Redemption Road by John Hart

Published by Thomas Dunne Books on May 3, 2016

Redemption Road is an intense psychological drama. Characters are living with dark secrets, or trying to find a way to live with them. With strong dialog and cinematic descriptions of settings, John Hart makes it easy to visualize the characters as they move through the chaos of their lives. If they are moving along a road to redemption, it is a twisted road that may not lead to the expected destination. The main characters in Redemption Road are seeking a path to empowerment more than redemption. They want to get some version of their lives back.

Elizabeth Black’s father is a preacher who sees everything as black or white. Elizabeth is a cop who sees a lot of gray. But Elizabeth is being investigated for shooting two unarmed men 18 times in a manner that suggests torture. The shooting occurred as Elizabeth rescued a young woman named Channing who was kidnapped and sexually assaulted. Elizabeth has been suspended as she waits to learn whether she will be charged with double homicide. Adding another complication to her life, Adrian Wall is getting out of prison.

Adrian, a former cop, served 13 tough years before his release on parole. Elizabeth is haunted by the memory of finding a woman’s body sprawled across the altar of her father’s church and by Adrian’s arrest for that crime.

At age 14, Gideon Strange is 13 years past his mother’s murder, a death that psychologically destroyed Gideon’s father. The time has come, Gideon thinks, to take revenge. That means killing Adrian Wall.

As all of these plot threads weave together, more women die, and the lives of Adrian and Elizabeth become even more chaotic. They are entangled with a strong cast of characters, including Channing and her parents, the warden who agreed to Adrian’s early release, Elizabeth’s partner, and an elderly lawyer named Crybaby Jones.

Redemption Road focuses on character development rather than action, but the plot builds dramatic tension from the first page. The reveal at the end isn’t entirely surprising, although it comes with a surprising twist that ties characters together in an unexpected way. I thought I would be disappointed if the reveal turned out as I suspected it would, but any disappointment I felt was outweighed by the novel’s multiple virtues.

RECOMMENDED

In the Company of Spies by Stephen Barlay

First published in 1981; published digitally by Endeavour Press on February 15, 2016

First published in 1981, In the Company of Spies is a cold war novel that fits comfortably on the shelf of second-tier novels that entertain fans of the spy genre. A Hungarian by birth, Stephen Barlay escaped from the Soviet invasion (and his likely arrest) in 1956. A journalist in Hungary, Barlay wrote both fiction and nonfiction in English while living in Great Britain. In the Company of Spies was, perhaps fittingly, produced as a made-for-TV movie in 1999.

The novel is set in 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. Helmut Rust gets a message from a Russian who dies during its delivery. The coded message tells Rust, who was forced out of the CIA, that his father wants out of Russia. When Rust makes his way to Russia, he learns that smuggling his father out of Russia is no longer the mission that awaits him.

Rust’s life is complicated by a love triangle, a brother in a wheelchair who works for the CIA, and friends who might be enemies. This is the typical fare of spy novels and, if Barlay doesn’t take the story to the lofty levels attained by the genre’s best writers, he nevertheless gives Rust enough depth to instill sympathy for his predicament. Most of the novel’s twists are not entirely unexpected but the story does deliver a nice double-twist at the end. In fact, the last pages and Rust’s reaction to the surprises are the best part of the story.

A suitable mixture of action and intrigue keeps the story in steady motion. Barlay’s prose is uninspired and occasionally awkward, but no more so than some contemporary writers of second tier espionage novels (a few of whom have achieved bestseller status for reasons that are apparently unrelated to writing ability).

The great insight of In the Company of Spies, I think, is its insistence that Americans who have never experienced an oppressive government have no right to judge the victims of oppression -- people who, motivated by fear or survival, do things that are contrary to the interests of human rights or world peace. To the extent that the novel tries to deliver profound political insights, I think it is less successful. International political issues, particularly in a time of crisis, are more complex than Barlay is able to convey.

The novel builds on the belief that Kennedy betrayed Cuban-Americans by abandoning the quest for Cuba’s “liberation” in exchange for Khrushchev’s agreement to remove missiles from Cuba. Regardless of where the reader comes down on what is no longer a hot-button issue, In the Company of Spies exploits the time and setting in a way that spy fiction fans should enjoy.

RECOMMENDED

Panther's Prey by Lachlan Smith

Published by Mysterious Press on April 5, 2016

Panther’s Prey begins with the trial of a homeless, mentally ill man who, according to his public defenders, falsely confessed to a sexual assault. Rodriguez has a history of confessing to crimes he didn’t commit. When Rodriguez is acquitted and is later accused of committing another sexual assault (leading to a death), Leo Maxwell (his lead lawyer) doesn’t know whether he should feel guilty for winning his release or angry that the police are focusing on his former client rather than pursuing the real rapist.

It struck me as odd that the police and prosecution would immediately pursue Rodriguez for the new crime. True, some police and some prosecutors are lazy and many are vindictive, so wrongly accusing a guy who was acquitted after they wrongly accused him in an earlier case might satisfy those motives, but it helps to have some actual evidence of guilt that seemed nonexistent here. And whether a judge would allow the client to plead guilty to a new murder, when the guy has a history of pleading guilty to crimes he didn’t commit and when no significant evidence points to his guilt, struck me as unlikely. The novel’s shaky premise troubled me.

