The Water Rat of Wanchai by Ian Hamilton

First published in Canada in 2011; published by Picador on May 6, 2014

A forensic accountant is an unlikely thriller hero, but Ava Lee is an unlikely forensic accountant. Ava is a Chinese-Canadian who is as adept with martial arts as she is with a calculator. She's more of a debt collector/skip-tracer than she is an accountant. This is, however, a big league version of debt collection.

Ava's current task is the collection of $5 million stolen from a company that financed a seafood supplier. Her travels take her to Hong Kong, Bangkok, Trinidad, Guyana, and the British Virgin Islands. None of the locales gave me the sense of seeing anything that a tourist wouldn't see, but I did get the impression that Ian Hamilton has actually been to those places. A resident's view of the countries is unnecessary as Ava has a tourist's perspective, including an obsessive concern with the amenities available at hotels, as well as their star ratings. Needless to say, Guyana disappoints her. That crime-ridden location nevertheless gives her a chance to show off her formidable fighting skills. At the same time, the story's violence is kept to a necessary minimum. This is more of a cerebral thriller than an action novel, although the action moves at a brisk pace.

Ava is my kind of thriller hero. She's intelligent, resourceful, cunning, a woman of action who thinks before she acts. She gets things done and doesn't monkey around on her way to her goal. Much the same can be said of Hamilton, who writes with certitude, reaching his goal with a minimum of fuss. This is a tightly constructed story that doesn't waste a word. That is a skill that has become increasingly rare among modern thriller writers. The story avoids overreaching and is easy to believe, another rarity in modern thrillers.

In addition to highlighting the corruption that is endemic in less developed countries, Hamilton adds color to the story with Ava's domineering mother and her inscrutable business partner, Mr. Chow. But it is Ava who makes the story work, and she makes it work well. Originally published in Canada in 2011, this is the first novel in the Ava Lee series. It has encouraged me to read the rest of them.

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Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Published by Del Rey on January 28, 2014

Red is the lowest color on Mars, but Red is rising. Darrow is a Red. He was born to sacrifice. Working deep underground to mine the planet's helium, he believes his sacrifices will one day make Mars ready for human habitation. Obedience is noble, or so he has been taught. His wife, Eo, thinks he is a puppet of the Golds, who keep the Reds hungry and obedient. Eo wants Darrow to lead the Reds in revolution but Darrow does not want to die a martyr, as did his father. A traumatic moment changes his mind.

Darrow joins a resistance movement and discovers that there is more to Mars than the underground life he has known. His anger makes him want to take on Octavia au Lune -- who rules the solar system from her base on Earth's moon -- and all the other Golds who have enslaved the underground Reds, but that is a long-term goal. His immediate mission is to infiltrate the Golds, to become one of them so that he can work against them. Once he becomes his enemy, empathy creates an internal conflict that provides the novel with much of its substance.

Red Rising is the sort of novel that is often described as "a rousing adventure." It is actually a little more than that. It delivers action but also intrigue. It moves quickly but it takes time to explore moral conflicts. Its characters are skillfully crafted. It features an impressive amount of world-building based on a future that borrows from Roman mythology (along with, of course, a polite nod in the direction of Edgar Rice Burroughs). This is a science-lite version of science fiction that melds with fantasy without becoming fantasy. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're looking for an explanation of how Mars was terraformed to give it not only a breathable atmosphere but climate control, you won't find it here (apparently it has something to do with helium mining).

My qualms about the story concern my sense that the setup merits something meatier than the war games that dominate so much of the story. The drawn-out war games seems like padding to justify turning a book into a series of books, perhaps with a view to exploiting the mania for war games novels that made it to the big screen, including Ender's Game and Hunger Games. Darrow spends most of the novel trying to prove his mettle to the Golds in order to gain a leadership position. Some of this is interesting (particularly the conflicts within Darrow's "tribe" as members vie to lead the group before battling other tribes) but if the point is for Darrow to do something to free the underground Reds from enslavement, the war games do little to advance the plot. I suspect it will be clear when the trilogy concludes that the story could have been told just as effectively, and more economically, in two books, or maybe just one. The political intrigue that runs through the war games kept me reading but it didn't prevent me from wondering whether the plot would ever stop lurching from one battle to the next and return to the promise of the novel's beginning. I know Pierce Brown will make more money by writing a trilogy (and more power to him), but I would rather have seen the action condensed so that the novel could more rapidly reach a conclusion. Still, although I will unhappily wait for the next book to see if the novel's premise leads to a payoff, I liked the characters and their interpersonal conflicts well enough to recommend Red Rising as "a rousing adventure."

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All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

First published in Great Britain in 2013; published by Pantheon on April 15, 2014

At the start of All the Birds, Singing we know little about Jake Whyte. We know that Jake is a woman of a certain age who speaks with an Australian accent, that she lives alone on a small island in Great Britain, that someone has sliced open and gutted two of her sheep, and that she feels like she's being watched. The novel changes its time frame repeatedly and we soon learn that this is one of three eras in Jake's life that the novel will spotlight. In the second she is part of a sheep shearing team. In the third she is a companion/helper for a creepy sheep farmer named Otto. On the island she tends her own sheep and a strange man named Lloyd drifts into her life. Occasionally we are given glimpses of Jake's difficult childhood but the important event of Jake's formative years is saved for the final chapters.

