The Iceman by P.T. Deutermann

Published by St. Martin's Press on August 21, 2018

I’m a sucker for submarine novels. I probably read them as I would a horror novel because I would be terrified to be in a submarine, particularly when torpedoes and depth charges are trying to sink it. I’ve rarely met a submarine novel I didn’t like, and I liked The Iceman more than most.

Malachai Stormes is a World War II submarine commander who has a well-deserved reputation for being aggressively crazy when it comes to killing Japanese soldiers and sailors. His insubordinate attitude doesn’t sit well with all of his superiors, but they let him slide as long as he keeps sinking enemy ships. His latest success earned him a promotion and a bigger sub in the Pacific. He takes command in Australia and is quickly dispatched to Guadalcanal with orders about torpedoes that the reader expects him to ignore. One of the book’s themes is the shoddy nature of American torpedo manufacturing and the tendency of submarine captains to ignore senseless orders that assure their torpedo use will be ineffective.

Malachai takes his sub, the Firefish, on a number of missions, sinking tankers and destroyers and shooting an occasional hole in an aircraft carrier. The missions are tense and exciting, as they should be in a submarine novel. Malachai is determined to be innovative, as he demonstrates (to his crew’s horror) by staying on the surface to attack tankers so that he can shoot them with the deck guns. He also has to deal with a nasty fire (never a good thing on a craft that is underwater and filled with explosives) and with a crisis at the novel’s end.

Apart from dazzling submarine warfare scenes, the novel builds interest through Malachai’s interactions with his superiors, his XO, and a woman in Perth. His superiors are unhappy with his willingness to criticize their orders, although they can’t do much about it given his record of success. His XO can’t handle Malachai’s bloodthirsty intensity, particularly when he sinks a Japanese seaplane and then orders the deaths of the survivors so that they can’t reveal their knowledge of the sub attack if they happen to be rescued. The woman in Perth, on the other hand, enjoys Malachai’s company despite his cold-hearted, controlling, and isolated nature.

The Iceman combines suspense with realistic images of war and a believable submarine captain who was damaged by life even before the war threatened to strip him of his remaining humanity. The love story holds no surprises, but it nicely balances the war story. I could complain about some scenes that might be a bit too predictable (has there ever been a fictional submarine captain who didn’t take his sub below its rated depth to test its true crush depth?), but frankly, I enjoyed every underwater scene, predictable or not. Thriller fans, war story fans, and particularly submarine fiction fans should get a kick out of The Iceman.

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Holy Ghost by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on October 9, 2018

The Virgin Mary’s appearances at a small church in Wheatfield, Minnesota have revitalized a dying Rust Belt town. Quick to take advantage of the miracle are J.J. Skinner and Wardell Holland, the two men who orchestrated it with the help of Janet Fischer.

Taking advantage of the gullible is a time-honored way of making money and, in this instance, would have been relatively harmless had it not inspired a sniper to begin wounding townspeople and tourists who venture near the church. At least, the working theory connects the shootings (and perhaps subsequent murders) to the Virgin’s appearances.

Virgil Flowers is dispatched to Wheatfield to help the locals find the shooter. His investigation proceeds in Virgil’s usual ambling way as he chats and jokes with townsfolk while appreciating the local women and keeping an eye out for clues. He’s eventually joined by regular series characters, including BCI investigators Jenkins and Shrake, creating the opportunity for the kind of banter at which John Sandford excels.

Virgil’s investigation is complicated by the fact that no witnesses hear shots fired, nobody sees a shooter, and nobody is sure of the direction from which the shots came. Nor can anyone explain why all the shots that nobody heard were fired at the same time of day. The whodunit and “how was it done?” storylines are well executed, but it is the likeable characters that keep readers coming back to Sandford.

In addition to his regular characters, Sandford has fun with Skinner and Holland, who might not be entirely honest but have good hearts. He populates Wheatfield with a number of colorful characters. Virgil’s interviews with crime suspects and witnesses are always amusing, as is Virgil. I like his realistic view of law enforcement officers (a third are pretty good, a third are “just getting through life,” and a third are “poorly trained or burned out, not too bright, have problems handling their authority”). I wish more real cops were like the fictional Virgil.

Holy Ghost speculates about the connection between religion and violence and pokes gentle fun at paranoid survivalist gun nuts. That will turn off some readers, but readers who are looking for an excuse to become outraged have objected to Sandford novels in the past because characters held political positions with which the readers disagreed. Judging from Amazon reviews, some readers object to Sandford novels because his characters interact with Democrats without regarding them as demons.  Sandford adds a couple of ineffective Minnesota Nazis to the cast of this novel, perhaps to appease a segment of the reading community that should probably stick with Mitch Rapp novels.

