Liar's Paradox by Taylor Stevens

Published by Kensington on December 18, 2018

As the first book in the Jack and Jill series (currently consisting of this novel and Liar’s Legacy), Liar’s Paradox introduces Clare and her two children. In a backstory that evolves into the central story, we learn that while Clare worked for the CIA as an agent in Moscow, she ran into some trouble with her handler, a fellow named Boris who wanted to take her to bed. Clare was already in bed with Dimitry, the son of the Ministry of Defense. Her rejection of Boris places her in a precarious position, as does her pregnancy by Dimitry, who might or might not be a KGB agent. Clare expected Dimitry to join her when she escaped from Moscow but he never made the rendezvous, for reasons she didn’t understand at the time.

The pregnancy turned into the twins known as Jack and Jill. Like most of the other characters, including Clare, they have used a variety of names during their lives. By the time they were born, Clare had amassed a following of enemies, both inside and outside the CIA. She knew that children would be a vulnerability, so she raised them to survive without her. Their survival skills at this point are well honed, but the consequence of Clare’s unorthodox parenting is that her children hate her. Or maybe it’s sort of a love-hate relationship. They don’t want Clare’s enemies to kill her, if only because they would prefer to kill her themselves.

As the story begins, Jill is a 26-year-old drug addict with an enabling lover named Robert. Jack kidnaps her (the only safe way to deal with her) because Clare wants to see them. In a panic, Robert goes to the police and the media give Jack and Jill a troubling amount of publicity. When they arrive at Clare’s home in the woods, however, they discover that it is under assault. A fellow named Holden has accepted a contract from the Broker to kidnap Clare, an endeavor that leads to the death of most of his team members. Ironically, Jill has taken a few contracts from the Broker herself, the better to make use of her skills when she’s not high.

Much of the plot develops Clare’s backstory, including her search over the years for Dimitry, who seems to be resurfacing, and about whom Jack and Jill know little. In the present, the plot turns into a credible action story. Clare finds herself bound and under guard in a vessel at port. As Jack and Jill try to find her, they need to go through Holden, whose nature turns out to be a surprise.

Taylor Stevens is the reigning master at creating damaged female thriller protagonists. Jill is an intriguing character because of her animosity toward her mother and, for that matter, all of society. At times, she is nearly feral in her reaction to others, including Jack. When she gains control of herself, she is smart and extraordinarily capable, although still driven by emotions she barely recognizes.

While Clare is entering her senior years, she is still cunning, devious, and deadly. Taken together, Clare and Jill are two of the most formidable female action heroes in thrillerworld. As she always does, Stevens achieves a perfect balance of characterization and action in this novel and in the one that follows.

RECOMMENDED

The Body Politic by Brian Platzer

Published by Atria Books on March 3, 2020

The Body Politic is more about the body than politics, although a key character works for John Edwards and Hillary Clinton before joining the Trump administration. The two primary characters, Tess and David, each have health issues that are scrambling their lives and testing their marriage. David’s problems began when he fell from a height. Since then he has dealt with dizziness, headaches, blurred vision, nausea, and other problems that are amplified when he does anything more strenuous than sleeping. The problems are likely neurological but no doctor has made a definitive diagnosis or provided an effective treatment, so David has tried every alternative he can find, from herbal remedies to meditation.

Tess was physically healthy until she became depressed and, like David, started spending all day in bed, rendering both David and Tess ineffective parents of their two children. Tess is determined to stay with David and help him recover. He is devoted to her despite her infidelity. Tess has a distressing personal history that includes the violent death of her mother at the hands of her father when she was young. She has been disturbed by her memories of her mother’s murder but begins to question the accuracy of those memories when she reconnects with her father after years of estrangement.

The side-switching political consultant, Tazio, is David’s best friend, although he is also close to Tess and to another mutual friend named Angelica. By the novel’s end, having praised Trump lavishly on Fox News, he’s scored a job in the Trump administration, perhaps with the intention of influencing its policies as an infiltrator from the left. By the novel’s end, however, it is unclear whether Tazio has any political philosophy or just enjoys being recognized.

The story is driven largely by David’s medical issues and Tess’s struggle to cope with David’s infirmity, her own depression, her feelings about Tazio, and her potentially unreliable memories about her childhood trauma. Eventual confrontations with Tess’s father and his new wife add to the domestic drama. While the novel has all the ingredients of a soap opera, it avoids sensationalism and the tear-jerking moments that often make domestic dramas unendurable. In fact, when Tess has an epiphany during a confrontation with David that redefines her understanding of their marriage, it is a moment of sheer and brutal honesty, the kind that most domestic stories try without success to achieve.

