The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer

First published in 2010; reissued by Minotaur Books on February 4, 2020

The Nearest Exit is the second novel in Olen Steinhauer’s Milo Weaver trilogy. The trilogy was recently reissued because a fourth novel will soon be added to the series.

As we learned in The Tourist, Milo does nasty work for a branch of the CIA that few people know exist. Together with the Tourist Agents who research and support their missions, Tourists travel around the world imposing America’s will on foreign entities, usually by killing people the Tourist masterminds have come to dislike.

Milo didn’t seem to have or want much of a future as a Tourist by the time the first novel ended. He wanted to devote himself to his wife and daughter, not to the whims of his agency. When the new boss wants Milo to return, Milo finds he has little choice. Milo begins with some baby assignments but is eventually charged with killing a 15-year-old girl named Adriana Stanescu. Milo wonders if he is being asked to kill a child to prove his loyalty, but having a daughter of his own, he finds a way to circumvent the mission without jeopardizing his career. To achieve that goal, he enlists the help of his father, who is running a little spy operation of his own for the UN, unbeknownst to pretty much everyone except Milo.

Adriana’s eventual fate pits Milo against his boss, his father, and a highly placed German law enforcement agent named Erika Schwartz. Erika is morbidly obese and a serious alcoholic, although she reserves her heaviest drinking for the end of the workday. She’s also astonishingly good at her job, making her the most intriguing supporting character in the book.

Erika has a video of Milo kidnapping Adriana, which turns her into one of Milo’s many adversaries. Adriana’s father is another. But the most formidable of the group is a Chinese spymaster who may or may not have planted a mole among the Tourists — or perhaps among the few Senate aides who are cleared to know about the Tourist program.

The plot combines traditional themes of betrayal with a clever Chinese scheme that has Milo more than once changing his mind about the existence of a mole. By the time the action winds down, things are not looking good for the Tourists. Milo’s future seems particularly bleak, as does his marriage, which has not benefitted from his employer-imposed secretiveness or from his absences from the family as he charges off to make the world safer. Even the CIA-approved marriage counselor has some doubts about Milo’s ability to focus on his family.

Unlike the first novel, the story ends on something of a cliffhanger. That’s not unexpected in a trilogy and, having read the first two, I can’t imagine that any spy fiction fan would forego the pleasure of reading the third installment. The combination of strong plotting, international intrigue, and sharp characterizations enshrine Steinhauer in the top echelon of American spy novelists.

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The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde

First published in Norway in 2017; published in translation by HarperVia on January 14, 2020

The End of the Ocean is told from two perspectives in alternating chapters. Signe’s story begins in the present. David’s begins about 20 years later, when a drought is threatening his life and that of his daughter Lou.

David, with his son, daughter, and wife Anna, left southern France to make his way to a camp. In light of the water shortage, David felt a responsibility to stay at the desalination plant where he worked, but the electricity upon which the plant depends is no longer reliable. It is ironic, he thinks, that coal-fired power plants contributed to global warming and thus to the water shortage, yet producing more fresh water depends on those same power plants. Seeing no end to the vicious cycle, Anna insists that they try their luck at a camp where they might at least be able to find food. A raging fire leaves them with little choice.

Before David’s story begins, David and Lou are separated from Anna and his son. David arrives at the camp and waits for his wife to appear. His story describes his tormented wait as the camp’s food and water supplies dwindle. His relationships with Lou and with a damaged woman named Marguerite who befriends Lou in the camp grow more difficult every day. Eventually their survival may depend on whether it rains again, filling a channel that will allow them to travel to the ocean, where David can use his expertise in desalination to provide them with water for the rest of their lives.

The present from which the elderly Signe narrates her story is lived on a boat that she sails from Norway to France. She plans to make a grand gesture with a load of glacier ice that, before she stole it, was intended for sale to the wealthy.

