The Circus by Jonas Karlsson

First published in Sweden in 2017; published in translation by Hogarth on January 28, 2020

The Circus lies somewhere on the border between surrealistic and realistic. It might best be categorized as a psychological mystery that challenges the reader to decide whether the evidence supplied by the narrator supports the conclusion he has drawn. The plot revolves around the disappearance of a man at a circus — he apparently entered a mirror, and like Alice, left this dimension and entered some secret realm. Or did he?

The narrator is invited to the circus by his friend, Magnus Gabrielsson. They haven’t spoken in a year and the narrator regards their meeting as a social obligation he needs to get out of the way. A circus magician announces that he will make a member of the audience disappear. Magnus volunteers. When the magician directs Magnus to walk behind the mirror, the narrator can see Magnus’ reflection in the mirror but cannot see Magnus. The act ends when the magician removes the mirror. The narrator expects to find Magnus at the intermission but Magnus cannot be found. Nor can he be found in the days that follow. Nor can rumors about his disappearance be confirmed.

We learn that the narrator was a friendless child until he met Magnus. The narrator spent his school hours listening to music on his Walkman (he was more fond of synth than hard rock). When he noticed Magnus hanging around the periphery of the school playground, he struck up a conversation about music. They bonded, although the narrator did most of the talking. Magnus absorbed the narrator’s music lectures, learning as much as possible about the bands Magnus recommended.

At some point, the narrator realizes “there was another life outside the claustrophobic little world Magnus and I constructed.” He imagines himself befriending a popular kid named Dennis until Dennis steals his Walkman. So much for the wider world.

As an adult, the narrator’s only friend is Jallo, who he met at a summer camp. When the narrator tells Jallo about Magnus’ disappearance, Jallo suggests an address the narrator should visit. The narrator is surprised when, after some false starts, he finally visits the correct address, but the surprise brings him no closer to solving the disappearance of Magnus.

Soon after Magnus disappears, the narrator begins to receive telephone calls from someone who never speaks. Is it Magnus? Or perhaps the ghost of Magnus? Music sometimes plays in the background, but is it music that Magnus would play? Sometimes the narrator plays music for the silent caller. Near the novel’s end, they carry on a conversation by playing songs to each other, a conversation that gets its content from the song titles.

All of this is strange but intriguing. Those attributes are the signature of a novel by Jonas Karlsson. Thanks to the narrator’s interaction with Jallo, the reader will come to suspect that the truth behind Magnus’ disappearance is quite different than the narrator believes it to be. Yet the ending suggests that even the explanation that Jallo proposes might not be true. Everything in a Karlsson novel is ambiguous because, well, isn’t life?

Reading a Karlsson novel is like taking a break from reality, or at least from the way we are accustomed to perceiving reality. Karlsson’s novels are always grounded in a philosophical view of existence. This one suggests that the world is a circus (or as Shakespeare suggested, a stage) and life is nothing but an attempt to impose order on chaos. Order is an artificial construct, one of our own devising, an unnatural state but perhaps a necessary one if we are to muddle through a life that only has the meaning we assign to it. Whether or not the reader accepts or rejects that philosophy, fiction that tells an absorbing story while inviting the reader to consider life from a different perspective is always worthwhile. And in the case of a Karlsson novel, it is always entertaining.

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The Janes by Louisa Luna

Published by Doubleday on January 21, 2020

The Janes is the second Alice Vega novel, following Two Girls Down. Both books are a fresh take on the concept of a private investigator who tracks down missing children. While most protagonists who track down missing kids are ridiculously self-aggrandizing, reminding everyone they meet how much they care about victims, Vega cares about being paid. Yeah, she cares about the kids too, but she doesn’t talk about it. In fact, she doesn’t talk about much of anything. Unlike thriller heroes who can’t stop talking about themselves or recalling their difficult childhoods or berating others for not caring enough about victims, Vega keeps her mouth shut and gets the job done. Vega is not loquacious; she lets her actions speak.

