Hidden in Plain Sight by Jeffrey Archer

Published by St. Martin's Press on November 3, 2020

Jeffrey Archer has been chronicling the early career of his fictional creation, William Warwick, who appears later in life in Archer’s Harry Clifton novels. In Nothing Ventured, Archer described Warwick’s efforts to thwart art forgers, a gig he scored by virtue of his degree in art history. Warwick begins Hidden in Plain Sight with a promotion to the rank of Detective Sergeant and reassignment to a new team that is chasing the big dog of London drug smuggling. “The Viper” runs a good chunk of London’s illicit drug market from the top three floors of a building that houses his manufacturing and distribution business. The location, however, is a mystery to the police.

Despite Warwick’s shift to the drug task force, an interesting plot thread continues the art theft plot that drove Nothing Ventured. Miles Faulkner, whose sentence for art fraud was suspended, attempts to foil Warwick’s marriage to Beth. Miles is having marital problems of his own, problems that motivate him to engage in a couple of new crimes to thwart his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s effort to take his house, his art collection, and pretty much everything he owns. By novel’s end, the degree of his success will be in doubt, setting up the continuation of the story in the next novel.

Hidden in Plain Sight takes place in 1986, when it was still considered wise to declare war on drugs rather than treating them as a public health problem. While the drug plot has Warwick playing a significant role in the effort to find the Viper’s den, Warwick learns that his nemesis Faulkner is also involved in drug distribution, at least with regard to his elite friends. Warwick recruits an informant who helps him catch Faulkner with drugs, but whether the evidence will stand up in court leads to a trial that provides another plot point.

The courtroom theatrics are provided by Warwick’s father, representing the Crown, and his sister, who prosecutes as her father’s junior. I always enjoy courtroom scenes and this one is entertaining, in part because a prosecution witness turns out to be unreliable. Still, while discussions of courtroom strategy are always fun, cases turn on evidence and the evidence made the outcome fairly predictable, strategic considerations notwithstanding. As Rumpole sometimes mused, it is easy to prove that guilty person is guilty. Getting a guilty person acquitted is the real courtroom challenge.

My only knock on William Warwick as a character is his stalwart and unblemished nature. Warwick is known as “choirboy” because he is resolutely proper in everything he does. My sense is that Archer means him to be an exemplar of the British upper-crust at their best (Warwick’s father, Sir Julian, is a QC and his sister seems destined to become one). People of resolute moral character, at least in fiction, tend to a bit one-dimensional. All members of the Warwick family dispense bits of trivia so we know they are learned, but it takes more than an ability to explain the origin of “Bob’s your uncle” to give a character a memorable personality. I’d like to see Warwick let his hair down and show us his naughty side, except he doesn’t seem to have one.

Warwick’s moral rectitude does, however, set up a personal conflict (can he remain a police officer if he must serve a corrupt master?) that remains at the end of the novel. Since the Harry Clifton novels answer that question, it isn’t a cliff-hanger, but the novel does set up a (presumably) final conflict between Warwick and Faulkner in the next novel.

On the whole, I enjoyed Hidden in Plain Sight more than Nothing Ventured. There are fewer scenes of Warwick family gatherings that tended to slow the first novel, while the plot moves more quickly and in more directions. Readers who want their crime novel protagonists to be righteous defenders of the law and virtue will likely admire Hidden in Plain Sight.

RECOMMENDED

The Dirty South by John Connolly

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on November 3, 2020

The Dirty South goes back in time to tell the story of Charlie Parker’s first investigation of a homicide after the death of his wife and daughter. Series readers know that Parker’s wife and daughter were murdered, that Parker quit his job as a New York homicide detective to pursue their killer, and that he was eventually successful. When The Dirty South takes place, Parker has only recently started looking into other killings to see if he can find a pattern that will lead him to his family’s killer. That investigation brings him to a small town in Arkansas.

The Cade family owns a good bit of land in Burdon County. Nothing in Burdon County is worth much, but a company called Kovacs is debating the merits of building a new plant in Burdon County rather than a competing site in Texas. The plant would bring much needed employment to a dirt-poor community. The Cade family is doing its best to seal the deal, which means sweeping away any dirt that might discourage Kovacs from building on land owned by the Cades. One of the sweepers is Jurel Cade, who happens to be a deputy sheriff. Jurel has a brother, a sister, and a father who, even more than Jurel, are varying shades of evil.

