Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith

Published by Simon & Schuster on November 12, 2013

Some writers of genre fiction transform the genre, taking it to a new level of excellence. Martin Cruz Smith has done that to crime fiction with his Arkady Renko novels.

An interpreter is killed after being kidnapped by a thug who has been paid to steal the interpreter's notes of a secret meeting. Unfortunately for the thug (and for the interpreter), the notes are encoded, so the thief discards them. The notebook makes its way to a journalist named Tatiana Petrovna, who is soon the apparent victim of a murder. The Kremlin, happy to see the end of a prominent critic of governmental corruption, proclaims the death a suicide and closes the investigation. Renko, as always, isn't buying the official line.

To get to the bottom of Tatiana's murder, Renko must learn why the interpreter was killed. The plot takes Renko to Kaliningrad, a city noted for its high crime rate and the center of the world's amber trade. Renko gets help (or hindrance) from Zhenya (a young chess genius who became Renko's ward in an earlier novel) and the poet Maxim Dal, as well as Renko's boss and co-workers. Of the various supporting characters, Zhenya (whose struggle to decide upon his future provides a strong subplot) gets the largest share of Smith's artistic attention. Renko's neighbor and part-time lover, Anya Rudenko, also plays a role. Her association with the son of a recently deceased mobster gives the beleaguered Renko yet another problem to worry about.

Smith is an old school thriller writer. His plots are surprising but believable. He writes absorbing stories without heavy reliance on car chases and martial arts contests to hold the reader's interest. His never forgets the importance of character development. In that regard, Renko is one of the strongest characters in crime fiction. In novel after novel, as his world deteriorates, Renko endures. He is, paradoxically, a cynical idealist. Given the corruption that surrounds him, Renko doesn't believe his actions will improve Russian life but he carries on anyway, perhaps because solving crime is all he knows how to do. With a bullet lodged in his head that could kill him at any moment, he is understandably fatalistic but never morose. His wry humor is often self-effacing, making him an immensely likeable character, but he displays the emotional complexity of the best literary creations.

Tatiana is shorter and tighter than some earlier Renko novels. The story is not as poignant or as personal as the best novels in the series, but Smith nonetheless supplies the skillful plotting and soul-revealing characterization that make the Renko novels so memorable. Tatiana is a nifty display of storytelling and a worthy addition to a wonderful series.

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Enon by Paul Harding

Published by Random House on September 10, 2013

Paul Harding displays the power of his prose in the opening pages of Enon, as Charlie Crosby recalls the death of his daughter. The understated, deeply affecting descriptions of grief set the scene for the life that follows. Charlie blames himself for letting his daughter take the bike ride that ended in a collision with a car. After Charlie's marriage disintegrates, he becomes "a maker of dismal days." He spends them wandering the town of Enon, recalling the sweetness of the family life he has lost, seeing his daughter at different ages when he gazes at the town's children. As the months pass, he moves "deeper into the shade, further toward the border between this life and what lies outside it." He is embarrassed by his weakness, his inability to resolve his sense of loss. He has always believed that "life is not something we are forced to endure, but rather something in which we are blessed to be allowed to participate," but now he feels no gratitude for a life that "felt like nothing more than a distillation of sorrow and anger." He wants to believe that the joy of his daughter's life had its own integrity, that his life is better for having shared his daughter's life, but he measures his grief by the loss of that joy. Abuse of alcohol and pills heightens his condemnation of his failure of character.

While Enon is largely an internal monologue, it features richly developed minor characters: a cemetery caretaker who seems like "an archaic military experiment gone awry"; an elderly woman who fearlessly races down an icy hill on a sled; a poorly paid clerk who pines for his family in India while he spends his Sundays working at a convenience store. It is also a novel of place, the place being Enon, where Crosbys have lived since 1840. Charlie, taking a daily walk around the town, recalls his childhood fears of creepy woods and legendary boogeymen. We learn the history of Charlie's old house with its traces of the people who once lived there, including the grandfather who was instrumental in his life.

What do we do when "broken hearts continue beating"? Is grief a moral failing when it leads to self-destructive, irresponsible behavior? Harding leaves it to the reader to decide. Charlie, on the other hand, receives a lecture from the elderly sledding woman that seems right: at some point, particularly when it causes harm to others, grief can be selfish. There is a moral lesson in Enon, a lesson that Charlie learns about the nature of prolonged grief, about what his grief really is and why he can't release it. Although it isn't immediately apparent, the novel is ultimately redemptive and life-affirming in its perspective of "this awful miracle of a planet" we all share.

Harding's description of Charlie's thoughts, his attempts and inability to come to terms with his daughter's death, are achingly real. Enon is such a howl of pain that it is difficult to read in long stretches. Fortunately, Enon is the perfect length: long enough to tell the story but not so long that Charlie's anguish becomes overbearing. Regardless of its length, Harding's prose, sometimes stunning in its effortless beauty, would have kept me reading. This isn't a novel for readers who wish to disappear into a make-believe world that's filled with sunny characters, but for readers who want to understand the full range of life (including people who have given up on life), Enon is a work of great value.

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What Doesn't Kill Her by Max Allan Collins

Published by Thomas & Mercer on September 17, 2013

While it is written with Max Allan Collins' usual flair, What Doesn't Kill Her is a fairly ordinary revenge novel. It begins with the rape of a teenage girl and the murder of her family members (including her gay brother) by a man who rants about punishing sin and reestablishing God's natural order. The killer leaves Jordan Rivera alive because he wants her to tell his story. Ten years later, Jordan is in a mental health facility. To make sure she does not satisfy the killer's desire, Jordan has not uttered a word since her rape. That changes when she sees on the news that a family was murdered after a teenage girl in the family took another girl to the prom as her date. Are the crimes connected? Jordan intends to find out.