Much of Signe’s story is told in memory, adding a third time frame to the story. Signe grew up in a Norwegian village but made her life in Bergen. A company purchased water rights to the Sister Falls. It intended to divert the water to a power plant, destroying Norway’s most scenic waterfalls. Signe’s mother owns a significant share of the company. The plan will make her wealthy. Signe’s mother has already argued with her father about an earlier plan to divert the waters of a river, a plan that destroyed local agriculture.

Signe lived with Magnus, whose family lost its farm after the river ran dry. Magnus was an engineer who viewed the destruction of nature as inevitable, a sign of human grandeur. The rift between Signe’s parents will eventually replicate in Signe’s relationship with Magnus, as Signe’s long-term concern with the environment clashes with Magnus’ short-term desire to accumulate wealth. Signe’s protest against delivering pure glacier water to the wealthy when climate change threatens the availability of water for everyone begins the novel and plays a central role in its ending.

The End of the Ocean is a cautionary story of environmental destruction, but emotional honesty is the novel’s strength. The novel imagines good people making hard choices, compelling the reader to share each character’s agony. Can Signe bear to give birth to Magnus’ baby? Can David allow Marguerite into his life if sharing a dwindling water supply with her will threaten Lou’s survival? If short-term survival is a fundamentally selfish act, is it better not to prolong one’s life?

The reader will spot the ending that ties the two stories together long before it arrives, but it is the ending that the reader will want. The novel builds suspense in both timelines while raising the kind of serious ethical questions that book club members might enjoy debating.

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The Secret Guests by Benjamin Black

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on January 14, 2020

It isn’t easy to come up with a new plot for a suspense novel. John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, reimagines the history of England and Ireland during World War II in a thriller that blends politics with personalities. The royal family, worried about the safety of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose during the London Blitz, make a deal with the Irish government, with has remained neutral. The two princesses are taken to the Duke of Edenmore, a distant relative who has an estate in Tipperary, for safekeeping. The connection of the two girls to the royal family is supposed to be a closely guarded secret, but no secrets about the English are kept in Ireland.

The publisher’s blurb suggests that Black “has good information that the princesses were indeed in Ireland for a time during the Blitz.” Apparently, taking the princesses abroad was a contingency plan during the war, but at least officially, the plan was never implemented. The Secret Guests is a work of fiction so whether Black’s “good information” is accurate doesn’t really matter.

The girls, ages 14 and 10, are given new identities and a cover story to explain their sudden appearance at the Duke’s estate. The two princesses feel sisterly contempt for each other, but they have even less regard for Celia Nashe, an MI5 officer whose gender accounts for her assignment to babysit “a couple of girls.” Ireland’s contribution to the security team is Detective Garda Strafford, an uncomfortable Protestant whose religion seems to be his primary qualification for the job. Longing for a hero she can love, Margaret eventually turns her starry eyes to Stafford, but only after her early fixation on Billy Denton, a shabby groundskeeper who doubles as the Duke’s steward.

Denton is crucial to the novel’s political background. His mother was shot during the Irish War of Independence, although by which side is a matter of speculation. Strafford is worried that Denton may be sympathetic to the IRA, although Strafford, “as a descendant of the land grabbers who had flooded over from England three centuries before,” feels “suspended between two worlds, two sets of sensibilities, two impossible choices. Poor Ireland; poor divided little country, gnawing away at immemorial grievances, like a fox caught in a snare trying to bite off its trapped leg.”

The English are concerned that kidnapping a couple of princesses might be beneficial to the IRA. The fear is the IRA will trade the princesses to Hitler, who will hold them as hostages to destroy British morale, in exchange for allowing the IRA to rule Ireland as a puppet government. The local faction of the IRA, led by Boss Clancy, is generally regarded as harmless. Clancy lacks the resources to kidnap two girls from an estate that is loosely guarded by soldiers. But he does have contacts, and Belfast eventually supplies a couple of tough men who know to get things done.