Among the secrets that the Cades have an incentive to conceal are three murders of young women. The presence of a serial killer might discourage Kovacs from investing in the county. The most recent murder comes to light when Tilon Ward finds Donna Lee Kernigan’s young body in a ditch. Ward’s distress is amplified by the fact that he was giving Donna Lee money in exchange for sex. Ward earns a living cooking meth and was supplying Donna Lee’s mother so that she would look the other way.

Parker is in town taking a look at the two earlier killings, including one that is fairly recent, to decide whether they shed light on the murders of his wife and daughter. They don’t, but his curiosity earns him a night in jail. Donna’s killing takes place while Parker is locked up. When the police chief discovers that Parker is a former New York City homicide detective, he asks Parker for help. The chief knows that giving the investigation to the deputy sheriff will lead to its burial, lest it disturb the decisionmakers at Kovacs.

Parker’s investigation brings him into contact with a number of corrupt individuals, including several suspects who might have committed one or all of the murders. One of the suspects has been missing and presumed dead for about five years. Others include a bartender, a reverend with aspirations for a bigger church, Tilon Ward and the people for whom he cooks meth, and locals with a grudge against the Cades who might want to scuttle the Kovacs deal. All the suspects give the reader a chance to ponder clues and to view the story as a whodunit.

Yet Connolly uses mysteries as a springboard to explore evil as it coincides with human nature. Part of that exploration involves the question of what makes a killer kill. The Dirty South makes the point that monsters often contribute to their own creation, although every monster is shaped by other monsters.

The Dirty South also examines a more encompassing evil. While Burdon County residents might be uncomfortable with the knowledge that a serial killer may be preying on local women, the victims have been black and everyone in the county is likely to benefit from the Kovacs plant, so the business community — and even the state government — has no interest in making waves. A “see no evil” attitude elevates corruption and self-interest above the community’s interest in protecting its most vulnerable members from harm.

Many Charlie Parker novels are grounded in the supernatural. Apart from Parker having a conversation with the ghost of his daughter, the supernatural is only hinted at in this novel, largely by a character who believes the county’s land was poisoned by bad blood in an earlier century.

Depth of characterization and striking prose always characterize Connolly’s fiction. I would say The Dirty South is one of Connolly’s better novels except that Connolly is such a consistent writer that every novel is at the same high level. Instead, I’ll say that The Dirty South is one of the better novels of 2020 for thriller fans to enjoy.

RECOMMENDED

The Shortest Day by Colm Tóibín

Published digitally by Amazon on November 3, 2020

“The Shortest Day” is a short story that is easily consumed in less than an hour. The story is available through Amazon as a “Kindle edition.”

Professor O’Kelly, an archeologist, has spent his career investigating an ancient burial chamber at Newgrange. As a scholar, O’Kelly focuses on facts supported by evidence. He does not speculate about things he cannot prove. When people ask him about spirits of the dead people who were buried in the tomb, he reminds them that spirits are beyond the remit of an archeologist.

What O’Kelly does not know is that spirits do dwell within the chamber. The spend their afterlives telling each other stories. Only one spirit, a woman named Dalc, is able to add new information to their collective knowledge because only she can leave the tomb and roam around in the world.

Once a year, on the winter solstice, a beam of light illuminates the chamber. The spirits are sustained by the light — it renews their energy — but they do not want the outside world to invade their resting place. “We need to be separate from the mortal world,” a spirit argues. “No one ever planned that this sacred space might be shared with anyone.”

In her only contact with a mortal, motivated by fear that archeologists would discover the beam of light, Dalc told a villager that the annual illumination of the chamber is a secret “that does not belong to the world.” Dalc explained that “we must all know our place in the great scheme of things. We respect mystery and silence and spirit.”

Dalc made the villager swear to keep people away from the tomb on the solstice. The villager took her vow seriously. While current villagers are aware that the winter solstice is the one day the tomb is not to be disturbed, the secret has not spread beyond the community. Until, that is, a drunken villager rambled about it while O’Kelly was visiting a local tavern.

When O’Kelly chooses the solstice for one of his visits, the villagers fret that the spirits will be disturbed. By the story’s end, the reader will be invited to ponder the impact of O’Kelly’s discovery.

