The Polaris Protocol by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton Adult on January 14, 2014

Reading a Taskforce novel is an adrenalin rush. While that could be said of many action novels, Brad Taylor's Taskforce novels have the additional virtue of being intelligent. Taylor has a clear, cliché-free writing style that helps the story move swiftly. Plentiful action scenes contribute to the pace, but Taylor avoids the overdone and over-the-top nonsense that pervades so many action novels. The plots are farfetched but plausible enough for fun escapist fiction. I keep waiting for Taylor to stumble, given the speed at which he is churning out Taskforce novels, but the quality continues to be consistent.

The Polaris Protocol begins with the Taskforce chasing a bad guy in Turkmenistan while different bad guys in Mexico are messing with the GPS system. The reader knows that it's only a matter of time before the Taskforce takes on the new threat to national security. As is always true in a Taskforce novel, everything that can go wrong does ... until the end, of course, when Pike Logan and his team clean up the mess. It's a formula, but it works.

Another part of Taylor's successful formula has been: Pike wants to do something to defeat a menace; Pike is ordered not to do it; Pike does it anyway, saving the world (or at least some part of it) in the process. Taylor varies that formula a bit in The Polaris Protocol. This time Pike is giving the orders and Jennifer is disregarding them. As always, Taylor strikes a workable balance between action and character development, while the addition of friction between Pike and Jennifer adds interest to the story.

The friction arises because Jennifer's brother Jack, a journalist investigating a Mexican drug cartel, accidentally discovers a bigger story that leads to his kidnapping. Jennifer goes to his aid, abandoning the Turkmenistan mission (with Pike's consent), which cheeses off some of her Taskforce teammates. Knuckles is more cheesed at Pike than at Jennifer, particularly when he learns that Pike and Jennifer have been slipping between the sheets during their off-duty hours. That subplot has been developing over the course of the series and it's starting to pay dividends as Jack recognizes the division of his loyalty to Jennifer and to the Taskforce and its mission.

An old nemesis of Pike resurfaces in The Polaris Protocol, but the most interesting character is a different psychopathic killer. Remorseless killers are standard fare in thrillers, but Taylor fashions this one with subtlety. I'm not sure I quite buy the notion of a philosophical psychopath, but he's more entertaining than the usual mindless grunt-and-kill evildoer. Character creation is one of Taylor's skills, particularly his ability to depict both good guys and bad guys in a nuanced way. Pike engages in appalling behavior at the novel's end for a reason that seems justifiable to Pike (covering up all the laws he's broken in this and earlier novels) and perhaps to the reader, although the notion that good guys obey the law is out the window in these novels. Pike muses that Americans want a black-and-white world in which people and governments are either good or evil, but that isn't the world in which we live. Pike understands that and, fortunately for his readers, so does Taylor. None of his good guys are entirely good, just as his bad guys are not entirely evil. That's one reason I enjoy these novels.

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The Scent of Pine by Lara Vapnyar

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 7, 2014

The Scent of Pine offers the reader a slice from a woman's life. Lena (an academic who teaches at a community college) might be too dreary for some readers, but the novel offers a valuable glance at her (dreary) life. Fortunately, the novel is brief and the dreariness is partially offset by Lena's lively stories about her job in a Soviet Union summer camp.

The novel takes place over the course of a few days as Lena tries to "solve the mystery of her present unhappiness." Twenty years earlier, when Lena was a student in the Soviet Union who just met her friend Inka, happiness seemed inevitable. Now, having lived with her husband Vadim in the United States for ten years, happiness seems impossible, particularly when she attends a conference to give a talk on Sex Education in Soviet Russia that nobody attends.

Lena meets Ben at the conference. Ben offers to drive Lena back to Boston and then to his leaky cabin in Maine. Along the way, Lena tells Ben (and thus the reader) the stories of her life. In the process, she explores the nature of happiness, questions why the men in her life (including Vadim) have never made her happy and, as she starts to see her stories from Ben's perspective, begins to reinterpret her past. In turn, Ben tells his stories to Lena. But all stories come to an end and, when a comfortable intimacy begins to connect them, Lena wonders about the ending of the story of Ben and Lena.

Late in the novel, Lena learns the truth (or at least a different perspective of truth) behind some of the stories she's been telling Ben about the Soviet camp. Lena is forced again to reinterpret her own stories while the reader learns how the stories connect to her present life. The connection is meant to be surprising and it probably is, but only because Laura Vapnyar conceals a fact from the reader (and Ben) for the sole purpose of creating a surprise near the novel's end.

To some extent, The Scent of Pine is a familiar love story as Ben awakens feelings in Lena that she can't recall experiencing with Vadim. The story is slight but it has the virtue of honesty. Fear of love is the novel's best theme. Lena fears love, not only because love hurts, but because it gives her the power to hurt someone else. Ben says: "practically every single thing that we do is either to distract ourselves from what is wrong with our lives, or to please somebody else, or to shield ourselves from reproaches and guilt" which causes us to live in cocoons, but emerging from the cocoon inevitably hurts someone, so we retreat to its safety and loneliness. It's a sad but not uncommon way of living and Vapnyar depicts it convincingly.

As a slice of life, The Scent of Pine lacks the heft of a more substantial novel. Despite its limitations and the rather colorless scenes that take place in the present, Vapnyar's prose style is graceful and the novel offers significant insight into its characters without overreaching. Those benefits make The Scent of Pine worth reading.