In any event, Leo recasts his role from lawyer to investigator and eventually to suspect as he tries to determine who committed the murder. The victim was his co-counsel in the Rodriguez trial, a woman who left a corporate firm to gain trial experience with the public defender’s office. The investigation causes Leo to delve into the motives that other people might have had for killing the former corporate lawyer. More deaths occur as Leo finds himself imperiled (or set up) by a conspiracy.

Plot threads from earlier novels are woven into this one. Series readers will recall that Leo’s father was released from prison after his innocence was established. Someone connected to Leo’s father is killed in Panther’s Prey with a murder weapon that is associated with Leo. Thus Leo is transported from one jail cell to another, accused of this crime and that, all the while trying to solve multiple murder mysteries.

Is the plot a bit much? Maybe, but it’s not so improbable that I couldn’t enjoy it. I was happy to see that the family drama that carried the first three novels was toned down in this one. My biggest complaint is my personal preference for courtroom drama in legal thrillers. After the Rodriguez trial, which occupies a small portion of the book, Panther’s Prey reads more like a detective story than a legal thriller. Lachlan Smith understands the drama inherent in criminal trials. I hope he milks that drama more in future installments. As an investigative/conspiracy novel, however, Panther’s Prey is a fun addition to the series.

RECOMMENDED

The Chimera Vector by Nathan M Farrugia

Published digitally by Momentum (Pan Macmillan Australia) on May 1, 2012

The Chimera Vector is sort of a Jason Bourne story, except this version of Jason is named Sophia. She’s a little more fine-tuned than Bourne, but she’s basically a black ops super-killer whose actions are controlled by something called The Fifth Column, a nickname for “the world’s military-industrial complex.”

After mistaking a civilian family in Iran for enemy soldiers and wiping them out before mistaking some “friendly forces” for terrorists (and wiping them out), Sophia and two Mark I operatives on her Fifth Column team are on the run. The Fifth Column regards them as “defective operatives.” Well, they do seem to be a bit confused. Programming glitch?

While working her way through a standard action plot, Sophia is presented with a plan to end psychopathy through eugenics. The reasoning in support of the plan is shaky -- stopping psychopaths from reproducing won’t produce “a world without evil” since abundant evil is caused by non-psychopaths -- but Sophia is troubled by the moral implications of involuntary gene manipulation for all of five seconds before signing on. Couple that with a genetic enhancement that quadruples lifespans, and you’ve got yourself a muddled plot.

The two genetic plans are at odds with each other since a psychopath who lives to be 350 can do a lot of damage without bothering to reproduce and spread his psychopathic seeds. That tension only contributes to the plot muddle, which occupies the novel’s second half. Rather than trying to make sense of it, the reader can wade through action scene after action scene, during which characters engage in constant banter. Long fights last far too long, and the wisecracking combatants made me think that the fights couldn’t have been nearly as intense as Nathan Farrugia made them out to be. I mean, if you’re making chit-chat while dodging knife thrusts, the knives can’t be all that worrisome.

The Chimera Vector isn’t a bad novel, but after a decent start, it nearly fizzles out. If you research this novel, you’ll find a lot more written about the marketing hype that made the book popular than the novel itself. Kudos to Farrugia for his marketing skill, but this novel didn’t convince me to read the others in the series.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

I Don't Like Where this Is Going by John Dufresne

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on April 11, 2016

I didn’t like where this book was going (it didn’t seem to be going anywhere) until about the last third, when it finally hit its stride. By the end, however, I wondered whether the author had a plan in mind when he sat down to write. The plot makes a certain convoluted sense but it is interrupted by events that come across as filler. Some of the events are interesting but too many are not.

The early pages of I Don’t Like Where This Is Going provide what I assume to be an update on events that occurred in the first novel in the series. Not having read it, I felt a bit lost until the current story began to move in the direction of a plot. That takes place after Wylie "Coyote" Melville and his friend Bay watch a woman plunge to her death at a Vegas casino, where they have gone to chill out until it is safe to return to their usual Florida residence. In the story that follows, Wylie and Bay try to get to the bottom of the woman’s death.

Wylie is a therapist, although his wanderings make it difficult for him to serve an established clientele. He passes the time by volunteering at a crisis center when he’s not solving murders or avoiding his own murder. Wylie is a good guy who likes to help people, a point that is emphasized by contrasting his goodness to the sleaze of Vegas. That struck me as a bit obvious and superficial. In general, characters in the novel tend to preach about society’s evils, repeating stories that are (mostly) urban legends in an apparent effort to highlight social problems that are (mostly) overblown.

There are some clever sentences in I Don’t Like Where This Is Going, some amusing observations of Vegas (admittedly an easy target), and a few action scenes in the novel’s second half that generate excitement. Unfortunately, those positive attributes are balanced against extended chunks of the novel that seem purposeless.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS