The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith

Published by Little, Brown & Co./Lee Boudreaux Books on March 20, 2018

Life is full of improbable coincidences. So is The Fighter, a novel that depends on two or three huge coincidences of time and place and circumstance to bring the story together. Some readers might chalk those circumstances up to fate, particularly in light of the novel’s religious imagery and express references to angels, saviors, and prayer. I’m not much of a believer in fate, and I have criticized other novels for an overreliance on coincidence, but I’m giving The Fighter a pass. Why? Because I enjoyed the story, and in the end, that’s all that matters.

Jack Boucher is a cage fighter and a gambler. He owes money to Big Momma Sweet. That isn’t good. She puts men in the ground who don’t pay their debts. Jack also needs money to stop a foreclosure and to get a former foster mother out of a nursing home. She suffers from dementia but she’s the only person in his life he cares about, the only family he has. Jack might also be suffering from dementia, or some form brain damage that has robbed him of his memories, a likely consequence of being kicked in the head too many times.

Jack’s struggle to get out of debt, to get his life back on track, to do something for his foster mother before he dies, is sad because it seems so futile. In the story’s opening chapters, it seems clear that Jack, while well-intentioned, has little control over his life. Even if he can break out of the daze caused by his pain pills, it isn’t clear how he will overcome the cumulative impact of his bad choices before he loses his foster mother’s home to foreclosure. It isn’t even clear that he will outlive his foster mother, who may be entering her last days.

A former stripper named Annette enters the story while she’s traveling with a carnival, working as the tattooed girl. Annette’s life intersects with Jack’s in ways she doesn’t immediately understand. I won’t say much about Annette because revealing her story would spoil the coincidental surprises. I can say that, as a character, she has the right combination of damage and heart and toughness to make her appealing (although no fictional stripper has ever been created who wasn’t appealing). The same combination of damage and heart and toughness animates Jack, but he’s also appealing because he takes comfort in being who he is. He hasn’t lived a life most people would want, but he has lived the life he wanted.

The novel reveals secrets that Jack never suspected his foster mother was carrying. It builds tension as it moves toward a climax involving the possibility of one last fight, a fight that Jack might not survive. The ending could have gone in either direction, a fact that maintains suspense as the story reaches its climax. As was true of Michael Farris Smith’s Desperation Road, the humanity of the novel’s desperate and damaged characters shines through, conveyed by prose that manages to be both intense and understated.

RECOMMENDED

Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds

First published in Great Britain in 2018; published by Orbit on January 23, 2018

Elysium Fire is a sequel to The Prefect, set in the universe known to Alastair Reynolds fans as Revelation Space (the title of the first novel set in that universe). Elysium Fire is basically a detective novel, but the detecting occurs in the detailed and intricate setting that consists of Chasm City (the title of the second novel in the Revelation Space universe) and the Glitter Band, orbiting habitats that have largely lapsed into decay. The Panoply, a law enforcement agency, maintains a sort of political and social order. Ordinary crime is left to local police agencies, but the Panoply addresses big issues, including preservation of the Athenian democracy that comes from letting inhabitants vote on just about everything that might concern them via implants in their brains.

Thalia Ng is a Prefect with the Panoply. With the help of her robotic whiphounds, she begins the novel by cutting off the head of a fellow who is apparently having a seizure. She isn’t told why she was given that order, but soon learns that people are dying, apparently due to overheated implants, and the only way to gather evidence is to preserve the head before the brain melts. The hope is to download memories that can be booted so the deceased can be quizzed about the circumstances that might have caused their implants to go haywire. That isn’t going well, and deaths (code-named Wildfire) seem to be increasing at an exponential rate, perhaps threatening everyone in Chasm City and the Glitter Band.

Thalia’s partner is a talking pig named Sparver Bancal. In the meanwhile, a senior investigator named Dreyfuss is questioning the backup memories (called betas) of the deceased about a white building called Elysium Heights that seems to link some of the deaths. Dreyfuss is additionally occupied with an antagonistic fellow named Devon Garlin, who views himself as a revolutionary. Dreyfuss also has an old nemesis on his hands, an Artificial Intelligence named Aurora who purports to seek an alliance for the purpose of battling Wildfire, although her real motivation involves a foe of her own, known as the Clockmaker.

Devon Garlin is part of the Voi family, which is responsible for the impenetrable system of wireless democracy by which Chasm City is governed. His exact role in that family is not immediately revealed. Flashbacks focus on two Voi children, Caleb and Julius, who are learning to manipulate quickmatter (from which nearly everything inorganic is now constructed) while being groomed for an oversight role regarding the machinery of democracy. The full background of Julius and Caleb is something of a mystery until the reader learns the truth about them, and about their connection to Devon Garlin.