The title refer to two Jane Does, two female children who have been killed and dumped. A piece of paper with Alice Vega’s name is clutched in the hand of one of the dead girls. We learn in an early scene that Spanish-speaking girls are being held for sex work in a “television room.” If a month goes by when no customer picks them, or if customers complain about their performance, they are taken to the garage by a fellow named Rafa, where something bad will happen. Vega has been in the news thanks to her child rescue efforts, which is how the girls in the television room know about her.

The girls are wearing IUDs with serial numbers that are only five numbers apart. Vega assumes there are at least four more girls where these two game from. A couple of police officers hire Vega to track down the girls. To that end, Vega doubles the proposed fee so she can use half to pay her friend, Max Caplan.

Cap is a retired cop with a potentially lucrative and easy job awaiting him. He’s not sure he wants to take on another adventure with Vega, who has a tendency to place him in dangerous situations. His daughter is even less certain that he should be risking his life. But Cap has a thing for Vega, who played him in Two Girls Down with a kiss he can’t forget. Whether she has any actual feelings for Cap won’t be clear until the novel ends.

Vega goes about her business efficiently, without ever talking about herself or her worldview. I love that about her. She wasn’t trained in the military or by a martial arts expert. She’s fairly small and doesn’t rely on superior fighting techniques when she places herself in danger, as she regularly does. If she needs to overcome a larger foe, she hits them in the knee with a bolt cutter. Or she shoots them in a nonlethal location. I love the fact Louisa Luna doesn’t make her protagonist a superhero. Cap is a bit more philosophical, and certainly the more demonstrative of the two, which makes him a good counterpoint.

I’m not typically a fan of human trafficking stories (thriller writers love to imagine there is human trafficking everywhere, but in reality, it’s pretty rare in the US). This story won me over because of the intriguing twists it takes, as Vega investigates corruption and an off-the-books approach to immigrant detention in various police and government agencies. The plot is credibly low-key and all the more fascinating because of it. The Alice Vega series establishes Louisa Luna as a thriller writer worth following.

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The Blaze by Chad Dundas

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on January 21, 2020

The lost memory plot has been done so often that writers rarely find a way to make it fresh. Setting aside the story’s familiarity, The Blaze generates enough suspense and sets up sufficient drama in the lives of likable characters to earn a recommendation.

Matthew Rose comes home from Iraq with a brain injury. He doesn’t remember his past, which might be for the best. He doesn’t recognize his mother in Florida. When he attempts to contact his estranged father in his hometown of Missoula, he learns that his father has just committed suicide. He travels to Montana to handle the probate and to see if the trip jars any memories.

Matthew learns that he was even more of an asshole during his teen years than are most teens. He was a popular kid until he turned twelve. Then he quit the swimming team, estranged himself from his close friends Scott Dorne and Georgie Porter, and started using drugs. His life was a mess until, at 23, he abruptly joined the army.

Back in Missoula, Matthew reconnects with Georgie, who is now a journalist. He learns that Scott’s father, Chris Dorne, went on to become something of an activist in elective office, exploiting the apparent murder of a boy named Carson Ward as the springboard to a career in local politics. Chris Dorne and Matthew’s father were good friends, but Matthew’s father began a downhill slide just as Chris was getting his life on track. Matthew recalls none of that, but looking at a picture of an old candy store, Matthew has a vague memory of the store in flames. Did Matthew have something to do with the fire?

Matthew happens to stumble upon a burning house and, fixated on the flames, snaps some pictures. The next day he learns that a grad student named Abbie Greene died in the fire. The home that burned down was owned by a lesbian couple, prompting concern that the fire stemmed from a hate crime. A cop’s murder adds to the body count, and a fire at Georgie’s place leaves the reader wondering why Matthew is at the center of so many blazes.

The plot methodically develops connections among characters and events, allowing the reader to piece together clues, some of which misdirect, making it difficult to guess where the plot might be going. We learn its destination when Matthew rather improbably recovers his memory, followed by an information dump that a key character helpfully provides. The plot elements weave together nicely, leaving no threads dangling. The story is ultimately a whodunit, and it succeeds both in concealing the answer and in giving the perpetrator a convincing motive.