Abused women give the plot a unifying theme. Tess, her mother, Angelica, and the current wife of Tess’s father have all experienced harm, directly or indirectly, that was inflicted by men. Yet at this point, while Tess’s father clearly has an anger management problem, he seems to control his urges to be physically violent. Whether his wife and children should stay with him is a question that — to the author’s credit — encourages subtle analysis rather than knee-jerk reactions.

There are moments when it seems as if David is taking advantage of Tess by not pulling his weight in their marriage, a failing that could arguably be a form of psychological abuse, but it seems clear that David is doing his best to cope with a disease that is real despite the medical industry’s inability to give it a name. Brian Platzer builds sympathy for David slowly as the novel progresses. The depression from which Tess suffers is just as real and her struggle to fight against it also earns the reader’s respect. Equally compelling is her struggle to come to terms with her past and to deal responsibly with her feelings about her father and Tazio. Finding the strength to move on is closely related to the theme of abuse.

Dealing with pain is another theme. David is a good guy, but there is a difference between enduring pain and making a point of enduring pain. One of his healers eventually helps him understand that “constantly confronting everyone with his pain didn’t make him feel better, and it disturbed other people.” Sometimes it’s better to suffer in silence. The healer also suggests, albeit belatedly, that David should approach each day with the assumption that he will be in constant pain and take joy in the moments when he is not. That’s a gloomy way to live, but less gloomy than wallowing in misery.

None of the issues that Platzer explores have easy answers, nor does Platzer offer any. I admire that. People who crave easy answers are easy prey for the charlatans who peddle simplistic solutions to complex problems. People who spend their lives as self-defined victims create self-imposed barriers to happiness. Finding a way forward is often a process of trial and error. No single solution works for everyone, regardless of what spiritual advisors and social workers and snake oil salesmen tell us. The novel illustrates that point in many ways.

The Body Politic is a bit scattered and unfocused, as if it’s not quite sure whether it wants to be about Tess and David or Tess and her father or Tazio and Trump. Tazio drifts in and out, as if Platzer was uncertain of his role in the novel. But if the narrative moves in many different directions, that’s a reflection of life. The characters have unresolved issues and maybe those issues will never be resolved, but the novel reminds us that we need to make as much progress as we can, even if the path forward is unmarked.

RECOMMENDED

Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford

Published by HarperCollins/Ecco on May 12, 2020

Sorry for Your Trouble collects stories of loss, usually caused by death or divorce. Many of the characters have ties to Louisiana or Ireland, although Maine and Paris seem to be their preferred vacation destinations. They have generally reached (or at least are approaching) an age that permits sober reflection on mistakes made and reckonings to come.

My favorite entry in this nine-story collection, “Second Language,” is one of the longer ones. After his wife’s sudden death evicts him from his “infallible, magical, irreplaceable world,” a businessman moves from Idaho to New York and meets a divorced woman who feels her life is “composed of some strange, insubstantial paper that she couldn’t quite keep hold of.” They marry, but he depended on his first wife to invent the “workable, reliable mind-set” that made him feel married, and is disappointed that his second wife has a more independent view of partnership. His new wife, on the other hand, understands that her husband “believed in greater and greater closeness, of shared complications, of difficult-to-overcome frictions leading to even greater depths of intimacy and knowledge of each other,” while she simply isn’t that kind of person. Ford dissects the lives and philosophies of the two principal characters, their relationship and its aftermath, exposing hidden barriers to the kind of understanding (of life, ourselves, other people) that we expect or hope to achieve.

I also give high marks to “The Run of Yourself.” After the death of Peter Boyce’s Irish wife, Peter rents a summer house in Maine near the one he and his wife used to rent. He rents a different house — not the one in which his wife died — so he can revisit pleasant memories without being haunted by thoughts of the crusty person his wife became after she fell ill. A visit from his daughter only underscores the distance between them. He has come to realize that he only needs to make small adjustments in his life because, at his age, there is “nothing further to learn or imagine or re-invent.” Doing a favor for a troubled young woman might change his mind about that.

With two exceptions, I enjoyed all of the remaining stories, although to a slightly lesser extent. In “Nothing to Declare,” a relatively young Sandy “nonchalantly loved” Barbara when they traveled to Iceland together, but the emotion was fading by the time he left her there. “She was, he felt, pretentious and self-infatuated. Leaving was a fine idea. What he’d been missing was miss-able. In the stark light her face bore a coarseness he hadn’t noticed, but supposed he would come to dislike.” A couple of decades later, when Sandy kisses Barbara in New Orleans during a chance encounter, Sandy’s feelings are ambiguous, but it isn’t clear that either Sandy or Barbara have fundamentally changed.