As is always true of Reynolds, an enormous amount of thought went into Elysium Fire. The background details are just as interesting as the story. The primary characters (Thalia, Sparver, and Dreyfus) respond to conflicts in admirable ways, making them easy to like despite their faults. The younger members of the Voi family are portrayed in a way that makes it possible to understand and even sympathize with their feelings of alienation and anger. The plot works as a mystery, challenging the reader to piece together the novel’s various components to make sense of Wildfire, Elysium Heights, and the connection among the victims. The story also works as an action novel from time to time, although this is a cerebral story more than a shoot-’em-up space opera. The novel is long (as Reynolds’ novels tend to be) but the pace is steady and the tale is never dull. I’m giving Elysium Fire high marks as an entertaining entry in Reynolds’ fascinating Revelation Space universe.

RECOMMENDED

The Spy Who Never Was by Tom Savage

Published by Random House/Alibi on January 9, 2018

Spy thrillers should be based on intrigue and suspense. They should never be dull. The Spy Who Never Was fails those tests. The novel might appeal to a fan of cozy mysteries, but I’ve never heard of a cozy spy novel. If you’re more interested in the heroine’s latest “sassy” hairstyle and footwear selection than international intrigue, this might be the right novel for you. Fans of traditional spy novels should avoid it.

The CIA has been spreading rumors that an agent named Chris Waverly has been conducting operations, thereby protecting the agents who actually conducted the operations. It’s doubtful that foreign agencies would fall for the ruse, but that’s the premise. It’s more believable than the rest of the story, which hinges on the delightful coincidence that the real Nora Baron looks just like the fictitious Chris Waverly.

Spy hobbyist Nora is told that blackmailers have tumbled to the fact that Waverly is fictitious and are threatening to reveal the truth, thus exposing real agents to harm, unless the CIA pays them. At the CIA’s direction, Nora takes a break from her busy life as the wife of a real spy, mother to a college student, and acting teacher to pretend to be Chris Waverly, thus flushing the blackmailers into the open.

It is clear to the reader that the CIA’s story isn’t making much sense, and that eventually becomes clear to Nora as well, although she’s a bit slow on the uptake. By the time she has finished her assigned mission, however, with more than half a novel to go and a trail of killed or missing agents, Nora realizes that she’s being played. She becomes convinced of that when the dreaded assassin The Falcon (because assassins always have cool names like The Falcon) visits her hotel room in the middle of the night. The story goes downhill from there.

Nora is the kind of spy who does her spying in tourist spots like Venice and London, making it easy for the author to provide local color. This time she goes to Paris, where the local color consists of popular restaurants and a river cruise along the Seine. Tom Savage offers an explanation for Nora’s tourism, but it seems contrived. The more likely explanation is that Savage has taken some European vacations to popular tourist destinations (including a river cruise along the Seine) and decided to turn them into material for spy novels. A description of Lucerne (another tourist destination) sounds like it came from a travel guide, although the bed-and-breakfast in which Nora stays (I’m not kidding) is described in loving detail.

Nora is also the kind of spy who beats up men twice her size who attack her, despite having no military training and minimal CIA training. But she has taken classes in jazz dance, which appears to be all the training anyone needs to defeat a stronger and more skillful fighter.

We’re told that the CIA is actively involved in breaking up Russian and African sex trafficking rings, which is not at all the CIA’s job and about which it could probably care less. Then we’re told that a spy has an important cellphone conversation at a bar with the bartender standing there, a remarkably sloppy performance by the spy but convenient for Nora when she chats up the bartender.

The characters in The Spy Who Never Was are all too cheery and freshly scrubbed (even the bad guys) to be convincing. They certainly aren’t interesting. The life story of the spy originally posing as Chris Waverly — avenging the assassinations of her assassin parents, falling in love with the Russian assassin who was tasked with killing her — borders on the preposterous. Her motivation for disappearing is equally implausible.

The big reveal (the true reason Nora was sent on her mission) is unoriginal and unbelievable. So we have dull characters and a farfetched plot, with occasional moments of underplayed violence that only add to the story’s overall dullness. It’s all very cozy, but if you’re looking for an actual spy novel, you’ll probably be disappointed.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Night Market by Jonathan Moore

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on January 16, 2018

The Night Market is a near-future science fiction thriller. Many thrillers that are based on wide-scale conspiracies tax the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief, but readers are conditioned to suspend disbelief when they read science fiction, so the conspiracy seems plausible. In fact, given the rampant nature of consumerism and the ease with which corporations place profit over moral behavior, the conspiracy would be all too likely if the technology upon which it depends actually existed.

The near future in which the story is set is not a nice place. Big chunks of urban areas belong to vandals at night. Police brutality is unchecked. Isolation is a way of life. Consumerism is the new heroin.

