High Treason by Sean McFate

Published by William Morrow on June 9, 2020

I was reluctant to read High Treason because novels that feature the word Treason, Traitor, or Patriot in the title are usually pretty bad. I should have trusted my instincts. This is the third in a series of thrillers featuring Tom Locke. I didn’t read the first two but I don’t have the sense that I missed much.

One of the two cartoon villains in this novel is the president’s national security advisor, a lump named Jackson who thinks the president is a wimp and agrees to have him assassinated. Jackson’s goal is to “galvanize and harden” the American public so they will unite against national security threats, even if those threats must be fabricated to accomplish the goal. The improbable means of accomplishing the assassination is designed to lay the blame on Middle Eastern terrorists, but the assassins mistakenly take out the VP.

The assassins are supplied by the other cartoon villain, a snarly old man named Winters who made me picture Smithers of Simpsons fame. Winters was running a private firm of mercenaries called Apollo Outcomes before he supposedly met an unfortunate end that was arranged by the hero, Tom Locke. Winter’s demise, which apparently occurred in an earlier Locke novel, was greatly exaggerated. Winters is back from the dead and masterminding the scheme to kill the president, although he is doing so on behalf of a secret cabal. Naturally, some nuclear weapons are shipped into the United States along the way.

Locke is cartoonish himself, in the tradition of thriller superheroes. Pundits and Homeland Security are immediately convinced that the assassination is the work of ISIS, but Locke, having watched 30 seconds of footage on cable news, knows that the bridge was blown up by Apollo Outcomes because he used to be one of their mercenaries and he is certain that Apollo Outcomes is the only outfit that has ever had the idea to blow up a bridge. This being Thrillerworld, Locke is immediately convinced that only he can stop this grave new threat to American freedom and democracy. Naturally, he can’t go through normal channels because he is on the run due to his heroic deeds in earlier books.

Apart from his superhuman ability to base firm conclusions on no real evidence, Locke seems to be invulnerable. He miraculously survives mayhem — he is the lone survivor to occupy a vehicle that is hit by a Hellfire missile — only because miraculous survival is necessary to keep the book from coming to a premature end. While Locke does all the usual tough guy stuff, he tends to be more reliant on advanced weaponry than fisticuffs, at least when he isn’t fighting Winters, whose gimpy leg and advanced age give Locke a rather unfair advantage. Not that Locke cares, because he adheres to the tough guy bromide that if you fight fair you aren’t trying hard enough.

Locke is eventually joined by an FBI agent named Jennifer Lin, who — unlike the superiors who refused to consider her opinions — is convinced that the assassination attempt was the work of Russian agents. Her pursuit of her theories makes her a renegade outlaw who is hunted by her agency. Before meeting Locke, she gets herself captured by bad guys and fights her way free because all thriller superheroes are masters of whatever martial arts technique the author decides they should possess. Not to be outdone, Locke also gets himself captured and fights his way free. Action notwithstanding, I tried in vain to suppress yawns while zipping through the predictable story.

Readers won’t encounter anything new in High Treason, a novel that is derivative from the first scene to the last. Lin’s decision to place her career at risk by disregarding orders and going rogue to pursue her own investigation is a staple of thrillers. The key events are driven by one of those ancient conspiratorial organizations that thriller writers love. This one is called The Order and it dates back to the 1300s, which is a long time to keep secrets. A HALO descent onto a Manhattan rooftop is straight out of the last Mission Impossible movie. Nuclear bombs planted in three American cities is such an overused threat that it has become tiresome. The virile hero and the rogue heroine fight each other to a draw before lust overcomes their animosity, after which the hard-fighting woman “giggles” and “coos” when she’s in the arms of her man. I failed to detect an original scene in the entire novel.

Locke is the kind of thriller hero who is always applauding himself for how brave he is, reciting macho slogans like “Who dares wins” and making sure the reader understands that he’s no sissy. One-dimensional characters are common in thrillers but Locke barely manages even a single dimension. Jackson and Winters are just as bad as Locke. The two villains waste boring pages pontificating at each other while griping about what a supreme adversary they have in Locke.

Sean McFate treats his audience as a bunch of illiterates, smugly explaining, at least twice, the meaning of “wilco” as if the term is understood only by elite soldiers. McFate’s clunky prose style is pulp fiction at its worst (after Locke sets an adversary on fire, McFate tells us that “the shrieks were gruesome”). The dialog is silly. A sample of Locke’s grand pronouncements: “Apollo must be stopped.” “I have returned to render justice.” “I condemn you to death for high treason.” I condemned myself to finish the novel, which at least has the virtue of moving quickly, primarily because it is long on action and short on substance.

