Mr. Nobody by Catherine Steadman

Published by Ballantine Books on January 7, 2020

Mr. Nobody combines a medical thriller with a lost-memory thriller. On both fronts, the novel achieves only modest success.

Dr. Emma Lewis is an English psychiatrist who has an interest in memory disorders. She wrote a paper arguing that certain patients who suffer from a fugue state have been misdiagnosed as malingerers. In rare instances, she believes a fugue state can be attributed to traumatic stress rather than a neurological disorder.

An American neuroscientist, preeminent in the field, refers a patient who turned up on an English beach near Norfolk. The press have labeled the patient Mr. Nobody. This could be the case that makes Emma’s career, but the hospital where Mr. Nobody is being treated is in a town that Emma fled long ago, leaving tragedy and her birth identity behind. She has to work up the courage to return and hopes that nobody will recognize her. Of course, her hopes are promptly shattered when Mr. Nobody calls her by her former name.

Mr. Nobody (hospital staff eventually call him Matthew) has a desperate desire to connect with Emma but he can’t remember why. Matthew reminds Emma of her father, leading to melodramatic sentences like: “The look in his eyes, it reminds her of someone a long time ago, but it can’t be, it can’t be him.” Since Matthew is clearly too young to be Emma’s father, it isn’t clear why she even entertains the possibility. The military take an interest in Matthew, thinking he might be a missing soldier, a theory that might explain the fighting skills Matthew displays when another patient threatens Emma with a cane.

Secondary characters of note include a police officer who knew Emma back in the day and the officer’s wife, a reporter who is investigating the Mr. Nobody story, much to the displeasure of the police. The officer can’t tell his wife anything (she would blow Emma’s changed identity if given the chance), which causes some marital discord. That plotline eventually leads to a predictable resolution.

Most of the novel’s characterization is reserved for Emma. She comes across as a typical thriller protagonist who is forced to confront the past from which she is trying to escape. Her childhood trauma seems insufficient to warrant her change of identity, and the novel’s ultimate lesson — only you can change yourself — loses its value when applied to a character who is clearly smart enough to have internalized the lesson long before her encounter with Matthew.

The attempt to give Emma’s life a feel-good ending is forced. The plot creates more interest than suspense, if only because it follows a circuitous route to its less than credible destination. Catherine Steadman plants a few false flags, one of which supposedly reveals Matthew’s true identity well before the novel ends. A savvy reader will know that there is more to Matthew’s story. An information dump in the final pages offers a needlessly complicated and improbable explanation of how Matthew wormed his way into Emma’s life. The selective nature of Matthew’s memory loss and his ability to manipulate it is just too convenient to be credible. Some of the story reminded me of the movie Memento, which covers much of the same ground more convincingly.

On the other hand, Steadman’s prose is competent when she isn’t resorting to tiresome descriptions of Emma’s distress. The story moves fairly quickly and the climatic action scene isn’t bad. Emma isn’t a shallow character, although Steadman gave me little reason to empathize with her messed up life. Readers with daddy issues might like her more than I did. I am recommending the book because the story held my interest, but I do so with reservations because this isn’t one of Thrillerworld’s better attempts to freshen the lost memory theme.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Terminal Uprising by Jim C. Hines

Published by DAW on February 12, 2019

Terminal Uprising is the sequel to Terminal Alliance, in which we learned that humans have gone feral, not to say zombie-like. An alien race called the Krakau admitted Earth into its alliance after restoring some humans to a relatively normal condition. The process renders humans resistant to pain, which makes them useful as soldiers. Humans are feared on other worlds because they are hard to kill.

Marian “Mops” Adamopolous is a restored human who, in Terminal Alliance, was placed in charge of a team of janitors that maintained a Krakau military vessel. The mix of humans and nonhumans under Mops’ command are skilled cleaners and adept at repairing plumbing clogs. They used those skills in Terminal Alliance to overcome aliens who were plotting against them, but found themselves at odds with the Krakau, in part because they took command of a Krakau starship, the Pufferfish.