The foundation of this story is true, in that Michael O’Kelly did discover the phenomenon in 1967. Why the tomb was designed to illuminate on the shortest day of the year is unknown. The illumination clearly required careful planning and ingenious design. According to the Newgrange website (the place is a tourist attraction now), locals did tell stories about the annual lighting of the chamber, although they didn’t reveal exactly when it would happen.

I always admire Colm Tóibín’s prose and his ability to create atmosphere. Like all of Tóibín’s work, the story is interesting and thought provoking. What thoughts Tóibín intended to provoke is something of a mystery to me. Perhaps, as an Irish writer, he couldn’t resist writing a ghost story and that’s all there is to it. But I have struggled to reconcile the spirits’ fear with the story’s ending, which seems to suggest that the fears were groundless. If the lesson learned by the fretful spirits is supposed to teach a larger lesson, it eludes me. Surely not all fears are groundless.

O’Kelly’s lucky discovery enriched the living by revealing an amazing bit of ancient engineering. I suspect Tóibín’s point is that unscientific fears harbored by villagers should give way to the revelations of science. That interpretation might permit the light illuminating the chamber to be seen as light that chases away the dark fears of superstition. But maybe not. Maybe I’m only projecting my own frustration with people who reject reason and science. In any event, I like the story. Maybe it’s my dimness that prevents me from fully appreciating it, but the fact that a story is challenging isn’t a reason not to recommend it.

RECOMMENDED

Make Russia Great Again by Christopher Buckley

Published by Simon & Schuster on July 14, 2020

I hurried to finish Make Russia Great Again because after the election it might lose its relevance entirely. While other novels have taken shots at a fictional Trump, it seems doubtful that any of them will be remembered after Trump is gone. Making fun of Trump is the nightly sport of talk show hosts, but they’ll move on in January if Biden wins. I suspect readers will do the same. Nobody wants to revisit a nightmare.

As the (not so failing) New York Times noted, the difficulty with satirizing the Trump administration is that reality outpaces fiction. By the time this book made it to market, Trump had found new ways to self-destruct that even the most masterful satirist would have been unable to imagine.

Make Russia Great Again takes place shortly before the 2020 election. Some characters (like Trump and Pompeo) are real, others are thinly disguised. Sean Hannity is Seamus Colonnity, Ivanka is Ivunka and she’s married to Jored, Pence is Pants, Graham is Biskitt, etc.

The novel’s narrator is Herbert K. Nutterman, who rose through the management ranks at various Trump properties before Trump tapped him to become the new chief of staff. Two storylines, other than the upcoming election, drive the plot. First, an American computer program called Placid Reflex autonomously hacked the Russian election and gave the Communist candidate a landslide victory in the first round of voting. Putin isn’t pleased but doesn’t immediately suspect Trump who is, after all, in Putin’s pocket.

Second, a Russian oligarch and Trump buddy named Oleg Pishinsky is widely suspected of causing the demise of an American journalist who investigated his molybdenum empire and other shady endeavors. Responding to those suspicions, Congress passed a law that disadvantages Oleg’s desire to sell molybdenum to the United States. Oleg wants Trump to get it rescinded. If Trump says no, Oleg will release videos of Trump having sex with each contestant of Miss Universe 2013 after promising each the crown. Oleg also did away with a contestant who wasn’t satisfied with being paid off, a crime that might look bad for Trump. Unfortunately for Trump, Congress isn’t buying his pitch that the US has a desperate need for molybdenum, an element that Trump can’t pronounce.

There are moments of genuine humor in the novel. I particularly enjoyed Trump’s response when the videos begin to leak. He changes “Make America Great Again” to “Make America Hard Again,” an improvement that his loyal base embraces. The Evangelicals, of course, look away without wavering in their support.

While the story is fun, some of Nutterman’s observations — about, for example, the “liberal mainstream media” obsession with reporting true facts rather than alternative facts — fall flat because they really aren’t satirical at all. Much of the book depicts Trump as he is, without the exaggeration that defines satire. Trump and his echo chamber entourage might be clownish but they aren’t all that funny.

The book does have a prescient quality, if only because Trump is predictable. Without knowing who the Democratic nominees would be, Buckley has the president condemning them as socialists, a label that Trump and uninformed inhabitants of the fringe have tried without success to pin on Biden. Since Buckley didn’t know who the candidates would be, Buckley has Trump calling them Loser One and Loser Two — which is admittedly Trumpish.