The transplanted Irishman in “Happy” dies after living an intellectual’s life. Bobbi “Happy” Kamper, his “surviving paramour,” joins friends for end-of-summer cocktails in Maine, a gathering that represents “a reversion to some way of being that pre-dated everything that life had sadly become.”

In “Displaced,” a 16-year-old boy who lost his father hopes to bond with an older Irish boy, but the friendship only increases his confusion about life. A divorcing American in “Crossing” who encounters brash American tourists in Ireland before he visits with his solicitor wonders whether he would be pathetic if he were to let a tear leak out in remembrance of the past.

In “Jimmy Green — 1992,” the disgraced former mayor of a small Louisiana town winds up in Paris for no particular reason. He watches the results of the American election in an American bar with a French woman and, because of his slight preference for the winning candidate, learns that Americans abroad can be even more obnoxious than Americans at home. The unpleasant episode is easily written off as an inevitable advance in the disassembling of his life.

 “Leaving for Kenosha” struck me as a story of less substance. The friend of the daughter of a divorced man is moving to Kenosha with her family. The divorced man has “a feeling of impendment” as he thinks about his daughter one day growing up and moving away. “A Free Day,” the story I liked the least, briefly follows a woman who is having an affair of convenience.

Ford has achieved a perfection of style, a fluid and harmonious voice that few writers manage with such consistency. His characters have a fundamental decency that allows them to grieve their losses without anger. They are civilized if a bit too restrained for their own good. They aren’t the kind of people who make headlines, for reasons good or bad, but they remind the reader that people who are capable of using their intellect are always striving for a balance of intellect and emotional awareness that is incredibly difficult to achieve.

RECOMMENDED

The Goodbye Man by Jeffery Deaver

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on May 12, 2020

Colter Shaw is a reward hunter, as opposed to a bounty hunter, but of course he turns down or gives away rewards because he’s just so darn good. Shaw starts the novel by tracking down a young man who has disappeared with a friend after being accused of participating in a shooting. Of course, the accusations are false, but before Shaw can prove their innocence, the young man’s friend commits suicide for no apparent reason.

Jeffery Deaver picks easy targets in The Goodbye Man and magnifies their evil to make sure the reader loathes them. Before the suicide, local law enforcement agents decide to murder the two young men simply because they are undesirable outsiders. They practically salivate at the idea of killing them. There are plenty of people in law enforcement who don’t deserve a badge, but killer cops aren’t usually as depraved as the ones depicted in the novel. Sure, Shaw is a good guy because he doesn't think that cops should commit murder, but there's a certain lack of subtlety in portraying villains as the worst people a reader can imagine.

To get to the bottom of the suicide, Shaw travels to the young man’s destination, which turns out to be a cult called The Osiris Foundation. Nobody likes cults, making it another easy target. Its founder, Master Eli, is David Koresh, Warren Jeffs, and Jim Jones rolled into one. Deaver wraps up the very worst tendencies of cults into one neat package, giving Shaw no choice but to infiltrate and destroy it.

That nobody else has discovered the cult’s malevolence is even more difficult to believe than the malevolence itself. Deaver tells us that the cult is secretive, but it needs members to sustain itself, so it can’t be all that secretive. Yet nobody notices that people who join the cult are victimized in ways that would surely be noticed by the outside world? I didn’t buy it.

Nor did I think that anyone would view Master Eli as anything but a joke. In just three weeks, his followers are so devoted to him that they are willing to sacrifice themselves because they believe his silly promise of a better future. All cult leaders are con men, but they succeed because they have charismatic appeal. Deaver didn’t make me believe that anyone would believe a single preposterous word that Eli utters.

On two occasions, cult enforcers physically abuse people where Shaw can watch. A cult that is trying to convince members that it offers the path to peace and serenity would hardly engage in such public displays of violence. Yeah, Shaw is not making his presence obvious on either occasion, but how convenient it is that Shaw happens to be in a place where he can see the violence going down? Writers who rely on improbable coincidence to advance a plot need to try harder.

Oh, and for all the security measures the cult takes, there is an unguarded gate that Shaw happens to find, giving himself easy egress and ingress to the compound. Too convenient? Yeah, just a bit.

