Agent follows The Eighth Sister as the second book to chronicle the exploits of Charles Jenkins, an unretired spy. Jenkins came out of retirement in the last novel because he needed the money. In this one, Jenkins returns to Russia to repay a favor.

Jenkins escaped from Russia in The Eighth Sister thanks to the sacrifice of Paulina Ponomayova. She provided a distraction that gave Jenkins time to get away from his pursuers. Jenkins assumed she died. It turns out that she is alive (at least for the moment) and in prison, where she will certainly be tortured on the premise that she knows the identities of spies who have passed information to the CIA for decades.

Naturally, the CIA decides that it would be smart to send Jenkins, a tall black guy who stands out in Russia, to rescue Paulina. Jenkins coerces a retired Russian spy, Viktor Federov, into providing an assist, playing both on Federov’s greed and on his competitive nature. After they confirm that Paulina is still alive, Jenkins concocts a plan to bust her out of prison and smuggle her out of Russia.

Farfetched? Of course it is, but improbability doesn’t get in the way of entertainment in a novel that is largely a setup followed by an extended chase scene. Much of the fun derives from the novel’s tradecraft, the various deceptions and ruses that the CIA employs to keep Jenkins and Paulina from being captured or killed. As for the chase, on roads and trains and boats and foot, Robert Dugoni delivers the excitement that a thriller should generate. The outcome is predictable and the story is bit light on drama, but the last half moves too quickly to allow time for contemplation of the novel’s faults.

The very last scene sets up a return to Russia to save the surviving spies whose identities Jenkins tried to protect in the first novel. Jenkins might want to stay unretired because he hasn’t felt this young in years, chases apparently serving as a tonic for youth until you get caught. I fear that Dugoni will go to the well once to often if he sends Jenkins back to Russia — by now, every cop in Russia must know that a tall black guy should be detained with no questions asked — but it isn’t fair to judge a novel I haven’t read. Maybe the formula will work a third time. I can attest that it worked well enough the second time to earn a recommendation.

RECOMMENDED

Spook Street by Mick Herron

Published by Soho Press on February 21, 2017

Mick Herron’s Slough House books are among the most entertaining spy novels of the current century. Slough House is home to members of the British Secret Service who are considered unworthy of employment but who, for whatever reason, cannot be fired. Under the deceptively watchful eye of Jackson Lamb, the “slow horses” at Slough House manage to prevail, more or less, in their fight against England’s enemies, or its friends, depending on the circumstances. Spook Street is the fourth novel in the series.

Spook Street opens with stage setting, reintroducing familiar characters and their problems, which variously include a gambling addiction, alcoholism, anger management issues, and troubled relationships. A new character, J.K. Coe, is clearly somewhere on the autism spectrum and probably high on the psychopathy scale. A terrorist bombing occurs in the background but doesn’t seem immediately connected to the plot.

The plot’s immediate concern is River Cartwright, whose grandfather, a legendary spy who raised River, is becoming lost to dementia. River’s grandfather is increasingly paranoid and apparently living in the past, certain he’s being followed by an enemy. Lost in his fantasy, when River comes to his home and draws him a bath, the old man seems determined to kill his grandson.

That plot eventually sends a capable killer to Slough House while Lamb is off buying whiskey, leaving nobody tending the shop who has the skills to fight an armed assassin. Before that happens, a slow horse does some actual spying, traveling undercover to France and learning about a black ops training site that was apparently responsible for the attempt on the life of River’s grandfather and for the assassin who invades Slough House. The purpose for the site remains a mystery until the novel’s end, one of a few mysteries that occupy the reader as the story gathers steam.

Like the other novels in the series, Spook Street integrates humor, action, and unexpected moments of drama. The first third is a mix of wit, farce, and slapstick before a more serious story begins to unfold.

It seems unwise to pick a favorite character in this series because the character might not survive until the end of the story. But live or die, the characters all have the kind of quirky personalities and idiosyncrasies that invite empathy. They are not necessarily a likeable bunch — they tend to have love-hate relationships with each other — but they are fundamentally decent and, on occasion, surprisingly competent. Particularly Lamb, whose competence is never in question, but whose Machiavellian nature asserts itself in the interest of a good cause at the novel’s end. Above all, having been a joe for much of his life, Lamb takes care of his joes. “And one thing joes learn quickly is that those who write the rules rarely suffer their weight.”