Having apparently committed treason against the Krakau, Mops and her team begin Terminal Uprising on the run. Mops is soon working with a Prodryan, a member of race that is at war with the Krakau and everyone else. The Prodryan delivers a message from one of Mops’ few remaining friends among the Krakau, an Admiral who tells her about a location on Earth that seems to be curing feral humans. Mops decides to go to Earth and investigate. Political intrigue ensues, followed by chases, explosions, and chaos.

Like the first novel, Terminal Uprising employs action and humor to tell a fun, fast-moving story. Much of the humor comes from the fact that Mops and her crew were originally assigned to sanitation. They rely on cleaning supplies rather than weapons to solve their problems. That joke threatens to wear thin in Terminal Uprising, but Jim C. Hines manages not to wear it out. Hines creates amusing aliens and finds humor in both human and alien behavior.

The novel ends on a hopeful note for the human race and sets up Mops for her next adventure. I don’t know that the premise would sustain a long series of novels, but Hines’ success with the second novel suggests that there is room for one more if Hines chooses to write it.

RECOMMENDED

Liars' Legacy by Taylor Stevens

Published by Kensington on December 31, 2019

The Russians are up to no good in Liars' Legacy, the second novel in Taylor Stevens’ Jack and Jill series. An American intelligence bureaucrat named Hayes is also up to no good, in the sense that he wants to further his own interests rather than the country’s.

The plot involves “a son trying to escape his mother’s past and hoping to find a father.” The father is Dimitri Vasiliev, a KGB officer, and the mother is Clare, who at the time of her pregnancy was an American agent in Moscow. Jack and Jill have been shaped by Clare to be world-class assassins. As one might expect, they didn’t receive the kind of nurturing from Clare that children crave, but like Johnny Cash’s legendary Boy Named Sue, adversity imposed by a parent teaches them to survive. That talent comes in handy, given the number of killers who try to take them out as the story unfolds.

Other key characters are also in the killing business. Kara works for a nebulous government agency that has decided to kill the assassins on the Broker’s list, a list that includes Chris Holden. Kara is an analyst rather than a trigger puller, but events force her into the field when she is assigned to a tactical team that chases a dangerous target — until the target starts chasing her team. Up the chain of command from Kara is Liv Wilson, “a politics-playing, ass kissing ladder climber,” a “woman who saw competence in other women as a threat to her own position and who’d sabotage in a hundred petty ways."

The story begins in the aftermath of the Broker’s death, the Broker having been established in Liar’s Paradox as “the man who played king against king and bartered souls for national secrets, who’d negotiated hits between buyers and assassins, and who’d forced order onto lawless chaos.” A couple of hit squads seem to be following Holden on a flight from Dallas to Frankfurt, but maybe things are not as they seem. Holden is following Jack and Jill, Jack’s ticket having been purchased by someone who claimed the ability to connect him with Dimitri, the father that the twins have never met. Jill is along for the ride to watch Jack’s back, although she hopes that the search for Dimitry will “put meaning to their mother’s past and make some sense of an upturned childhood.” Jack’s feelings about Clare are less complex; he hates her for forcing him to live a life of lies, always looking over his shoulder for real or imagined threats.

Frankfurt is a step on a journey to Berlin, where the players converge. The twins are tracking their father while the Russians, the Americans, and Holden are tracking the twins. Later destinations in the journey include Prague and the United States, where events transpire that include a Russian plan to sow chaos by assassinating one or more American politicians. Jack might be tasked with one of those killings in a twisty plot that always has the reader wondering whether Jack, Jill, Holden, and Kara will eventually succeed in killing each other as well as their targets or pursuers.

Stevens manages to keep the story moving at a steady pace without dumbing down the plot. She writes action scenes that compare favorably with the best action-thriller writers. Characterization is nevertheless her strength. Holden thinks Jill is “a few sane days shy of crazy,” an apt observation given her love-hate relationship with Jack, Clare, and the world. Holden, who was “delivered as a trophy” to the man who ordered his mother’s death, is nearly as complex as the twins. Yet while none of the characters act out of high moral purpose, save possibly for Kara, they are all capable of kindness and empathy.

