The Last Astronaut by David Wellington

Published by Orbit on July 23, 2019

The Last Astronaut is a first contact novel. Early in the story, the contact kills an astronaut. If you have seen any of the Alien movies, you’re familiar with the concept. Fortunately, although the novel feels like a patchwork of ideas borrowed from Alien and Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and a couple of Star Trek episodes, the story offers a moderate measure of fun for readers, particularly those who don’t read much science fiction and are not put off by the absence of fresh ideas.

The story begins in the past. Sally Jansen is the mission commander of a crew traveling to Mars when something goes wrong. She jettisons a part of the ship to save the rest of it, killing a crew member and aborting the mission. Whether Sally is a hero for saving the ship and the rest of the crew or a failure for allowing a death divides opinion at NASA.

About 20 years later, Sunny Stevens is working for a private NASA competitor when he observes an object approaching Earth that has spontaneously started to slow. His employer doesn’t seem to care, so he quits and goes to work for NASA. Parminder Rao, an astrobiologist, is pulled from her project and assigned to the discovery. Sally Jansen is recruited to join the team, returning to NASA after a long absence. Windsor Hawkins is added as the representative from Space Force. The astronauts are sent to make first contact with what is assumed to be an alien vessel. They actually make second contact, as a ship launched by Stevens’ former employer beats them to the prize.

The dual themes of The Last Astronaut will be familiar to science fiction fans. First, our ignorance is vast. Any aliens that humans encounter are likely to be truly alien. Making assumptions based on our limited knowledge of how things work on Earth is more likely to impede than to assist understanding. Second, the tendency of hawks in or out of the military is to kill anything they don’t understand, and that tendency will certainly assert itself in any first contact with aliens.

The secret of the alien ship is revealed a bit more than halfway through the novel. Science fiction fans will have guessed that secret in the novel’s early pages (again, the concept is far from original) but the real question is what our intrepid space travelers will do once they learn the truth. Their actions are predictable, but they keep the story moving. The ending is so artificially upbeat that I didn’t buy it. Some of the action on the way to the ending is nevertheless entertaining in an unchallenging, summer beach read way.

A few details of the story don’t make much sense. For example, the description of its airlocks is difficult to reconcile with what we learn about the nature of the alien ship. More problematic are the melodramatic efforts to bolster Jansen’s heroism. The novel drags when expository sections remind the reader of Jansen’s fears and courage. At several points I was muttering “just get on with it.” About 20% of The Last Astronaut could have been trimmed. Even then, the story would not be meaty, but it would have been a better action/adventure novel if its efforts to make the reader feel sympathy for Jensen had been less forced.

If you want to read an action/adventure novel with science fiction trappings and you don’t mind stock characters, you might enjoy The Last Astronaut. If you have read a fair amount of science fiction, you won’t find anything fresh here.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Black Sun by Owen Matthews

Published by Doubleday on July 23, 2019

Major Alexander Vasin is a former homicide investigator from the Moscow police who is now a KGB agent. In 1961, Vasin is sent to Arzamas-16, a city that does not officially exist, to investigate a physicist’s death. Fyodor Petrov was working on the development of a new bomb when he died from ingesting a radioactive substance. The local KGB pronounced the death a suicide. The Politburo is not convinced.

Vasin encounters obstacles as he investigates. Scientists proclaim themselves too busy to speak to him. The local KGB officer in charge insists that Vasin confirm the death as a suicide and go home. Yet there are secrets being kept and Vasin has been tasked by his boss in Moscow to uncover them. His mandate gives him power, but he suspects that he will be in danger if he pushes too far.

Vasin has a secret of his own, involving his boss’ wife. That secret seems destined to come out after Vasin's wife learns about his affair. If she doesn’t expose him directly, the fact that the KGB listens to every phone conversation in Russia may eventually be Vasin’s undoing.

The plot of Black Sun is built on intrigue, deception, and betrayal. The mystery — who killed Petrov and why? — is a good one. Owen Matthews sets up a range of suspects who might have a motive and places them against an overlapping backdrop of characters who have an incentive to send Vasin home with the crime unsolved. Any distraction from the goal of building and testing the ultimate weapon is unwelcome.