Cleveland Detective Mark Pryor thinks he sees a pattern in certain family murders -- killings from which one family member is spared -- but neither his boss nor the FBI agrees that the killings are related. Coincidentally, Pryor had a high school crush on Jordan before her family was murdered.

Some aspects of What Doesn't Kill Her are less than convincing -- Jordan's development as a superstar street fighter, the speculation by members of a support group that their families were all (perhaps) victimized by the same killer, Pryor's certainty that he sees a pattern in killings that are apparently unrelated -- but the plot is never so outlandish as to kill enjoyment of the story. The romance that develops (or rekindles) between Pryor and Jordan is cheesy and contrived. A plot element that is so obviously manipulative makes it difficult to invest fully in the characters. Not that I would have invested in Jordan anyway, given her one-dimensional identity as She Who Will Avenge.

The killer's present identity is well concealed until Collins drops some obvious clues several pages before the reveal. The ending is inevitable and thus predictable -- this is a revenge novel, after all -- but the path Collins follows to get there builds some tension. Collins always writes with a good sense of pace. While this isn't one of his better novels, it isn't bad. I liked it enough to recommend it (particularly to fans of revenge novels), but I wouldn't put it high on my list of recommended thrillers.

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Poison Pill by Glenn Kaplan

Published by Forge Books on October 22, 2013

The title of Poison Pill has a double meaning. It's the name given to a strategy to prevent hostile takeovers of corporations -- in this case, a pharmaceutical company -- but its literal meaning is also applicable. Someone is poisoning the company's leading product (a headache remedy) in order to destroy the company's value.

In chapter two, Peter Katz tells his mother all about the safe room in the basement of his father's Greenwich house. The savvy reader knows that, like Chekov's gun hanging on the wall, the safe room will reappear near the end of the novel. Peter's mother, Emma, is an executive at Percival & Baxter, a pharmaceutical company. His father, Emma's ex-husband Josh, is planning a hostile takeover of Percival & Baxter for his client, a mysterious Russian named Viktor Volkov whose reason for wanting control of the company is far-fetched but amusing. Viktor, hoping to create a dynasty in London, wants his daughter Tanya to breed with the little brother of the woman Viktor plans to marry, thus merging his wealth with the brother's title and producing the heirs he can no longer manufacture. Tanya wouldn't mind breeding but she has her own ideas about an appropriate sperm donor.

In many ways, young Peter is the most interesting character in the novel. He's caught in the middle of a war between his hotshot parents. His father wants to use him to influence his mother while his mother is poisoning his thoughts about his father. Peter and Tanya both belong to the Kroesus Club, an exclusive group of teens and young adults, the children of wealthy parents from around the world, a group that Peter generally despises. Peter is peripheral to the central story for much of the novel but he stars in an interesting subplot of his own. He is a believable character, although perhaps a bit more grounded and likeable than most teenage offspring of wealthy parents.

The other characters, like the plot, are well-conceived, although you wouldn't want to hang out with most of them. Family dramas pepper the novel and they turn out to be related to each other in unexpected ways. Scenes of domestic discord between well-paid Emma and her struggling artist second husband are dull and some of the scenes involving Emma and Josh approach melodrama, but there aren't many of those.

An interesting theme in Poison Pill is the ongoing debate about hostile takeovers. Josh sees himself as creating shareholder value while Emma sees him as destroying good companies. Greed is a related theme and while the lesson is obvious (greed isn't good), it is nonetheless satisfying. Those themes animate the thriller in a fairly conventional way. The story races to an unconvincing ending (Emma displays intuition that borders on ESP) that wraps up the story a little too neatly, but the novel as a whole is better than its disappointing climax.

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The Ipcress File by Len Deighton

First published in 1962

The nameless hero of Len Deighton's early novels (known in the movie versions as Harry Palmer, The Ipcress File alludes only to the name Harry) is constantly fretting about his expense account and quarreling over back pay. He's a spy who doesn't appreciate being treated as a civil servant. His irreverent attitude pervades the early novels, which have a much lighter tone than Deighton's later, more substantial work.

Although The Ipcress File (1962) is the first of the Harry novels, it seems less dated than Billion Dollar Brain (1966). Harry is diverted from his current project -- tracking the elusive Jay -- to visit an atoll with other members of the British and American intelligence communities. Harry is blamed for an act of sabotage, accused of being a Hungarian double agent, imprisoned and tortured, all the while wondering about the identity of the real traitor, the person who set him up. Of course, the intricate (if convoluted) plot eventually works its way back to the evil Jay, adding more problems to Harry's beleaguered life.

To call the brainwashing scheme that underlies the plot of The Ipcress File farfetched would be to understate, but the novel is enjoyable despite the demand it makes on the reader to suspend disbelief. Had the tone been less tongue-in-cheek, the unlikely scheme would have been a more serious flaw, but the plot isn't meant to be taken seriously. The Ipcress File is a fun, energetic blend of intellect and action. The characters are the kind of well-educated Brits who can quote Milton from memory. Dialog is snappy and Harry has a dry, understated sense of humor that makes him a pleasure to know. Taken in the right spirit, The Ipcress File is a successful, if not particularly memorable, spy novel. Readers looking for serious spy novels by a talented author in his prime should investigate Deighton's Bernard Samson books.

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