Taylor Stevens has earned critical acclaim as a thriller writer, but I’m not sure she has the same following as lesser writers who churn out books that readers might find more comforting. Her childhood history is a compelling story and her experience overcoming adversity plainly informs her writing. I enjoyed her Vanessa Michael Munroe series and I’m now an equal fan of Jack and Jill.

RECOMMENDED

Happy New Year!

A Small Town by Thomas Perry

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on December 17, 2019

A Small Town is a vigilante story. To make vigilantism seem justified, thriller writers concoct dastardly crimes committed by evil villains so that readers will root for the vigilantes. In the logic of thrillerworld, if bad guys are bad enough, it’s okay for good guys to murder them. It isn’t surprising that Thomas Perry made one of the killers a psychotic racist cult leader because even liberals would agree that it is morally correct to murder a racist, right? Wrong. The protagonist’s stunning hypocrisy might make her an interesting character if her character flaws were recognized and explored, but Perry wants the reader to cheer on a serial killer who never pauses to consider whether being a serial killer might be morally blameworthy. I just can't root for shallow protagonists.

The bad guys in this story are federal prisoners who commit an improbable escape, killing a bunch of corrections officers and arming themselves in the process. Mind you, this is a minimum-to-medium security prison, the kind that houses tax evaders and people who commit credit card fraud, but we’re told that hardcore criminals were transferred there because more secure prisons were overcrowded. It isn’t clear that the hardcore criminals even committed federal crimes (murder is usually a state crime), but put that aside. Violent criminals with years left to serve don’t get sent to a federal prison with a low security level, even at the request of a blackmailed Bureau of Prisons bureaucrat, making the premise hard to swallow. But the setup isn’t nearly as difficult to buy into as the plot that follows.

In the two years since the prison break, the FBI hasn’t managed to find any of the twelve worst bad guys (perhaps not surprising since that duty would primarily fall upon the U.S. Marshals). Our hero, a detective named Kate, decides to resign from her small-town cop job so she can track down the twelve escapees and go full vigilante on them. Can this plucky small-town cop succeed where federal agents cannot? You know that answer to that question. In fact, she manages to find them rather easily and dispatches them without working up a sweat. The feds were apparently too dim to consider some of the obvious steps she takes to find the killers.

Kate takes the crime spree personally because her lover (married to a woman with MS so we’re supposed to forgive him for having an affair) was a casualty of the bad guys. That’s one of many contrivances designed to manipulate the reader into cheering for Kate despite her decision to betray everything a law enforcement officer should believe in by becoming a serial killer. I didn’t find either her cause or her character to be noble.

Apart from being a serial killer, Kate carries an illegal “numberless Glock” with an illegal “silencer screwed on.” Where does she get her illegal weaponry? More importantly, why does a police officer who should be dedicated to arresting people who violate firearms laws feel no qualms about violating them herself? The moral seems to be that if you think you have a good justification to break the law, it’s just fine to do so. The prisoners probably felt justified in escaping, but Kate believes her justification is superior to theirs. The prisoners and Kate are both wrong. We are a country of laws precisely to prevent people like Kate from becoming their own law.

Even less believable is that Kate’s quest is funded by the mayor and city council members who redirect a crime fighting grant to her personal use. I found it hard to swallow that so many people, even in a small town where leaders tend to be like-minded, would willingly conspire to commit federal and state felonies by misusing a federal grant to fund a contract killer. The mind simply boggles.

A vigilante novel needs to do something special to earn my recommendation. Perry has never been a gifted wordsmith, although he sometimes tells a good story. A Small Town does nothing to overcome its shallow premise. The narrative suffers from redundancy, as the reader is frequently reminded just how awful the criminals are, how much they deserve to die, and how the small town suffered in the aftermath of the violent prison break. The sentences devoted to those topics are an exercise in tedium. A good bit of the novel reads like padding, as Perry supplies mundane details that do nothing to create atmosphere or advance the plot.

I was amused by some of the novel’s observations, including a character’s realization after dedicating eight years to a religious cult that all he had to show for it was “a marginal life in the woods.” But the novel’s few moments of entertainment fail to offset a dull and predictable story about a remarkably hypocritical character.

NOT RECOMMENDED