Inside Man by Jeff Abbott

Published by Grand Central Publishing on July 1, 2014

A woman walks into a bar. That could be the opening line of a joke, but it's also a logical opening of a Sam Capra novel, given the number of bars that Sam owns. This one is a dive near Miami. Sam's friend, who used to work security, is meeting the woman because he's doing an unspecified job for her. When the friend gets shot, the woman's problem becomes Sam's. The woman vanishes but Sam isn't someone who lets go of a mystery, particularly one that involves a friend.

The mystery takes Sam to Puerto Rico where he reengages with the woman and becomes involved with her family. There is a dirty side to the family business and enough family drama to power a television miniseries. Whether someone in the family killed Sam's friend is the central mystery, but as Sam gets drawn more deeply into the power struggle that preoccupies the family members, he has additional mysteries to solve. Before he learns the answers, he finds himself in a predicament that echoes the classic television series The Prisoner.

The story is full of action but none of it is mindless. The mysterious Round Table and the mysterious Mila, his Round Table contact, work their way into the story, causing Sam (and the reader) to wonder again about the Round Table's true agenda. That theme fades into the background after providing some tantalizing clues about the Round Table's true nature. A neat surprise at the end also sets up a plotline that will probably be advanced in the next installment.

I wasn't a fan of Adrenaline, the first Sam Capra novel, but the novels have steadily improved since then. Inside Man is the best of them. While it doesn't add much to existing characters, it delivers the strongest story in the series.

RECOMMENDED

Sabotage by Matt Cook

Published by Forge Books on September 9, 2014

Sabotage initially pursues three storylines. The first involves Austin Hardy, who is pursuing a doctorate in aeronautics. Hardy's professor offers him a position as a military consultant but cannot explain any details prior to acceptance. Before Hardy can decide, the professor disappears. Hardy and the professor's daughter, Victoria, decide to find him.

The second plot thread follows Dan Chatham, whose company has launched a secret weapon into space. The orbiting weapon is taken over by someone known as the Viking, who threatens to sell it to terrorists if Chatham doesn't outbid them.

The third introduces Jacob Rove, a retired military man who is variously described as a meteorologist, a marine biologist, and a bioacoustical oceanographer. Having helped a wealthy banker's daughter avoid kidnapping, Rove has been rewarded with a luxury cruise. The cruise becomes less luxurious after the cruise ship is hijacked by scores of armed pirates.

The conspiracy is grounded in a conventional and dull high tech threat. A Russian friend of Hardy's professor explains it all to Hardy in simple terms because Hardy, despite pursuing a doctorate at Stanford, apparently needs things explained to him at a middle school level. I didn't buy the plotline involving Hardy and Victoria. They cruise through the novel with unbelievable ease. Hardy jokingly calls the professor's daughter "Nancy Drew" and that is about the level at which Hardy and Victoria operate. Their lighthearted banter is too childish to believe, given the gravity of the situation. Too much of their dialog is meant to educate the reader, not to inform each other, resulting in expository lectures that do not sound remotely realistic. They concoct a "plan" that could go wrong in too many ways to count, but the novel fails to create any sense that Hardy or Victoria are in danger. Tension is notably lacking in their part of the story.

Some parts of the story are ridiculous. Victoria takes time out from her effort to save her father's life to purchase (and apparently memorize) a tourist guide to Iceland, allowing her to lecture Hardy about Icelandic history. Hardy, having never fired a gun before, proves to be an adept marksman when firing from a moving airplane. A confrontation at the end turns into a chat-fest while dozens of criminals with guns let all the important people live instead of shooting them. Even more preposterous is the password that Victoria's father writes down, encoded in a ridiculously complicated way for no apparent reason, since it is a password he is unlikely to forget (or, for that matter, to write down).

The plotline involving Rove is stronger than the Hardy/Victoria chapters. His heroics are also improbably easy, but Matt Cook at least creates a sense that he might be at risk as he works his way through hordes of armed thugs. The reveal of the Viking's identity is mildly entertaining. If Sabotage had featured more of Rove and less of the Hardy boy, I might have liked it better. As it is, while I commend a young author on getting his debut novel published, I can't recommend it.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Lincoln's Gamble by Todd Brewster

Published by Scribner on September 9, 2014

More than 23,000 books have been written about President Lincoln, attesting to the important role he plays in the American imagination. Todd Brewster notes that some biographers of Lincoln have revered him as the second coming of Christ while others have portrayed him as a devious scoundrel.

Lincoln's Gamble is not a biography. Brewster calls it an attempt to discover the "real" Lincoln by focusing on a slice of his presidency. It succeeds at least to the extent of revealing an important slice of the "real" Lincoln. Brewster paints Lincoln during the last half of 1862 as complex and conflicted, principled and pragmatic, a fence-sitter at war with himself before his better nature triumphed.

