Widowmaker by Paul Doiron

Published by St. Martin's/Minotaur Books on June 14, 2016

I have to start with a rant about the protagonist because he’s just ridiculous. Mike Bowditch is a game warden in Maine who is paranoid about the risks that face game wardens. As far as I can tell, no game warden has been murdered in the line of duty in Maine since 1886, so when Bowditch sneaks up on a car parked outside his house in broad daylight because he fears the unknown driver wants to kill him -- and continues to keep his hand on his gun because the unarmed woman behind the wheel makes the suspicious claim that she needs to pee -- I had to think it might be time for Bowditch to retire.

Bowditch is happy that he’s been issued an assault rifle because wardens are “in serious danger of being outgunned in every firefight.” Are scofflaws who fish without a license a serious threat to get into shootouts with wardens? I guess Paul Doiron didn’t read the “North Woods Lawless” series in the Portland Press Herald about Maine game wardens who “padded evidence, provided alcohol to people who were being investigated and invented events that did not occur” in their investigations of game violations. Nothing in there about shootouts.

Bowditch also has disturbing ideas about his powers as a law enforcement officer. He seems to believe that he would have the right to kill an unconscious person who (while still conscious) tried to stab him. Even for a cop, the right to use deadly force in self-defense ends when the threat ends, but Bowditch must have skipped that class. He also believes the myth propogated by law enforcement that “Where there are drugs, there are almost always guns,” which statistically isn’t even close to being true. He has the typical moralizer’s inability to understand, or to feel compassion for, people who come out on the wrong side of his harsh judgment. Bowditch is, in short, narrow-minded, simplistic, and dull. On the other hand, he likes dogs, so he can’t be all bad.

The mediocre plot did not overcome my dislike of the protagonist. A woman wants Bowditch to find her son, who disappeared after being required to register as a sex offender because his girlfriend was a minor. Bowditch doesn’t want to play private investigator but the woman drops a bombshell on him that he can’t ignore. Eventually Bowditch tumbles to an improbable conspiracy that involves sex offender assassinations, leading to the shootout he craves.

Doiron’s prose is smooth and the novel’s mountainous setting is convincing. The plot is less convincing, but it’s not as outlandish as many modern thrillers. The novel’s steady pace makes Widowmaker easy to read. Widowmaker therefore has positive attributes, and readers who think Bowditch is interesting or heroic might like this more than I did. Still, I cannot recommend Widowmaker without significant reservations.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Polaris by Todd Tucker

Published by Thomas Dunne Books on June 14, 2016

Of all the tired plot devices that should be retired, the protagonist who wakes up with a crucial memory loss and wonders what side of a conflict he supports is high on my list. It is rarely believable, particularly when the memory loss is used a convenient means of generating suspense that would otherwise be wanting. In the case of Polaris, even that device creates little suspense, despite some fast-moving action scenes.

Polaris is set some decades in the future, after global warming, war, and an epidemic have threatened to decimate the world’s population. For reasons that are eventually explained (cleverly but not credibly), swarms of small drones are overflying the oceans, looking for targets to bomb. A target is basically anything a drone can spot, although they are supposedly programmed to look for targets at sea. No distinction between friend and foe has been programmed into the drones. If it floats, civilian or military, the drones bomb it. That’s such a remarkably useless weapon that it’s almost credible, given the history of military spending. Almost, but not quite. The poor premise undercut my interest in the story.

Pete Hamlin wakes up with a head injury and a shaky memory. He has apparently killed a friend, thus averting a mutiny, but he doesn’t recall the killing, the mutiny, or, for that matter, much of anything. Hamlin knows he is on a submarine called the Polaris and is told that they are being followed by a Typhon submarine, but the word Typhon means nothing to him.

Hamlin eventually recalls that the Alliance (which operates in cooperation with but independently of the U.S. military) is at war with Typhon, but he doesn’t know (and so the reader doesn’t know) whether he is with the military, the Alliance, or Typhon. Is he a mutineer or did he stop the mutiny? Everyone seems to think Hamlin is on their side but Hamlin can’t figure out where his loyalties lie. We are eventually given an explanation for that but the convenient selectivity of Hamlin’s memory loss struck me as an obvious plot device rather than a credible event.

Toward the novel’s middle we get an expository information dump that explains what’s up with Hamlin’s past. It includes a remarkable coincidence that’s just too coincidental to be credible. Later in the novel, we get an extended flashback as Hamlin regains his memory.

By the time it circles back to beginning, the story has become so predictable that the events triggering Hamlin’s memory loss are unsurprising -- which defeats the purpose of relying on the memory loss gimmick to carry the story. The ending is a standard action scene, mildly entertaining but far from memorable.

Some of Polaris is fun. I enjoy submarine novels and if Polaris focused on submarine warfare more than the strained development of plot contrivances, I would have liked it more. Characters are typical action figures without much depth. Diehard fans of submarine fiction might want to try Polaris, but the credibility stretches were too much for me.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Fractured State by Steven Konkoly

Published by Thomas & Mercer on May 17, 2016

Fractured State is a near future science fiction thriller. Like most modern thrillers, the plot is preposterous, but since this one is science fiction, I readily suspended my disbelief in order to enjoy the story.