The retrospective look at the arms race is interesting not just for its potential impact on humanity, but because it immunized Soviet nuclear scientists from the constraints that governed the lives of most Soviet citizens. The scientists have access to “subversive” music and literature that are forbidden to most. The sense the scientists have of being a privileged and untouchable elite adds interest to Vasin’s investigation.  

Black Sun dramatizes the risks that politicians take with human lives when they order scientists to design and test nuclear weapons, risks that necessarily have unintended consequences, as the United States learned when it destroyed Bikini Atoll. The story, Matthews tells us in an afterword, is based on the reality of a bomb that Soviet scientists feared might set the world’s atmosphere on fire. A bomb with reduced power that the Soviets eventually tested shattered windows in countries 900 kilometers from the test site. The bomb’s inventor, Andrei Sakharov, lobbied the Soviet Union to enter into the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

The characterization of Vasin as a man who believes himself to be a swamp dweller, undeserving of happiness, is suitable both to a noir novel and to the setting. The oppressive atmosphere of Soviet Russia pervades the story in chilling detail. Informers advance their careers by denouncing the innocent. Patriotism is measured by loyalty to people who hold power rather than loyalty to country. Survival depends on sacrificing principles. In a society where everything is relative, a world of lies where there is no room for moral purity, Vasin does his best to tell good lies that will make incremental improvements in the lives of those who are engulfed by Soviet darkness.

The story is tight and the resolution of the mystery is satisfying. Vasin finds a way to do justice (of a sort) without doing more harm than is necessary. Vasin has a bit in common with Arkady Renko and Bernie Gunther, two noir icons who pursue justice in unjust societies. If Vasin goes on to have a series of adventures behind the Iron Curtin — the next one is set up in the last chapter — the series will likely be one that Renko and Gunther fans will want to follow.

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The Bouncer by David Gordon

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on August 7, 2018

The Bouncer is a fun, fast-moving, light-hearted thriller. The premise is that the FBI and the NYPD are coming down hard on criminal organizations in New York because their anti-terrorism details can’t catch any actual terrorists, so going after organized crime (on the contrived theory that their money laundering and drug dealing somehow abets terrorism) is the next best thing. To get back to business as usual, mob boss Gio Caprisi offers to help the FBI catch terrorists in exchange for leaving his businesses alone. That sounds like something that could easily happen, given the uneasy history of coziness between the FBI and the Mafia.

Meanwhile, Joe Brody is working as a bouncer at one of Gio’s places. He gets involved with a robbery (ripping off some arms dealers) that goes wrong, but he manages to rescue a fellow criminal from the clutches of an attractive FBI agent. That gets him invited to help with another caper, this time stealing a sample of a new perfume from a vault. Or at least that’s what he thinks he’s stealing. That crime also goes wrong in a way that proves there is no honor among thieves.

Bouncers have a good bit of down time when the strippers aren’t on stage. Joe uses his time productively by committing crimes, evading law enforcement, and reading classic literature. Eventually, Gio has him take on some terrorists.

David Gordon writes action scenes in a cinematic style. He gives Joe the kind of personality that a criminal protagonist should have — flawed, a bit beyond concerns about society’s norms, but fundamentally decent when it counts. Other characters, particularly the FBI agent who gets under Joe’s skin, have enough personality to make them interesting.

This novel is the first in the “Joe the Bouncer” series. Fans of intelligent, action-driven crime novels will likely enjoy it. I look forward to reading the second installment.

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Tall Oaks by Chris Whitaker

Published in the UK in 2016; published by Dover Publications on March 20, 2019

Tall Oaks is a place where people keep their scars hidden from view. The story’s first dramatic event, however, creates a shocking mystery for everyone to see. While Tall Oaks is both a crime novel and an ensemble domestic drama, the plot and its multiple threads are almost secondary to the carefully constructed characters.

Jessica Monroe tells Sergeant Jim Young that she saw a man wearing a clown mask on her baby monitor. When she ran to the boy’s room, the clown had disappeared with her three-year-old son Harry. Jim launches an investigation that rocks the sleepy town of Tall Oaks. He feel protective toward Jessica. She is needy and unstable, separated from her husband Michael, and losing Harry might just push her over the edge. No evidence ties Michael to the kidnapping, but the idea of a child snatcher in Tall Oaks is difficult for anyone to believe. Michael soon becomes a pariah.

A bunch of other characters are tangential to the kidnapping but play key roles in the plot. One is a teen named Manny who fancies himself to be a gangster. His mother, Elena, works hard to keep Manny under control, not that anyone takes him seriously. Manny is interested in a girl named Furat, who finds him amusing despite (or because of) his insistence on aping the language of a 1940s mobster. As a foul-mouthed kid with delusions of badness, Manny adds a dimension of comic relief to the story.

In fact, I loved Manny. He’s a liar who has a knack for telling the truth when the truth needs to be told. He’s also good to Furat, one of the few high school kids who does not regard her as a terrorist because of her national origin.

Manny doesn’t like Jared Martin, the third man his mother has dated since his father left her. Jared is plainly punishing himself. In a novel about people with secrets, the truth about Jared comes as one of Tall Oaks’ largest surprises.

Max owns a camera shop. Jerry is his developmentally disabled employee. Their interest in photography seems destined to play a role in the novel’s outcome. While Jerry is fearful and kind-hearted, he turns out to be more complex than the stereotype he initially seems to be.

Jessica’s Aunt Henrietta is married to Roger but interested in Richard because he’s a “real man.” She’s also interested in Eddie because he’s a hunk. Roger is having an affair of his own, so he might be a “real man” in his own way. Roger is from London and treats marital discord in the reserved and civilized fashion that only the British can muster. How the marriage will turn out is one of many subplots in the story.

While multiple plot threads bind the story in Tall Oaks, they all find resolutions, more or less, as the story winds down. Secrets are revealed, characters reconcile (unless they don’t), and as a mystery should, the story ends with a surprise. The plot offers many suspects for the reader’s consideration, but Chris Whitaker plays fair. The clues to the mystery are scattered through the story and the answer makes sense.

While the story is excellent, Whitaker’s ability to create memorable characters gives the novel its heart. With its delicate mix of comedy and drama, Tall Oaks is one of the most entertaining crime novels I’ve read this year.

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Turbulence by David Szalay

Published by Scribner on July 16, 2019

A woman who becomes ill on a flight from London to Madrid hopes that the life of a man who has cancer will be spared in exchange for her death. A man sitting next to her spills a Coke on his trousers. From Madrid, that man flies home to Dakar. After witnessing the death of a child in a traffic accident, a pilot flies from Dakar to São Paulo, wondering whether his girlfriend in Frankfurt is alone.

Turbulence is a series of connected stories, each beginning with a flight from the city in which the preceding story was set and taking place in the destination city. As the characters jet from one city to another, they encounter the turbulence of life. A mother does not know how to respond when her daughter’s baby is born blind. A married senior tells her husband that she is in love with another man, causing their life to proceed “outwardly as normal for a while after that, though with a kind of silence at the heart of it.” A debt between friends sparks an argument, although the lender’s anger can be traced to an unrelated circumstance described in an earlier story. A woman’s husband flies home to abuse her, then flies back to Qatar where he is living a secret life.

The story about the married woman in her sixties who has an affair is my favorite. She loved her husband intensely once and knows that the intense love she feels for the new man will fade, just as her intense love for her husband did, but she surrenders to it anyway. Falling in love again somehow makes her marriage seem untrue, and she “did not want to live with something untrue.” The question is whether she should abandon her husband or work with him to restore truth to their marriage.

The novel is one of relentless motion; the stories are fleeting. Taken together, the overlapping chapters illustrate how people around the world make connections with each other, sometimes unnoticed or quickly forgotten as they move on to their next destination. The novel also emphasizes the similarities of people around the world. A troubled marriage in India echoes another in Hong Kong. Tensions between a parent and child in Budapest echo a relationship in Madrid. The man who lives multiple lives in India and Qatar sparks concern that a man who is about to marry in Budapest has another life in Syria.

David Szalay writes with surgical precision about the darkness that so often betrays the better self. Most books about connections focus on love, childbirth, and the other joys that bind humanity. Yet it is also true that humans everywhere face the same fears and burdens: death, duplicity, the exposure of embarrassing secrets. Turbulence is not a life-affirming novel — its bleakness may put off some readers — but Szalay offers an honest glimpse of the trauma and despair that people of all social classes, races, ages, and nationalities share in all parts of the world.

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