The story jumps from one stage of Jake's life to another and for much of the novel it is difficult to place the chapters in sequence. At an early point, it is clear that Jake has joined the sheep shearing team to hide from her past, but only later do we learn why she is hiding. The novel's structure forces the reader to engage in mental gymnastics by reordering the chapters to make sense of the story, a technique that helps the reader understand how the components of Jake's life fit together while building suspense. It is clear that at least two stages of Jake's life will end with an eventful climax. The story of one stage works backwards from the climax while the other two move toward it. Again, the novel's unusual and somewhat challenging structure -- it is impossible to understand the story without reading to the end -- contribute to its interest.

The kind of person Jake is, the hard choices she has made (or not made) in her life, are revealed in increments as the story unfolds. The reader has a very different understanding of Jake by the novel's end. Evie Wyld made me feel sympathy for a number of characters who are not particularly sympathetic and a good bit of compassion for Jake, who is not necessarily a bad person but not particularly likable. In the end, it isn't necessary to like Jake to understand the forces that shaped her and to appreciate her pain.

On the other hand, the key formative event in Jake's adolescence, revealed late in the novel, is undeveloped in relation to the details we learn about more recent stages of Jake's life. Her motivation for acting as she does is unconvincing, largely because we know Jake well as an adult but little effort is made to make the reader understand her in her youth. The incident's sketchy presentation at the novel's end deprives it of its power and the reinterpretation of the novel's events that it inspires seems forced. The abrupt and ambiguous and downright strange ending also makes the story feel unfinished. Despite my qualms about the novel's ending, I enjoyed the story's intensity, its air of atmospheric mystery, and its portrait of a damaged human being trying to make the best of a difficult life.

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Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole

First published in Nigeria in 2007; published by Random House on March 25, 2014

Having been tainted during his 15 years in the United States by western notions of fairness and honesty, the unnamed narrator of Every Day Is for the Thief finds himself unprepared for the "informal economy" he encounters upon his return to Nigeria. Bribes are routinely demanded, unearned gratuities are expected, and outstretched hands are everywhere. Despite entreaties from relatives to stay indoors, the narrator is determined to experience life in Lagos as he did in his childhood. He goes to the public market to confirm that other people exist, and that he too exists. He wants to write, to be the Nigerian John Updike. He feels motivated by a rich environment in which brawls break out at every intersection and children are murdered for snatching purses.

Every Day is for the Thief stands as an indictment of crime and corruption in Nigeria, but the target is so well known that its illustration in the novel is far from revelatory. More interesting are the scenes of life in Lagos: the dangerous public transportation that the masses ride and the middle class avoids; the museum that uncritically celebrates every butcher who has ruled Nigeria; the conservatory that stands as the city's point of pride; the lax attitude toward maintenance; the prevalence of superstition; the clash of extreme religious viewpoints.

The novel's dramatic conflict centers around the decision the unnamed narrator must make to live in Lagos or return to the United States, where he plans to practice psychiatry. That conflict provides little drama -- the "atmosphere of surrender" in Lagos is a convincing reason not to live there and the narrator never seems serious about leaving American comforts behind -- making the novel read like a travelogue or an autobiographical slice of life. I recommend Every Day is for the Thief on that basis, but if you are looking for a compelling work of fiction, look elsewhere.

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The First True Lie by Marina Mander

Published in Italy in 2011; published by Crown/Hogarth on January 21, 2014

Luca and his mother have lived an isolated life. It was a fun life when Luca's mother was happy but she was more often depressed and withdrawn, unable to overcome a loneliness for which her anti-social nature was partly responsible. Luca is a kid with issues, including his well-founded fear that his mother, who won't wake up, has died and made him an orphan. His unknown father is long-gone and his mother's attempts to find a replacement have only resulted in a string of noisy bedroom encounters with men who are unworthy contenders for the role. With nowhere to turn, Luca is on his own -- except for a cat named Blue and his sexually active Star Wars action figures. While he must decide what to do about his motionless mother, he is certain that it is best not to tell anyone because he has heard stories about orphanages and he doesn't want to end up living in one, particularly if he can't bring Blue.

Luca is foul-mouthed in a funny, almost silly sort of way. Telling his story in the first person and claiming to be in love with words (particularly those that will hasten his journey to adulthood), he is far more eloquent than a child would ordinarily be. I regard that as a plus. Luca is a chronicler of obscure facts (like the rate of hair growth). He is also an astute observer of adult life. He doesn't understand much of it, but then, who does?

Despite its gruesome subject matter, there is a sweetness and innocence to this story of childhood tragedy that makes it easy to digest. Marina Mander also incorporates a fair amount of humor, mined from Luca's active imagination and pithy observations of adult life. This is ultimately a coming of age (prematurely) story as Luca learns to overcome fear. The novel's chief fault is its brevity. I suppose it's best for a story about a rotting maternal corpse in the bedroom not to go on too long, but this one would have benefited from a few more pages, or even a few more paragraphs. The story lacks a resolution. Sometimes an open-ended ending is appropriate but I found the abrupt conclusion (really more of a discontinuation) to be frustrating. Still, I like Mander's writing style and admired the character development. I look forward to reading more of her work, particularly if she overcomes the only weakness that impairs this novel.

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