The Blaze tells a tight story that creates a moderate degree of suspense. The explanation for Matthew’s youthful change of personality, bursting out in the late information dump, makes it possible to sympathize with him, particularly since he’s a nice enough guy after his head injury. Unlike many thriller writers, Chad Dundas thankfully resists making Matthew a superhero by virtue of his military service. Matthew doesn’t fight much during the novel and when he does fight or chase someone, he isn’t terribly successful. I appreciated that. The characters lack ambiguity — the reader is supposed to like them or not — but that’s true of most thrillers. The self-aggrandizing personality of the novel’s key bad guy makes him easy to dislike. And since the story never pushes the boundaries of credibility too far, it is easy to invest in Matthew’s quest to understand his troubled past.

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House on Fire by Joseph Finder

Published by Dutton on January 21, 2020

House on Fire imagines a pharmaceutical company that bears a close resemblance to Perdue Pharma. The family that controls it bears a close resemblance to the Sackler family. The company manufactures a drug called Oxydone, a drug that bears a close resemblance to OxyContin, except it is delivered through an inhaler. Like the Sacklers, the Kimball family promoted the drug aggressively to doctors, assuring them that the potential for patient addiction was low, and in the process made a fortune while creating a public health crisis. The Kimballs, like the Sacklers, have also squirreled money away in a variety of shell companies so that the family fortune will remain intact when their company inevitably goes bankrupt to avoid liability for all the lawsuits the family’s nefarious scheme has spawned.

In his Acknowledgements, Joseph Finder says the Kimball family isn’t based on any real-life family. Har har har. Okay, Finder and his publisher don’t want to be sued, so you can’t blame him for saying that. You’d also have to be blind to ignore the obvious parallels between the Sacklers and the Kimballs.

Putting aside the background, the plot departs (presumably) from reality; this is fiction, after all. It is difficult to prosecute families for the crimes committed by the corporations they control, but Conrad Kimball not only buried a study that revealed the addictive properties of Oxydone (the corporate crime of defrauding the government), he orchestrated some murders to keep the truth hidden (the very personal crime of homicide). It is up to Finder’s hero, Nick Heller, to expose Conrad’s evil deeds. Initially, he is hired by Conrad’s daughter Susan to locate a copy of the study. A friend of his, Maggie Benson, tells Nick she has been hired by a different daughter to find Conrad’s estate plan. Nick and Maggie both discover that it is dangerous to snoop into the business of a ruthless family. The novel’s second half is largely devoted to Nick’s exploits as he fights, jumps, shoots, rappels, and otherwise proves himself to be an action hero in his quest to bring Conrad to justice.

Finder’s specialty is corporate and financial crime. Given its prevalence, his novels are usually timely. This one offers reasonable insights into wealth crime: profiting from human weakness “is the greatest business opportunity there ever was”; the wealthy view bankruptcies as sinful when poor people use them to avoid debt but as a legitimate business tool for corporations that want to jettison the consequences of poor decisions; wealthy families market themselves by giving money to museums and hospitals and universities, where their names will be etched in stone, washing the filth from the money they made.

Heller is an interesting character. His father is in prison, a successful white-collar criminal until he got caught. Heller’s friendship with Maggie was derailed seven years earlier because he tried to seek justice for a military rape that Maggie endured, never thinking about whether Maggie would approve of his actions. With that background, Heller engages in more self-reflection than is typical of a thriller hero.

On the other hand, life might be a bit too easy for Heller. He outshoots multiple armed opponents and despite bringing his fists to a knife fight, dispatches his adversary with relative ease. Things need to go Heller’s way to keep the plot moving, so a password is guessed, a door is conveniently left unlocked, a desk clerk hands over a room key without checking ID, and a character confesses at the end when silence would be a more prudent option. Still, credibility issues are common in modern thrillers, and the ending features a surprise or two. While the novel’s action tends to overshadow its suspense, Finder knows how to hold a thriller fan’s attention. If for no other reason, the novel is fun because corporate outlaws face the kind of justice that only happens in fiction.

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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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