The book was written before the pandemic (which, Trump just assured us, is over), a fact that detracts from both its relevance and its satirical punch. Trump’s real sins are much worse than the sins Buckley imagines, a reality that compromises the ability to laugh at Trump’s foibles.

Having said that, Make Russia Great Again does deliver a steady diet of chuckles and an occasional full-bellied laugh. Trump’s fans won’t like it and might even hold a book burning, although that would require them to actually buy the book, which seems unlikely. If Trump wins reelection, readers who want to laugh after they finish crying might want to spend time with it. If Trump is defeated, the book might have value as nostalgia. As political satire, however, it is only a mild success.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Mystery of Henri Pick by David Foenkinos

Published in France in 2016; published in translation by Pushkin Press on September 1, 2020

“It is wise to be wary of anyone who loves books” cautions Madeleine, the widow of Henri Pick. Yet The Mystery of Henri Pick is a book for booklovers. The plot revolves around writers and critics and libraries and books, published and unpublished. The novel asks whether literary success has more to do with the story of a book than the story the book tells.

People who loves books and even some who rarely read harbor the belief that they have a story to tell. An unwritten book languishes in many souls. A small percentage actually take the trouble to write it, only to have the manuscript rejected by multiple publishers until they stop shopping it around. What happens to all those unpublished manuscripts?

Richard Brautigan conceived the notion of a Library of Rejected Books in his novel The Abortion. One of Brautigan’s fans brought it to life in the form of the Brautigan Library, which now resides in Vancouver. David Foenkinos imagines a librarian in a French village who, tickled by Brautigan’s idea, dedicates part of the library to unpublished manuscripts. Jean-Pierre Gourvec welcomes all rejected novels, provided their authors drop them off in person. By the time he dies, the library has accumulated thousands of manuscripts.

After Gourvec dies, Magali Croze assumes stewardship of the library. The unpublished manuscripts became covered with dust. An editor named Delphine Despero happens to spend an afternoon in the library with her boyfriend, Frédéric Koskas. There she discovers a novel called The Last Hours of a Love Affair. The book blends a love story with the death throes of Pushkin. The author was Henri Pick. Or that, at least, is what the public is told.

Henri Pick owed a pizza shop before his death. His wife had no idea that he had written a book. Henri showed no interest in literature, although his widow discovers a volume of Pushkin among his belongings.

Delphine’s discovery of Pick’s book sets the literary world on fire. The idea of a man pursuing a secret project that can be promoted as a masterpiece assures that the novel will be a best seller. The discovery changes the lives of Henri’s widow Madeleine and his daughter Joséphine. Journalists hound them for information about Henri in their hope of feeding more tidbits to the novel’s admirers.

Jean Michel Rouche, formerly an influential book critic who has become undone by his professional disappointments, suspects that Pick did not actually write the mysterious book. His effort to unmask its true author wakes him from his depression and gives him a reason to live. The mystery also drives the plot that brings the cast of characters together. Did or didn’t Pick write the amazing book?

The truth is revealed in an epilogue but is the truth really all that important? The Last Hours of a Love Affair brings joy or contentment to people who imagine that it might have been written for or about them. After all, readers “always find themselves in a book, in one way or another. Reading is a completely egotistical pleasure.” Perhaps the novel’s true origin is unimportant because “life has an inner dimension, with stories that have no basis in reality, but which are truly lived all the same.”

While the novel illustrates the ways in which people value form over substance — if conventionally published, The Last Hours of a Love Affair would probably have had a small readership — it also asks whether form and substance might sometimes have equal merit. If a book is meant to capture hearts, why are the heart-capturing circumstances of its discovery and publication of any less value than its content? Perhaps the story of artistic creation can be just as important (even if just as fictional) as the art itself.

Books about books are always fun for booklovers. The Mystery of Henri Pick explores the nature of books while revealing the hidden natures of its characters. With deceptive simplicity, the novel weaves together the lives of seemingly unremarkable people who, like most people who read, are more remarkable than they appear. Foenkinos even tells a couple of low-key love stories. The Mystery of Henri Pick is a charming addition to the literature of literature.

RECOMMENDED