Mick Herron stitches this all together with fine prose, deadpan humor, and sympathetic insight into the emotions of third string players. Spook Street maintains the high level of a series that offers a unique and welcome take on the British spy novel.

RECOMMENDED

House Privilege by Mike Lawson

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on July 7, 2020

Mike Lawson’s Joe DeMarco novels amuse the hell out of me. DeMarco is a fixer for the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, who as a result of the last election is about to resume his role as speaker. DeMarco doesn’t care about politics or much of anything other than golf. He’s a nonpracticing lawyer who hopes he can hang onto his fixer gig long enough to retire with a government pension, allowing him to spend all his time golfing rather than most of it. Violent circumstances keep interfering with the easy life he wants to lead. Those circumstances combine with DeMarco’s long-suffering attitude to fuel entertaining novels that are surprisingly light, given the number of mobsters, sleezy politicians, crooked lawyers, and sociopaths who populate the pages.

Congressman John Mahoney has a teenage goddaughter named Cassie. Mahoney’s wife adores Cassie but Mahoney pretty much ignores her, as he does anyone who can’t help him gain more power. Cassie’s parents die in a plane crash that almost kills Cassie, leaving Cassie with a trust fund that has been managed by a lawyer who inherited the job from her father, another lawyer who was a friend of Cassie’s father.

Until Mahoney’s wife can get back from a friend’s funeral, Mahoney wants DeMarco to figure out what Cassie might need. DeMarco doesn’t develop much of a rapport with the teenage girl or the nanny who is taking care of her or the lawyer who is managing her trust. None of them are as interesting to DeMarco as the Boston bartender he starts dating while he’s checking up on Cassie. DeMarco becomes suspicious, however, when an accountant who was auditing the trust is killed in a convenience store robbery. The series of suspicious deaths leads DeMarco to one of Boston’s most powerful mobsters.

House Privilege tells a good story at a steady pace. Eventually DeMarco chases a criminal around Montenegro, a country that has no extradition treaty with the U.S., in a series of chapters that accelerate the story’s action. Many of the laughs in House Privilege are unexpected, as when a character lies down in a jail cell and wonders why there is blood on the ceiling.

The DeMarco novels remind me of John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers novels. The books are good beach reads, mixing a fun plot with a likable protagonist who is always a bit disappointed in the world he navigates. Not all of the DeMarco novels have been as good as the last two, but at the age of 76, Lawson seems to be hitting his stride.

RECOMMENDED

An Unnatural Life by Erin K. Wagner

Published by Tor.com on September 15, 2020

An Unnatural Life imagines that Jupiter’s moon Europa has been colonized. Its colonists dwell underground. Robots with Artificial Intelligence, called robotniks, do most of the grunt work for the colonists. A robotnik known as Worker Class 812-3 killed a human co-worker. Or maybe he didn’t. Responsibility for such things is difficult to judge in the case of robotniks who can be controlled by others. A jury of humans found 812-3 guilty. The robotnik doesn’t feel guilty and, depending on one’s view of the law, he might not be. On the other hand, the robotnik thinks he acted out of love, so 812-3 might not have a reliable perspective when it comes to the human world.

A lawyer named Aiya Ritsehrer is working with a program that hopes to rehabilitate robotniks. They are good laborers with strong backs when they aren’t killing people, but most humans are skeptical that killer robots can be rehabilitated. That isn’t surprising, since many humans are skeptical that humans can be rehabilitated.

Aiya decides that, in the absence of robotnik jurors, 812-3 wasn’t tried by a jury of his peers. The plot is driven by Aiya’s determination to appeal 812-3’s conviction and to obtain a new trial based on United Nations rulings that grants equal rights to AIs. Aiya encounters resistance from human colonists who almost universally agree that AIs can’t be trusted because they aren’t true humans. Much of the resistance comes from angry shouters who apparently still plague humanity in 2145.

Isaac Asimov wrote the first widely read stories about robots who yearn for human rights. He wisely put the focus on the robots and their struggle to be recognized as human. Stories about civil rights for robots tend to be allegories that channel the struggle to protect the civil rights of everyone who is treated as less than equal. They work when they make the reader see the robot as having the qualities of a human. Erin K. Wagner alters the traditional framework for stories of this nature by making the unfortunate decision to shift the emphasis away from 812-3 and to place it on Aiya.