High Treason might appeal to fans of tech-driven military thrillers who care about the tech more than original plotting, believable characters, or polished prose. For anyone else, there are better choices.

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#SayTheirNames

#Solidarity

Dead Land by Sara Paretsky

Published by William Morrow on April 21, 2020

Dead Land is Sara Paretsky’s twentieth V.I. Warshawski novel. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve read, Dead Land included. Paretsky always mixes Chicago’s colorful history and atmosphere into a solid, traditional detective story. Much of Dead Land takes place on Chicago’s south side, in parkland near Lake Shore Drive.

V.I.’s goddaughter, Bernie Fouchard, is coaching a preteen girls’ soccer team that is sponsored by the South Lakefront Improvement Council (SLICK). V.I. and Bernie attend a SLICK meeting where the team is scheduled to be given some love. Before that can happen, the meeting addresses a plan to fill in part of the lakefront with a sand beach, some playground equipment, and maybe a nice restaurant or bar. The presentation is interrupted by a protestor named Coop who believes there is more to the proposal than they are being told. Naturally, the Chicago cops hustle Coop away so that the people in power can continue steamrolling the unsuspecting neighborhood residents.

V.I. and Bernie make their way into the park, where they hear Lydia Zamir singing a song called “Savage” that earned her a loyal following. Lydia is now homeless and a bit feral, playing her music on a toy piano and deathly afraid of anyone who comes near her. V.I. wants to help her, but Coop arrives and establishes himself as Lydia’s protector.

V.I. recounts all of this to her reporter friend, Murray Ryerson, who thinks there is a story in (1) the resurfacing of Lydia and (2) the plan to build a little beach area that might actually be a plan to do something else. When the news breaks about Lydia, her fans flock to the area, enraging Coop. After Lydia disappears, V.I. learns that Lydia went off the deep end four years earlier when environmental activist Hector Palurdo was killed by Arthur Morton, a sniper who carried out a mass shooting. Lydia was standing onstage next to Palurdo when he was shot. The law firm that swooped in to defend the mass killer got a restraining order against Lydia when she seemed to be losing it.

Paretsky's intricate plot involves nefarious developers, sneaky lawyers, corrupt politicians, a disputed South American inheritance, and a multitude of murders. Coop is suspected of killing the man he interrupted at the SLICK meeting, but V.I. has her doubts. She’s more interested in finding Lydia, as is the law firm that Lydia allegedly harassed. The more V.I. digs into Lydia’s history, the more she suspects a connection to murders — and to attempts to murder her —although the connections are elusive. The reader is invited to join V.I. as she juggles the puzzle pieces until they can be assembled into a recognizable picture.

The reader need not fear being overwhelmed by all the players and clues because Paretsky provides internal summaries to keep the details alive in the reader’s memory. She balances action scenes with pavement pounding detective work to keep the story moving at a good pace. The central characters are well established and offer no surprises, but Coop and Lydia give Paretsky a chance to explore damaged but decent individuals who are struggling with mental health issues in different ways. Paretsky writes about the unfortunate with compassion while entertaining the reader as V.I. unravels a challenging mystery one thread at a time.

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Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 2, 2020

Luna is living an unusual life. While awaiting transportation in an ambulance, she watches a woman remove her shoes and place them in a mailbox, unless this is something she might have imagined. Her grandmother has been reincarnated as a bird, or so it seems to her. She is getting married to “the groom” if she decides to go through with it, but her grandmother-bird crapped all over her wedding dress so she needs to find another one. Every time the elevator door opens in the building where she plans to wed, she steps out onto the same floor. Stairs are no better because there are more flights of stairs than the building has floors. A diner turns into a ship sailing on the waves of the stock market, although Luna might have dreamt that one.

After a long estrangement, Luna reunites with her brother Tom, a former addict, and learns that Tom is now Simone, who holds a “woman’s grace and the person I used to know’s ability to entertain with an offhand gesture. She is simultaneous.” Tom/Simone wrote a successful play about Luna’s life called Parakeet and used the earnings to finance the first phase of a sex transition. Compared to the rest of Luna's life, her brother returning as a woman “is the only thing that makes sense.”