As background to the political intrigue, various characters either backbite or sleep with each other. Sexual liaisons compete with the political undercurrent of a divided Ireland to hold the reader’s attention until action scenes drive the story to its ending. Black’s dependence on complex characters rather than chase scenes to carry the story gives The Secret Guests credibility that modern thrillers too often lack. As always, Black writes with graceful muscularity. With a good plot, strong characters, and a fascinating historical background, The Secret Guests pushes all the right buttons.

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The Marquise of O— by Heinrich von Kleist

First published in Germany in 1808; published in translation by Pushkin Press on January 7, 2020

From a modern perspective, this two-century old novella seems like the stuff of romantic comedy. A scholarly introduction by the translator, Nicholas Jacobs, advises the reader that the story was regarded as scandalous at the time of its publication. Certainly it is meant as drama rather than comedy — “operatic drama,” according to Jacobs — although Jacobs explains that the happy ending is uncharacteristic of Heinrich von Kleist, who apparently had a gloomy worldview that his other work reflects, no doubt accounting for Kleist’s eventual suicide. Whether the ending is happy by modern standards is something that the reader will need to judge.

The story is set in Northern Italy during the War of the Second Coalition at the end of the eighteenth century. European monarchies, fighting against Napoleon’s France, ultimately lost that war, but the Russian army won some campaigns in Italy during 1799.

The Marquise in the title is a widow named Julietta. She has a country house but, given the war, she finds it prudent to stay with her two children at the house of her parents. Her father, the Commandant, is ordered to defend the citadel in which his house is located. Russian troops overrun the citadel and order the Commandant to surrender, which he does as soon as the surrender can be made honorably. The surrender is accepted by a Russian Count who compliments the Commandant on his good manners. War at the time was apparently a civilized conflict between gentlemen.

While the fighting is ongoing, however, Russian soldiers capture Julietta and her mother. One of the soldiers subjects Julietta “to the most shameful mishandling” with the implied intent of having his way with her. Fortunately, the Count comes along and rescues the Marquise from the ungentlemanly assault. He apologizes to the Marquise on behalf of the culprits, then apologizes to the Commandant, who clearly holds the Count in high esteem. The Russians depart and the Commandant is once again free to do whatever aristocrats do when they are not fighting wars on behalf of their conquerors.

After some confusion about the Count’s possible death (leaving the Marquis “inconsolable that she had let the opportunity pass of throwing herself at his feet”), the handsome Russian returns, proclaims his devotion to the Marquise, and proposes marriage. The proposal is complicated by the fact of the Count’s military service, which remains to be discharged. The Commandant won’t have his daughter marrying a deserter, so the Count’s wooing is held in abeyance pending the Count’s efforts to wiggle out of his duty to his country.

The heart of the story begins when the Marquise finds herself “with child.” The bewildered Marquise, who knows how babies are made, is confident that she did not make one. Virgin birth having fallen out of fashion, however, her family is not only disinclined to believe her, but disowns her. “You are despicable!” her father says. “I curse the hour I bore you” and so on.

The story proceeds as a family drama, with the Marquise’s mother hatching a plot to reveal the identity of the baby’s daddy. At a later point, foreshadowed when the story begins, the Marquise resolves to place an ad in the newspaper, promising to wed the father if he will come forward and reveal himself.

Will the Marquise reconcile with her family? Will her honor be intact? Who is the rogue who made her pregnant? Will she marry him and, if so, can she possibly be happy? Kleist answers all of those questions. The answers are not surprising, given the literary and social conventions in effect when the story was written. The notion of an unmarried woman becoming pregnant is no longer scandalous to most modern readers, but the real scandal — the fact that the Marquise became pregnant without her consent — seems to have been lost on Kleist.