Legislation designed to assure sustainability and resource protection has upset some Californians. All of their purchases are recorded so they can be issued a consumption report card. They are allotted a certain number of minutes per month for travel outside their residential district; exceeding the limit is taxed exorbitantly. Water use is regulated, solar power is mandatory, and so on. No swimming pools, no gardens, no fun.

Sustainability has become such a success that a growing number of greedy Californians want to secede, preventing other states from consuming California resources. The assassination of an influential public official might spark a civil war within the state -- or so fears Keira Fisher. She has her bug-out bag all packed. Nathan, her husband, works for San Diego County as a wastewater reclamation expert.

The assassination is soon followed by another, and by the apparent sabotage of a nuclear plant’s cooling system. The media aren’t sure whether to blame the California Liberation Movement (which favors secession) or the One Nation Coalition (which opposes secession). Neither is the reader, since it seems that certain interests are advancing their own causes and using the political movements as scapegoats.

Against that background, the novel follows Nathan, who witnessed something he wasn’t supposed to see. He needs to flee or die. With the help of a Marine, Nathan and a band of Marines take on an impressive paramilitary force that uses an improbable amount of weaponry and men in an effort to kill Nathan, his family, and the Marines who are helping him..

The set-up of Fractured State is interesting. The politics of the future schism might be improbable, but they are handled intelligently. That background develops during the first third of the novel. The rest is a fairly standard military/action novel, but the action scenes are lively and intense. Since I tend to ignore book descriptions before I start reading, I didn’t realize this was part one in a series, although it became clear as I neared the final pages that the story would not end with this book. I look forward to reading the next one.

RECOMMENDED

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

First published in 1988

Iain M. Banks began his series of novels about the Culture in Consider Phlebas. I enjoyed that novel but thought it had a number of flaws. To my mind, Banks hit his stride as a science fiction writer with his second Culture novel, A Player of Games. It is an impressive examination of how social, political, and cultural structures are used to control individuals, as seen primarily from the standpoint of a gamer.

Jernau Gurgeh is a famed game player. He has mastered pretty much every popular game, no mean trick for someone who does not specialize in any particular game. He has devoted his life to game scholarship which, in Banks’ utopian future, is as good a way of using up your life as any other.

The Contact section of Culture has been interacting with a galactic empire that acquires power over other planets by the ruthless use of force. Leadership in the empire is determined through a series of games. The ultimate winner becomes the Emperor, while a good showing assures political or military appointments. None of that would bother the Culture except for the empire’s cruelty toward pretty much everyone who isn’t in power, including residents of the planets it conquers.

The Culture manipulates Gurgeh into playing the empire’s game after manipulating the empire into inviting Gurgeh to play. Having accepted the challenge, Gurgeh experiences a series of emotional highs and lows as he confronts his feelings about the game, the empire, the Culture, and his life as a game player.

The novel has some funny moments, mostly involving Gurgeh’s interaction with the prissy machine that the Culture has assigned to assist him, but the novel isn’t humor-based, as are some of Banks’ later Culture novels. Banks includes a nice mix of action scenes, but The Player of Games isn’t really an action novel. It’s more of a psychological thriller in a science fiction setting. Playing the games takes a toll on Gurgeh, as do his discoveries about the nature of the empire and the consequences of the game he has chosen to play. His turmoil and the evolution of his character is the novel’s strongest feature.

The Player of Games has something to say about the nature of empires and of any political or social system that relies on subjugation or that denies freedom. None of its insights on those subjects are fresh or surprising but that doesn’t lessen their importance. A stronger and subtler theme, I think, is that games are not a model for governance. Banks makes the reader understand that competition, while fun in a harmless game in which honorable players do not cheat, leads to war and corruption when it becomes the basis for acquiring political power.

The Player of Games is fun, smart, exciting, and meaningful. I think it’s one of Banks’ best science fiction novels, and one of his best novels overall.

RECOMMENDED

Ice Station Nautilus by Rick Campbell

Published by St. Martin's Press on June 28, 2016

I’m a sucker for submarine novels. This one has four submarines, torpedo battles, undersea rescues, SEAL shootouts with Spetznaz, and all sorts of technical jargon that sounded convincing to me, given that I know nothing about submarines apart from what I glean by reading submarine novels.

A new Russian ballistic missile submarine is carrying a secret. The USS North Dakota is assigned to monitor its maiden voyage. As might be expected when submarines play tag under the polar ice cap, things go wrong pretty quickly, and the story turns into one of survival and rescue. But while the American Navy goes about its rescue mission, the wily Russians hatch a more nefarious plot. That leads to the aforementioned torpedo battles and polar shootouts.

National Security Advisor Christine O’Connor and presidential military aide Steve Brackman are the main characters, although a full cast of military and political characters round out the story. This is the third novel in a series and, while I didn’t read the first two, it works well as a stand-alone. Relationships between the central characters, however, are probably more meaningful to readers who followed the series.

While much of the story is predictable, it is predictably exciting, and occasional surprising moments are rewarding. The story moves at flank speed. Characters have enough characterization to carry a thriller and the plot is no more far-fetched than is typical in a modern action novel. Credible excitement is about all I ask from a submarine novel, and Ice Station Nautilus delivers.

RECOMMENDED