Ross Carver is a police inspector in San Francisco. He and his partner, Cleveland Jenner, investigate a report that a blood-covered guy inside a house is beating a bedroom window. A few minutes after the report is made, the man had turned into a pile of cooked meat. By the time Carver and Jenner arrive, the dead man is a pile of moss. A few minutes later, the feds have Carver and Jenner in decontamination and are burning down the dead man’s house. And after that, they don’t remember a thing. In fact, they don’t remember responding to the call.

Before their memories disappeared, Carver and Jenner were investigating Patrick Wong, who has now disappeared. Jenner thinks he interviewed Wong, although he doesn’t recall the details. They wanted to talk to Patrick Wong so they could find Johnnie Wong, who may have murdered a singer named Hadley Hardgrave. The story eventually circles back to that murder.

Carver gets an assist from a neighbor named Mia who appears to be agoraphobic, but Carver, and thus the reader, doesn’t know whether anything about Mia can be trusted. Such is the nature of conspiracy novels. In fact, part of the fun of a conspiracy novel is guessing which characters are part of the conspiracy. In The Night Market, puzzling out how the conspiracy works is also part of the fun.

The ending of The Night Market is surprising. It’s also surprisingly creepy. The novel as a whole is sufficiently convincing to be chilling, while Jonathan Moore’s crisp prose style creates a dark blend of uncertainty and suspense. You don’t need to be a science fiction fan to enjoy this near-future thriller; it’s like a Ludlum novel with fewer words, stripped to its bare essentials.

RECOMMENDED

Fade-Out by Patrick Tilley

First published in Great Britain in 1975; published by Bloomsbury Reader on December 14, 2017

Fade-Out was published in 1975, a simpler time when “the boys in the lab” solved the Earth’s problems while “the girls” were laying around getting “a nice suntan.” The novel has a dated feel that is enhanced by foreign policy debates about how the United States should handle the monolithic Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall came down only 14 years after Fade-Out was published. How quickly times change.

I’m not sure Fade-Out warrants Bloomsbury’s claim that it’s a “classic” that is “often copied by others.” In fact, the novel reprises First Contact themes have been an integral part of science fiction since at least the 1940s. At the same time, by the novel’s end, Fade-Out does have the feel of a classic, even if it’s a forgotten classic.

The book’s title refers to a “fade out” of radio wave reception that begins to afflict all parts of the Earth, albeit at different times. The boys in the lab figure out that something in orbit is causing the problem. They can’t see the thing, but they can detect it on radar. They are pretty sure it’s a ship and they surmise that the fade-out occurs when its propulsion system is activated. The boys in the White House reluctantly decide that the ship is of extraterrestrial origin, although they would prefer to blame the Russians.

The book’s initial chapters describe the political debate that surrounds the ET contact. Of course, the military wants to blow the ship out of the sky. More rational minds believe that starting an interstellar war would be unwise, but the conflict then revolves around the degree to which the United States should cooperate with Russia in addressing an alien presence. That debate intensifies when the fade-out continues after the ship buries itself in Montana.

Eventually we learn something about the ship (they name it Crusoe), and about the (apparently) big mechanical spider that exits from it (they name it Friday). Even the supposedly rational minds do precious little to communicate with the ET. They’re more intent on capturing Friday, or at least immobilizing it while they explore Crusoe. To that end, they do a number of things that would seriously piss off a human, apparently without considering that antagonizing an alien isn’t a smart approach to First Contact.

In any event, the humans who do manage to get inside Crusoe … well, I won’t give it away, but what they find isn’t what any of their team expected. Their close encounter of a very different kind sets the novel apart from others that have followed the same path.

The characters take occasional breaks to discuss philosophy (the nature and purpose of the universe, whether there’s an afterlife) and to debate scientific theories (the big bang versus the steady state theory, another aspect of the story that now feels dated). None of their musings add anything noteworthy to the story, except for the notion that lots of people don’t want to know the answers to the big questions, because the answers might unsettle their lives. One of the science-minded characters also accepts as fact some “scientific” theories about pyramids that have been debunked, and while that’s a small part of the story, it contributes to the novel’s dated feel.

I recommend the novel to fans of books (like The Martian) that feature scientists and engineers trying to puzzle out solutions to problems (like how to drop a bomb on a craft that disrupts electrical energy). Despite its dated feel, the story is reasonably convincing, and it ratchets up tension rather remarkably in the last 50 pages in a way that reminded me of the classic novel Fail-Safe. The ending is nicely ambiguous, which will bother readers who want everything spelled out for them. I was pleasantly surprised that the plot did not resolve in a more definitive way and that a couple of important loose ends were never explained. The rest of the book is good in sort of a predictable way, but to my mind the last chapter makes Fade-Out stand out. From the perspective of 2018, Fade-Out manages to be both dated and timeless.

RECOMMENDED