Viewed through modern eyes, the way in which the Marquise presumably became pregnant overshadows all else, but Kleist evidently viewed the crime as forgivable under the circumstances. It’s interesting to note the contrast between the “shameful mishandling” by a soldier and what Kleist evidently regarded as less shameful mishandling because it is attributed to love rather than lust. Times have changed for the better, but putting aside that shift in perspective, the story delivers the kind of suspenseful, eyebrow-raising melodrama that should hold a reader’s interest.

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The God Game by Danny Tobey

Published by St. Martin's Press on January 7, 2020

A group of nerdish high school students found each other in the school’s tech lab and formed a group that pulls pranks. They call themselves the Vindicators. Charlie, Peter, Kenny, Alex, and Vanhi are now in their senior year. Vanhi is Charlie’s best female friend but she’s a lesbian so he has no chance with her. Charlie has long had the hots for a different girl, but she’s dating an entitled son of a banker who captains the football team.

Peter introduces Charlie to a website that calls itself G.0.D. and is either an Artificial Intelligence, a real god, or some sort of demon, depending on the perspective of the person interacting with it. G.0.D. issues challenges to Charlie and eventually to the rest of the Vindicators. It also seems to be watching them, as evidenced by texts that refer to things the Vindicators have recently done.

After playing an initiation prank, the Vindicators are invited to play the God Game. Winners have all their real-life dreams come true. The catch is, players who die in the game also die in real life, and death is the only way to leave the game. This is a jealous G.O.D. who expects to be worshipped. The Vindicators don’t really believe that they will be murdered for losing a game, although Peter reminds them that it’s not really murder if God does it.

The struggle to come up with a sensible explanation for G.O.D.’s apparent omniscience — something the Vindicators can’t do for most of the novel — is a hook that keeps the reader involved. The novel’s best moments come when the game forces its players to make moral choices with real world consequences. Should Vanhi sabotage Charlie to improve her chances of admission to Harvard?

The novel’s comparison of the game to a religion is also intriguing. A popular view of religion suggests that God is always testing people; testing their faith or their virtue or their ability to withstand suffering. The game takes testing to a new level.

On the downside, the story is built on clichéd characters. The bully who is keeping his sexual identity locked in a closet. The pretty girl who likes a nerd but only dates the popular boys. The kid from a religious family who questions religion. And, of course, the computer nerds who are ubiquitous in fiction. Even the nerds have clichéd problems: parents who demand perfection, parents who are cheating on each other, parents who are failures, friends who betray their friendship. I appreciate the effort to build characters, but all the clichés swell the novel to twice the word count that the story merits. A shorter and tighter story would have more appealing.

Still, I liked The God Game, albeit more for its concept than its execution. The novel repeatedly makes the point that credulous cretins who lurk on the web will believe just about anything (the continued belief in the QAnon conspiracy is sufficient proof that weak minds are easily manipulated). I particularly like this passage: “The optimists said the Web would give every human a voice. Holy shit! Have you met humans? We created God to protect us from ourselves.”

The notion that a computer program might begin to think of itself as a deity has been done before, but the concept (and maybe this is a spoiler, so fair warning) of a game that crowdsources morality, inviting players to judge the actions of others, is a new twist. The redefinition of what it means to be “saved,” morphed from a religious perspective to the context of data (a rewriting of old files with new ones, perhaps symbolic of a new life), is clever.

The story requires an even larger suspension of disbelief than is common in modern thrillers. G.0.D. sees all and controls everything that has a processor, an unrealistic proposition for even the most powerful app. Players seem willing to do just about anything the games requires of them, including the infliction of mayhem (creating the improbable scenario of gamers abandoning their screens and doing something physically active). But novel’s improbability is overshadowed by the interesting moral choices that G.O.D. forces the players to make.

The God Game will probably be more appealing to young adults than mature readers. All the teen angst the characters experience is wearying. The novel seems to end on a surprising note that is uncharacteristic of YA fiction, but ultimately cops out by reversing the apparent surprise. Notwithstanding its faults, the book has sufficient merit to make it worthwhile even for a jaded adult.

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