Some aspects of The Goodbye Man are interesting, or at least amusing. Master Eli exaggerates his accomplishments, talks about fake news, encourages his followers to chant slogans and attack anyone who questions him, and is a “raging narcissist.” He reminded me quite a lot of Master Donald, on whom I am guessing he was modeled. Shaw pretty quickly sees through the Foundation’s self-help scam, but one of the therapists who engages Shaw gets him to take a deep dive into his real issues (involving his unresolved feelings of guilt about his absent brother), adding a moment of unexpected depth to a fairly simple plot. None of that is quite enough to earn a recommendation.

I expected The Goodbye Man to earn a guarded recommendation until the final chapters — maybe the last quarter of the book — went it rolled completely off the rails. Parts of the story that are supposed to be touching are too contrived to have an emotional impact. Apart from a weak plot, Shaw has developed all the personality of a comatose actuary. Shaw's habit of following his father’s tedious rules and assigning arbitrary percentages of success to his action plans are supposed to be interesting traits, but they only makes him annoying.

About half of last 50 pages weave in an ongoing story about a conspiracy that Shaw’s father was trying to unravel. That storyline began in the first novel and will probably unfold over several books. The conspiracy seems almost as ludicrous as the Osiris Foundation’s scheme. It doesn’t encourage me to believe that the next installments will be worth reading. That’s disappointing, since I have generally enjoyed Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme books.

Deaver performs all the thriller writer tricks to make the novel seem to move quickly — short chapters, lots of white space — but the book loses momentum as it nears the end. I enjoyed the first Shaw novel (The Never Game) but this one is a step down.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Hammer to Fall by John Lawton

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on March 10, 2020

Hammer to Fall is the third Joe Wilderness novel, but I have not been so fortunate as to read the first two. John Lawton has an unusual take on the spy novel genre. Wilderness (whose birth name is Holderness) is a bit of a rogue, a patriot when necessary and a hustler when opportunity presents itself. Spying suits his personality because he’s a born deceiver, but so does filling his safe with ill-gotten currency. The story is amusing for that reason, but it is far from a comedy. Hammer to Fall creates suspense in the best tradition of spy novels, including a couple of classic prisoner exchanges on bridges.

The novel has many moving parts and covers a significant span of time. Central characters weave in and out of each other’s lives as the story unfolds.

Joe begins the novel as a Schieber (black marketeer). In 1948, Joe is a Russian-speaking British corporal who does business with Eddie Clark and an American named Frank Spoleto, selling stolen coffee to a Russian named Kostya Zolotukhin. Kostya’s mother is a general in the NKVD known as the Red Widow. She rips off Joe and the Schiebers in a deal for peanut butter, leaving Kostya to face their wrath.

Spoleto goes on to be a CIA agent. Joe’s lover at the time is woman named Nell Burkhardt who was “raised by thieves and whores back in London’s East End” yet has a moral compass that Joe lacks.

Fast forward to 1966 and Joe is a field agent for MI6 who has seemingly misplaced a Soviet agent named Bernard Alleyn during a prisoner exchange. What actually happened to Alleyn plays a key role in the novel’s resolution. As punishment for apparently bungling his mission, Joe is sent to Finland, where nothing is happening. Joe passes the time by reengaging with Kostya in a black-market vodka operation until he stumbles upon information that might suggest an actual Soviet plot against the West. Along the way Joe gives a career assist to a bright woman named Janis Bell.

Joe next travels to Prague after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, posing as a tractor salesman. The Prague station chief, whose wife slugged a Russian spy, is spirited away and replaced by an old friend of Joe. Another old friend, Freddie Troy, who also has a feisty wife, goes to Prague as the UK ambassador. All of this leads to the story’s culmination, which circles to the beginning and brings back characters from Joe’s past in another tense scene on a bridge between East and West.

Lawton’s characters have a realistic (not to say cynical) view of the world that they sometimes express with a bit of snark. For example, when Troy is told that his mission in Prague is to show support for democratic rebels while quietly turning most of them over to the Russians because “we can’t put up tents on the embassy lawn” to house them all, Troy asks why it is important to demonstrate support publicly if “in private you’re getting ready to dump them.” Of course, Troy’s wife promptly puts up tents in the embassy lawn.

The plot is also realistic in that it doesn’t involve a series of chase scenes and shootouts. Joe is bored much of the time because spying involves a good bit of waiting and watching. There’s little chance for the reader to be bored, however, because Joe fills his time in interesting ways. And moments of fast action arise with sufficient frequency to give the book a good pace.

Complex characters, a fascinating and wide-ranging plot, and a terrific sense of atmosphere make Hammer to Fall a pleasure to read. The book is self-contained, but the ending sets up the next installment with a mini-cliffhanger.

RECOMMENDED