The first half of the book describes the ambivalent path to the Emancipation Proclamation that Lincoln traveled (in the words of Frederick Douglass) "in his own peculiar, cautious, forbearing and hesitating way." Much of the second half addresses Lincoln's approach to the war, his frustration with his generals, his determination to shift the Union's strategy from defense to offense, and his final (albeit limited) decision to free Confederate slaves.

Brewster emphasizes Lincoln's deliberate and lawyerly approach to emancipation. One one hand, while Lincoln shared the prevailing racism of his time, he believed that the core American values of liberty and equality were antithetical to slavery. Despite his belief in equal rights, he plainly did not view black Americans as morally or intellectually equal to white Americans. His preferred outcome would have been an end to slavery while encouraging former slaves to find a new country in which to dwell. On the other hand, Lincoln's foremost concern, as Brewster sees it, was to save the Union. Whether emancipation would further or hinder that goal was a question that constantly vexed him. Had Lincoln been able to negotiate an end to the rebellion by phasing out slavery over several decades while compensating slave owners for their losses, Brewster makes clear that he would have jumped at that chance, his personal opposition to slavery notwithstanding.

Brewster argues that the connection between slavery and the Civil War was critical to Lincoln. Lincoln's reluctance to proclaim an immediate end to slavery was based in part upon his recognition that the Southern economy was dependent upon it. Later, when the war was not going well for the Union, Lincoln concluded that damaging the economy of the South by freeing slaves might hasten a favorable end to the rebellion. Yet even then he feared that freeing slaves would prolong the war and might lead to continued violence both by and against former slaves. It was thus with an ambivalent mixture of resolve and uncertainty that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.

The concept of emancipation by presidential proclamation also troubled Lincoln because freeing slaves was arguably beyond his authority. Lincoln recognized that the Constitution, without using the words slave or master, sanctioned slavery by requiring the return of fugitive "laborers" to the "party" to whom their labor was due. Although not using the express term, the Constitution plainly regarded slaves as property. By what legal (as opposed to moral) authority can the president deprive people of their property without compensation and due process of law? While Lincoln (as opposed to Stephen Douglas) did not accept the notion that "state's rights" included the right to enslave, Brewster argues that Lincoln felt an obligation to uphold the law as it was embodied in the Constitution.

Lincoln resolved the dilemma by tying emancipation to the president's constitutional war power authority, a bold but questionable judgment. Moreover, because Lincoln's justification for freeing slaves applied only to states in rebellion and would no longer apply in states that laid down their arms, the Emancipation Proclamation purported to free slaves in Confederate states, but not to end slavery. It took a constitutional amendment for that to happen.

Brewster argues that Lincoln's fretting about the language and legal justification for emancipation was, in the end, largely irrelevant to supporters of abolition, who saw the proclamation as a moral statement rather than the careful legal document that Lincoln drafted. Regardless of (and perhaps contrary to) Lincoln's intent, the proclamation changed the war from an effort to save the Union to a war of liberation. In the end, Lincoln's justification of emancipation as a military necessity proved prophetic, as the loss of slaves sapped the Confederacy's strength while adding thousands of fresh soldiers to the Union's forces.

I'm not sure Lincoln's Gamble adds new insight to Lincoln's character, but after 23,000 Lincoln books, I doubt that would be possible. Lincoln's Gamble is nevertheless full of interesting facts. None of the book's digressions (a brief history of slavery, profiles of various individuals who may have influenced the president's thinking, the role science played in justifying nineteenth century racism, the uncertain evidence of Lincoln's religious beliefs) come across as padding or filler.

The book is balanced. Brewster does not shy away from Lincoln's character flaws or from the damage he did when he made poor decisions (particularly the suspension of habeas corpus). At the same time, he is respectful of the difficult choices Lincoln made during a critical six months in the nation's history. As a good historian should, Brewster relies largely upon contemporary sources and quotes them freely while taking care to evaluate their credibility. He makes clear distinctions between facts that are almost certainly true and those (such as where and when Lincoln began writing the Emancipation Proclamation) that are subject to doubt. Yet his lively narrative does not bog down in the nit-picking of history. He calls upon art and literature to help the reader understand the war and its impact on the nation. Brewster's tone is casual rather than academic, making it easy reading for lay readers (like me) who want to learn something new without wading through dense and dry tomes.

RECOMMENDED

The Ultra Thin Man by Patrick Swenson

Published by Tor Books on August 12, 2014

Although The Ultra Thin Man does feature two detectives, Dashiell Hammett this isn't. Neither Patrick Swenson's unremarkable prose nor the plot of his science fiction mystery excited me. While I would not condemn The Ultra Thin Man as a bad novel, there are so many sf mysteries more worthy of attention that I cannot recommend this one.