There’s nothing politically correct about Virgil, but he doesn’t see it as his duty to offend people for the sake of exercising his right to be obnoxious. Open-minded readers will appreciate Virgil’s open mind and his willingness to engage the world in a sensible but light-hearted manner as he goes about his business of investigating and stopping crime. Holy Ghost is another in a long string of Sandford novels that are just plain fun to read.

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Relic by Alan Dean Foster

Published by Del Rey on August 14, 2018

Relic is sort of a “last man standing” novel, the last man being the last surviving human. So I guess that makes it a post-apocalyptic novel, except that the apocalypse is a really big one.

The last man (as far as he knows) is Ruslan. He has a natural immunity to a biological weapon that killed all the other humans on his world, and apparently on all other worlds to which humanity has spread. Aliens find Ruslan, restore his health, and propose to recreate human civilization by cloning him, adding such genetic variants as they can to create males and females capable of reproduction. Ruslan opposes being the model for a future race, but the aliens — a scholarly race of tripods who are quite fascinated by humankind — hope Ruslan will teach the clones how to be fully human. In exchange for his cooperation, Ruslan wants the Myssari to find Earth (its location has long been lost to history) and to take him there.

To search for Earth, the Myssari look for clues on other planets that humans colonized. Ruslan’s existence soon attracts the attention of another alien race, the Vrizan, who are a bit closer to humankind in both appearance and behavior, which is not necessarily a good thing given human history. Eventually the Myssari and the Vrizan are in conflict about possession of the last surviving human.

By the novel’s midpoint, the reader will learn whether Ruslan is, in fact, the only human left alive. Other challenges Ruslan faces include whether he will be treated as a lab specimen that belongs to either the Myssari or the Vrizan, as opposed to an individual with all the freedoms that individuals should have, and whether as a human he has any claim on now-abandoned human worlds, including the one on which humans originated.

Relic tells a simple story that is pleasant and consistently interesting. It holds few surprises and the aliens seem more alien in appearance than behavior — they could almost be humans if they weren’t so unfailingly civilized. I think a serialized version of Relic could easily have been published in Galaxy or If during the 1950s. I got a kick out of its throwback nature, and I enjoyed it more than a couple of sf novels with more modern themes that I recently started and abandoned. Unlike some writers who are managing to get published, Alan Dean Foster at least knows how to construct a graceful sentence.

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The Lady Killer by Masako Togawa

First published in Japan in 1963; published in translation by Pushkin Vertigo on October 30, 2018

Pregnant from a one-night stand, Keiko Obana hangs from a windowsill until she plunges to her death. The police rule the death a suicide, but the inspector who investigates the case believes Keiko killed herself because of the pregnancy. So does a woman who believes her death is attributable to the rogue who made her pregnant.

After that prelude, the story follows Ichiro Honda (the rogue) as he seduces one woman after another, always assuming an identity other than his own, generally pretending to be foreign visitor to Japan. Honda keeps a diary of his sexual conquests that he refers to as his “Huntsman's Log.” The reader also follows Honda’s surprised response when he discovers that some of the women he seduced have been murdered. He even finds one of them dead when he turns up for a new assignation. Of course, the reader knows it is only a matter of time before Honda is blamed for the deaths.

The novel’s second half shifts the focus away from Honda to a young lawyer named Shinji who is helping an older lawyer handle Honda’s case. The older lawyer is the novel’s Sherlock, while Shinji does all the investigative legwork. Shinji is startled to learn that one of Honda’s conquests was a woman he was dating in college. Masako Togawa uses that coincidence to develop Shinji as a dispirited and lonely young man who is also a bit judgmental about Honda’s promiscuity — unless he is simply envious.

The Lady Killer creates a mystery for Shinji to unravel (how and by whom was Honda framed?) but it maintains interest by giving Shinji a series of interviews with characters who are carefully developed despite their brief appearances. Those characters — a medical intern, a salaryman, a salesman, a day laborer, and a gay prostitute — open a window on different aspects of Japanese life. The investigation also reveals how people are like “toothed cogs; once one cog slips out of sync, it damages not merely those around it but also others having no direct connection with it.”

The novel is noteworthy for its glimpse of Japanese culture, including the divide between older people who hold traditional values (for example, values that compel suicide for disloyalty) and younger people who have adopted a western approach to moral decision-making. Themes of duty and loyalty are prevalent throughout the novel. The Lady Killer also explores social norms, not unique to 1960s Japanese culture, regarding the judgment that society visits upon men who use women, even if the women happily agree to be used for a night of passion, and upon women who are branded as promiscuous because they enjoy casual sex.

At the same time, Honda’s view of himself as a hunter and of women as his prey makes it difficult to feel sympathy for Honda, even though he is an innocent accused. Yet Honda is far from being the most aberrant character in a story that exposes the dark side of humanity. This example of Japanese noir strives to spotlight darkness rather than to promote empathy for its characters.