The story’s focus is not on the legal issue, which is underdeveloped, or on 812-3, whose enigmatic personality isn’t explored in any depth. Rather, the focus is on the impact that Aiya’s battle for justice has on Aiya. Her friend/partner insists that she move out when a mob of angry shouters gathers in front of their home. Aiya worries that she won’t be protected by the police or prison guards who oppose giving human rights to robotniks. Aiya is a depressive, downbeat, surprisingly timid character who did little to win my sympathy despite her belief in justice. She doesn’t have the fire in her belly that draws lawyers to civil rights work. Instead, she seems to be a bit of a doormat who doesn’t have much desire to fight back against her oppressors and has to force herself to do the right thing for 812-3, a robotnik she instinctively fears.

The ending is downbeat. That may be a realistic commentary on the history of the civil rights struggle, but Aiya responds to it with her usual air of misery. Readers are apparently expected to be more indignant about the story’s events than Aiya ever becomes. Wagner tries to soften the bleak ending by having Aiya give freedom to a cleaning bot that likely lacks the processing power to appreciate it, but Aiya’s final attempt to make a statement seems contrived and a bit pointless.

I admire Wagner’s prose style. Perhaps a longer work that explored the underlying issues and 812-3 in greater depth, that wasn’t satisfied with depicting Aiya as a Debbie Downer, would have done justice to the story’s premise. As it stands, Wagner wrote a mildly interesting novella that adds little to a concept that other writers have exhaustively explored.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Abstainer by Ian McGuire

Published by Random House on September 15, 2020

The two key characters in The Abstainer are both bent on revenge. They must each decide whether satisfaction is worth its cost. Those decsions are difficult because the true cost of vengeance is often hidden.

James O’Conner drank himself into oblivion after his wife died. Having disgraced himself as a police officer in Ireland, he is transferred to Manchester, where he has the chance to make a new life. He stops drinking and develops a network of Irish informers who give him tips when the Fenians are planning a crime to further their rebel cause. The English officers tolerate O’Connor but they will never accept an Irishman as one of their own, no matter how often he proves himself. “He knows he is better off here in England were no one knows or cares about him, where he is free alike from history and expectation, but he wonders too how long this balancing act can last and how it will end.”

Stephen Doyle fought for the Union in the Civil War. He is the kind of man who only finds purpose in war. He believes war rescued him from “faithless years of lassitude and drift.” Traveling to England in the cause of Irish rebellion suits him, gives him a purpose and a use for his skills. Three members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood have been hanged in Manchester. Doyle has been sent from America “to take revenge for the hangings, show the world that we’re not weak or afraid.”

Michael Sullivan meets Doyle on the ship from America. Sullivan is O’Conner’s nephew. He’s running from trouble of his own making. Sullivan volunteers, and is later coerced, to spy on Doyle and the Fenians. He hopes to use his contact with Doyle to infiltrate the Fenians and learn the details of their plan.

Events do not go well for any of the characters. One of O’Connor’s informants is identified and killed. His sister Rose tells O’Connor she can’t stay in Manchester, having been branded as the sister of a traitor to the Irish cause. O’Connor flirts with the idea of making a life with her, but his plans are derailed by a moment of bad judgment and more deaths. O’Connor finds himself suspected of loyalty to the Fenians. His career in shambles, O’Connor decides to seek his own revenge by tracking down Doyle.

The story is dark but riveting. Like most stories of revenge, one killing leads to another. “There’s always another wrong to be made right, another lesson to be taught or learned.” O’Connor blames himself for the deaths of Doyle’s victims. “The dead are in command, he thinks, now and always. Each step away is a step toward, every turning is part of the same circle, and what we call love or hope is just an interlude, a way of forgetting what we are.”

Doyle's life is less complicated than O'Connor's, but they are similar characters, both groping for a path forward, uncertain of their destination. After Doyle leaves Manchester, not knowing that O’Connor is on his heels, he wonders if he will lose his resolve, grow soft and weak. To an outsider, the question is whether a life of contentment might be worthier than a life spent in pursuit of an unattainable cause.

Doyle and O’Connor each have a chance to walk away from vengeance. Whether they will do so, or whether they established their fates as soon they set revenge in motion, is the question that gives the novel its suspense. The ending is depressing and the last chapter seems disconnected from the rest of the novel, but the story as a whole is a compelling examination of the way in vengeance destroys lives, including the lives of the avengers.

RECOMMENDED