The Union consists of human and alien worlds. The two nonhuman members of the Union are the Memor (good aliens that gave humans the technology to travel between worlds) and the Helk (unfriendly aliens that apparently resemble bald-headed wookies). Ribon is the largest world in the Union, but any human colonists on the planet who are unable to flee will soon be wiped out by Ribon's moon, which is fragmenting as the result of antimatter explosions.

Former private investigators David Crowell and Alan Brindos are now under contract to the Network Intelligence Organization. Their primary concern is the Movement of Worlds and its Helk leader, Terl Plenko. They suspect that Plenko is responsible for the destruction of Ribon's moon and other mayhem. While Brindos goes off in search of Plenko, Crowell discovers that bad guys within the NIO are setting him up for a fall.

The plot centers upon an ultra thin wire that allows a combination of particle acceleration and nanotechnology to do something (I won't say what) to life forms. Brindos experiences the effects of this technology in ways that are probably meant to add excitement to the plot. Unfortunately, Brindos is such an empty character I didn't care what happened to him. The novel's title notwithstanding, he's no Ultra Nick Charles. Crowell, who narrates half the chapters in the first person, is equally devoid of personality. We don't see much of the reclusive Memor but the Helk we encounter do not seem any more alien than a typical All Star Wrestler.

I don't want to describe the plot since it is so dependent upon surprises. Suffice it to say that the convoluted conspiracy did not engage me. The novel lacks dramatic tension but it does contain a fair amount of action and it moves at a brisk pace. Had the characters been better, perhaps I would have found the plot more involving, if not convincing.

A hundred years in the future, are people going to be saying "I needed to stay on the down low?" I doubt it. I'm not sure how many people still use that expression today. That's only one example of a writer who didn't give enough thought to his prose. Swenson's writing style isn't awful by any means, but it too often lacks polish. The epilog seems to set up the possibility of a sequel but nothing about this novel tempts me to read the next one.

NOT RECOMMENDED

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by Broadway Books on September 9, 2014

I always look forward to reading a Robert Jackson Bennett novel. City of Stairs has all the hallmarks of Bennett's work, including a fiercely imagined world, offbeat humor, a thoroughly enjoyable story, and characters who, despite being from a different world or universe, illuminate what means to be human.

As a background to the complex plot, Bennett has invented a mythology. In the world Bennett creates, gods (recast as Divinities) once existed; the miracles attributed to them actually occurred. Prior to the Great War, Bulikov was a city of miracles, protected by the Divinities who occupied the Continent. Saypur was a Continental colony across the sea until a Saypuri named Kaj killed the six Divinities ... or so history records. After that, the miracles were locked away and forgotten.

Seventy-five years after Great War, Saypur rules the Continent. The people who inhabit Bulikov hate their occupiers, in part because the Saypuri have outlawed their divine symbols and all works that mention or acknowledge their Divinities.

The novel begins with the murder of Efram Pangyui, a Saypuri who was studying the Divinities and trying to learn how Kaj managed to kill them. Saypur sends Pangyui's mentor, a woman named Shara, to investigate. Shara, who does not want the Continentals to know that she is the great-granddaughter of Kaj, pursues mysteries and conspiracies that go much deeper than Pangyui's murder. Her investigation is impeded both by an uncooperative superior in Saypur and by Continentals who miraculously vanish on Bulikov's streets.

In addition to Shara, the novel's strongest characters include Shara's former lover, now a wealthy Continental; Shara's aunt, who operates Saypur's Ministry of Foreign Affairs while serving her own hidden agenda; and a rough-and-tumble Saypuri woman who is charged with governing Bulikov. The best character is Shara's assistant, Sigrud, who might be described as a philosopher-barbarian. Each character has a fully formed, carefully considered personality.

In many ways, the novel is allegorical. It can be seen as an exploration of leadership, of ruling by fiat versus leading by example. It can also be seen as a critique of religion, particularly religions that micromanage diets, dress, and sex acts, enforcing prohibitions by visiting inhumane punishments upon transgressors. Religious edicts that deny the experience of joy deprive their followers of a part of their humanity, while blind adherence to arbitrary rules, even when made by deities, is antithetical to progress and enlightenment -- or so the novel suggests.

Another of the novel's themes is the tendency of the oppressed to become oppressors once they seize power. Another concerns the consequences that befall wealthy nations when they allow oppressed nations to wallow in poverty. Yet another is how we deal with history when the history we learned turns out to be a lie, and how easily we forget that we all share a common history. This novel isn't a political or ethical tome but it scores points for illustrating meaningful lessons, always within the context of the plot and without lecturing. It scores even more points for using exceptional characters to tell a fascinating story.

RECOMMENDED