The plot depends on an elaborate scheme to frame Honda for multiple murders that will expose him to the death penalty. My initial reaction was that the killer could more easily have killed Honda; the decision to kill several innocent people struck me as an unlikely way to seek revenge. By the end of the novel, however, a plot twist allows the reader to see the story in a different way. Combined with an epilog that fills in the gaps, the mystery’s resolution is credible, surprising, and satisfying.

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Boomer1 by Daniel Torday

Published by St. Martin's Press on September 18, 2018

Boomer1 imagines a new way to divide Americans, young against old, as a social movement fueled by viral videos sparks resentment of Baby Boomers, prompting Boomers to direct their anger at Millennials. The risk of “us-against-them” movements, according to Boomer1, is that “at some point animosity based in the broad strokes of identity simply pervaded, its origin obscured, only the intangible residue of its conflict remaining.” True enough.

It’s also true (and a point Boomer1 makes effectively) that “generations” are just demographic groups, defined by arbitrary “born between” brackets, while members of a defined generation are individuals who may have little in common with each other. The two key characters in Boomer1 are Mark Brumfeld, who is living in his parents’ basement and raging at Boomers who refuse to retire (as if Boomer retirement would automatically qualify him for a high-end job), and his former girlfriend Cassie Black, who scores a high-end job using digital-world skills that come more naturally to Millennials than Boomers. In other words, Cassie’s new career undercuts the foundation of Mark’s outrage, although she’s reluctant to tell him about her good luck.

Before all of that happens, Cassie attends Wellesley and then returns to her roots as a bluegrass fiddler. She has a relationship with a woman and then with Mark, who plays in the same band, and then cheats on Mark with the woman. Relationships are not Cassie’s strength.

At some point after Cassie breaks up with Mark, she sees that he has changed his name to Isaac and is starring in viral YouTube videos that he calls Boomer Missives. A failure as an intellectual, as a journalist, as a doctoral candidate in search of a teaching gig, and as a boyfriend, Mark moved in with his parents before launching “the most infamous domestic revolutionary group in the country,” based on his perception that all Millennials are screwed because acquisitive Baby Boomers, who care only about themselves, have raped the planet’s resources and destroyed the global economy, leaving nothing for the Millennials. Mark’s videos advance a manifesto: “Resist much, obey little.” Boom boom.

Mark’s complaints that Boomers have not been good custodians of the environment are fair, although unfocused. More than half of all Boomers actually care about global warming and unequal wealth distribution and the other topics of Mark’s Boomer Missives. Many of Mark’s complaints are self-serving and ill-conceived — yes, his social security taxes help the elderly, not him, but the system was never designed to be a savings account, and the next generation will be paying taxes for Mark’s support — but any complainer can find an audience of self-identified victims living in their parents’ basements, so it is credible that Mark’s videos would go viral.

The novel alternates between the stories of Cassie and Mark, with occasional digressions to explore the life of Mark’s mother Julia and her love affair with “pure American” bluegrass music before she begins to cope with hearing loss. Toward the end of the novel, Julia emerges as an important character, a sympathetic representative of the Boomers who has done nothing to fuel the anger of the Millennials. [Disclosure: As a Boomer, I might be inclined to have greater sympathy for Boomers than Millennial readers of Boomer1.]

Leaderless social movements in the digital age (like Occupy) tend to gather steam quickly and to fade just as quickly. Boomer1 explores that dynamic in a story that seems plausible, even if not all of its events are convincing. (I mean, even viewing them as generational icons rather than musicians, how could anyone dislike Jerry Garcia or Neil Young?) Nor have I sensed a wave of hostility against Boomers that Millennials might ride upon, but as a Boomer, it is possible and perhaps likely that I am entirely oblivious to what Millennials are thinking.

In any event, I view the larger message of the story as more important than the details. The story asks whether the immediacy of video has supplanted the power of the written word. The advent of YouTube and social media and the dark web make it easy for people to spark something they don’t anticipate by venting anger that they haven’t carefully considered and don’t really understand. The fire they spark might be damaging, but should they be judged harshly for sparking it? It’s hard to think of Mark as a bad person, even if his actions set events in motion that eventually have a bad outcome, but media pundits would clearly blame him (pundits are in the business of blaming) despite his benign intent. On the other hand, perhaps anyone who uses video to fuel rage against an amorphous “other” deserves a bit of judgment (although there is a world of difference between deserving disapproval and deserving punishment).

In addition to asking meaningful questions about how social movements evolve in the Millennial age, Boomer1 works best for me as the story of youngish people trying to figure out who they are. Daniel Torday uses a wealth of detail to create Mark and Cassie as individuals rather than Millennial stereotypes. I also like the juxtaposition of things that change relatively quickly (technology, generations) with things that don’t (the Rocky Mountains, the struggle to make sense of life). In that sense, Boomer1 offers important insights into both the things that divide generations and the things that will always connect them.

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