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The Secret History of Las Vegas by Chris Abani

Published by Penguin Books on January 7, 2014

Las Vegas is a city of fantasy, making it a fitting setting for a novel that uses elements of myth and fantasy to illuminate truth and reality. With casinos that replicate Paris and Venice and ancient Egypt, Las Vegas (Chris Abani theorizes) is searching for a myth that will validate its existence, a link to a place with deeper and more substantial roots. Abani posits that Las Vegas has given birth to "submerged and subterranean cultures" filled with "the fevered men who so desperately wanted those myths to be true." It is also a city that attracts lost souls. Myths and lost souls provide the background for The Secret History of Las Vegas, an original and perceptive blend of humor and drama, fantasy and reality.

In one of the most interesting openings to a novel I've recently encountered, fused twin sons are born in the Nevada desert, two miles from an exploding nuclear bomb. Their mother names them Fire and Water. Years later, Water is a handsome adult, physically normal except for the head and partial body of Fire that sprouts from his side.

Meeting Fire and Water unnerves Detective Salazar. He wants to detain them as suspects in a series of unsolved killings but, lacking good cause, decides to hold them for observation by a mental health expert. He calls upon the novel's central character, Sunil Singh, a researcher at a private Las Vegas institute who is studying psychopathic behavior. Half Zulu, half Indian, and displaced from South Africa, Sunil thinks of Las Vegas as home. It is, at least, fertile ground for his study of psychopaths.

Beyond its beginning, I won't describe the plot, lest its craziness put you off (and also to avoid spoiling the pleasure of the surprises it holds). Suffice it to say that it involves past and present loves stories and a hit man who has a grudge against Sunil. At times it seems like a parody of a thriller. At other times it becomes a serious novel about race and injustice. The characters are just as unpredictable as the plot. No matter how familiar they are (the hooker with the heart of gold, the police detective on the verge of retirement who is frustrated by an unsolved crime), Abani twists them into less recognizable (but strangely believable) shapes. Fire and Water are hilarious, at least if you appreciate humor that is offbeat, slightly absurdist, and somewhat dark. Water responds to questions with not-quite-relevant trivia while Fire responds with sarcasm.

Yet for all the humor, The Secret History of Las Vegas is a serious commentary on the impact of apartheid on its victims. While races around the world are slowly blending together into a "sepia of tolerance," Sunil's life in South Africa was shaped by the racial classifications marked on South African identity documents carried by nonwhites, "the backbone of apartheid." The dangers and indignities of Soweto, the evils that he saw and that he perpetrated, are never far removed from Sunil's memories. At the same time, he has grown weary of people who wear trauma like a badge, vying for the distinction of belonging to the group that suffered the most, as if "tallying an impossible math" will arrive at a meaningful result.

In addition to the myths of Las Vegas, Sunil recalls the myths of South Africa, particularly the Sorrow Tree, which "could bear everyone's pain for a short while." All the novel's characters are bearing pain but they manage to find respites from pain, often by coming together, as people do when they gather at the Sorrow Tree. Sunil is searching for his own myth, the fictional story that will explain the truth of his life. Abani furthers that theme by incorporating a fairy tale from Sunil's childhood that is a thinly veiled version of a true story. Myth, illusion, fantasy, and varying versions of reality all stir together in Abani's fresh, eccentric, funny, moving, and thoroughly entertaining novel.

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Game by Anders de la Motte

Published in Sweden in 2010; published in translation by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on December 3, 2013

The concept of using a game to manipulate human behavior isn't new, but Game creates a more carefully-conceived purpose for the game than is common in thrillers that make use of that theme. Mix that with another well-used theme (global conspiracy) and you have a novel that entertains if you're prepared to abandon all reason and enjoy the action. By that measure, Game works reasonably well.

Henrik Pettersson (known to his few friends as HP) is over thirty but still a kid. When finds a cellphone that asks him if he wants to play a game, he agrees. There's money in it and even a modest measure of fame. Besides, HP is a sociopath who enjoys causing mayhem and that's what the game is about. As the reader would expect, the tasks he is assigned to perform escalate from pranks to serious crime and HP soon finds that treating life as a game has consequences, particularly when you're only a pawn.

The novel's other primary character, Rebecca Normén, is glad that her ex is dead, but she isn't happy that her little brother was convicted of causing the death for which she holds herself accountable. Ironically, Rebecca joined the Police Academy shortly after her ex died. Now she's with the Sweden's Security Police, assigned to guard political officials. Her life quickly and repeatedly intersects with the game that HP is playing.

HP compares his situation to the plots of a couple of conspiracy movies as well as Mission Impossible. He also recalls the famous airplane scene in North by Northwest when an airplane chases him. I think those references are Anders de la Motte's way of reminding us not to take the story too seriously. It's meant to be a fun diversion and on that level, it succeeds. HP is an anti-social jerk but he has just enough of a conscience to earn the reader's grudging sympathy. In a predictable but satisfying way, he becomes more likable as the novel progresses. I like the idea of making the central character a sociopath even if (to assure that the reader cheers for him) he's a sociopath who develops empathy. Rebecca is likable from the start, and the cause of her remorse -- the role she actually played in her ex's death -- gives the reader something to ponder until the unsurprising truth is finally revealed.

Nothing about Game takes it into the top tier of thrillers -- the prose is ordinary, the plot is a retread, the characters are familiar -- but the story moves quickly, maintains interest, and entertains. Game isn't a book I would read twice, but it made me look forward to the next installment in the trilogy.

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