Luna wakes up with a hangover one morning and discovers that she has physically transformed into her mother. This doesn’t surprise Tom/Simone, who realizes that “sooner or later every woman wakes up and realizes she is her mother.” Fortunately, the physical transformation is short-term.

What are we to make of Luna? Her name suggests a character who is mentally troubled and her observations suggest an unreliable narrator. Yet she seems quite sane, or no less insane than most people who are on the verge of getting married. In the story’s second half, we learn about a formative trauma while Luna was a bit younger that clearly affected her life, but questions remain about what is real and what is delusion. Luna hears on a radio program that stories should not start with “Once upon a time” but with “This never happened,” perhaps a reminder that fiction can do violence to a reader’s understanding of reality because none of it real.

“Will Luna get married or not?” is a broad description of the plot, to the extent that one exists. Some of her mishaps might be interpreted as the manifestation of a desire to remain unwed. There may be good reason for Luna to avoid marriage. While the story has surrealistic moments, it is anchored in the reality of family. Luna is marrying into a conventional family. The groom’s mother secretly (and then openly) scorns her as a “brown gypsy.” Luna avoids her groom’s perfect family because it makes her yearn for her own, messed-up family. “And then I’d have to acknowledge that I was missing incorrect, anxious freaks, and that I was one of them. People with good families can’t fathom those without. Or that we don’t want to borrow theirs.” Parakeet reminds us that there are no good families or bad families. There are only our families.

We do not choose to be born into a family, but marriage is about making a family, and marriage is a voluntary choice. Even if it seems destined or the right thing to do, we can always decide that marrying and becoming a family, in general or with a particular person, is not something we want. The choice Luna will make is uncertain as she approaches and endures her wedding day. The resolution might or might not be seen as a happy ending, but happiness is a matter of perspective.

At the novel’s end, Luna wonders whether she is a good person. She thinks the answer depends on who you ask. Simone agrees and tells her “so you better be careful who you ask.” Readers might have different opinions about whether Luna is a good person. She is clearly a troubled person. Maybe she doesn’t always make wise choices. But when it counts, including standing up for Simone’s right to stop being Tom, she proves that she has a good heart.

The novel is ultimately about finding yourself and being open to the possibility that what you find might later change. “Tiny, inconsequential shifts” in the path your life takes produce “unexpected vistas” and each shift causes you “to make room for yourself again and again.” Parakeet is charming in its oddness and wise in the lessons it teaches.

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Clean Hands by Patrick Hoffman

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press June 2, 2020

Clean Hands blends a modern financial/corporate espionage thriller with an old-fashioned criminal mob story. Yet at the end, it isn’t either of those. The clever plot travels in unexpected directions. The book might not be a good choice for readers who need a hero they can cheer for — corporate law firms, small-time thugs, and people who play dirty tricks in the clandestine world tend not to win a reader’s heart — but the characters all benefit from well-defined if disagreeable personalities.

Chris Crowley, an associate at the Carlyle firm, has his pocket picked. He loses the iPhone on which he has stored incriminating documents about a client of the firm. His failure to password protect the phone, coupled with videos that show Crowley making eye contact with the pickpocket, lead firm investigator Michael D’Angelo to suspect that Crowley is not telling the whole story.

The head of the firm, Elizabeth Carlyle, freaks out because the documents relate to a bank that is the firm’s key client. The bank is suing another bank and neither financial institution has clean hands. Carlyle is worried that the documents will expose her client, and thus her firm, to major liability. She contacts her go-to outside investigator, Valencia Walker, who promises to recover the phone.

The story follows the phone as it gets passed from one crook to another, and then follows Walker as she follows the trail of people who touched it. The investigation takes her to some small-time criminals who plan to trade the phone for money, but the plot conceals a deeper layer of intrigue. The extortion that the theft sets in motion is part of a more intricate scheme with more powerful players who manipulate characters in surprising ways.

The story never loses credibility despite its byzantine plot. The story is built on smart storytelling rather than meaningless action scenes, yet it moves quickly and cleanly, never bogging down in unnecessary detail. Characters are constructed in the same way, with sufficient background to make them real without burying the reader in unnecessary biographical data.

In the end, Clean Hands depicts Machiavellian characters whose hands are anything but clean, but creates sympathy for their self-involved lives by placing them in compromised situations. The story avoids a predictably happy ending, but there is a satisfying amount of karma in this story of morally ambiguous people who are manipulated by shadowy forces they barely perceive.

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