The Watchmaker's Hand by Jeffery Deaver

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on November 28, 2023

The Watchmaker has been a recurring villain in recent Lincoln Rhyme novels. The last novel suggested that the Watchmaker would soon return to seek revenge against Rhyme. His attempt is one of several plot threads that make The Watchmaker’s Hand one of stronger entries in this entertaining series.

Rhyme is a forensic scientist confined to a wheelchair. He works as a consultant for New York law enforcement with the assistance of Amelia Sachs, his NYPD wife. She collects evidence from crime scenes, as does NYPD patrol officer Ron Pulaski. Detective Lon Siletto, Rhyme’s former partner and a senior officer in Major Cases, is Rhyme’s principal contact within NYPD. Lyle Spencer purports to be a human lie detector, relying on the pseudo-science of kinesic analysis. Rhyme's caregiver, Thom Reston, helps out with research and odd jobs when he isn’t feeding all the members of Rhyme’s team. Series fans might be happy to know that all the supporting cast members play significant roles in The Watchmaker’s Hand.

The novel begins with a crane collapse and the heroic effort of the crane operator to prevent the machine from crashing into a densely populated office building. The collapse is followed by a demand from a previously unknown terrorist organization to deed certain city properties to a nonprofit corporation for conversion into low-income housing. Since housing advocates do not see mass murder as the best means to their end, Rhyme knows that the demand is meant to divert attention from its real purpose. Figuring out what that purpose might be is the novel’s central mystery, one that has Rhyme and his team chasing theories to unproductive destinations.

Other key events involve the unsolved theft of New York City infrastructure documents, including maps of tunnels and engineering plans for buildings; a police detective who spies on Rhyme; a car accident that leads to the loss of Pulaski’s badge; two politicians who are running for Congress; and a potential plot to assassinate the president. While these events seem to be unrelated, fans of the series will count on Jeffery Deaver to create an intricate plot that links them together. After unpeeling layers of deception, Rhyme will eventually arrive at the core of the scheme. It is no spoiler to suggest that the Watchmaker will be instrumental, but the real mystery is the identity of the criminal who hired the Watchmaker.

The plot is no more farfetched than most modern crime novels and, unlike many, it holds together. Deaver builds in multiple scenes of rapid action that turn a mystery into a thriller. Whether Rhyme will prevail against the Watchmaker is never much in doubt. The only question is how Rhyme will manage to survive. In the end, a new villain emerges (Rhyme calls this one the Engineer) who will likely appear in a future novel to bedevil the lives of Rhyme and his friends.

The characters are all true to the personalities they have developed over the course of the series. This novel is notable for developing the personality of the Watchmaker and, to a lesser extent, the Engineer. They become characters the reader can understand without cheering for their success. Rhyme’s forensic wizardry is always entertaining and sounds plausible (my knowledge of chemistry and geology is insufficient to make me a credible fact checker). On the whole, the excitement factor in The Watchmaker’s Hand and the strength of the plot make this installment one of my favorites in the series.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Generation Ship by Michael Mammay

Published by Harper Voyager on October 17, 2023

If it is impossible to travel faster than light or to circumvent that restriction with wormholes or warp drives, generation ships will be necessary to expand humanity beyond our solar system. Unfortunately, humans don’t always play well together. Thousands of humans living on an interstellar cruise ship probably won’t last more than twenty years before their society starts to fall apart. After a century, chaos seems inevitable. Non-Stop remains my favorite example of a generation ship that has gone to ruin.

The ship in Michael Mammay’s novel has defied the odds. It has been in flight for more than two centuries. As the novel begins, it is one hundred days from its destination. The ship has maintained order with elements of authoritarian rule. Power is shared between the governor (who makes decisions based on politics) and the captain (whose job is to keep the ship safe). The ship’s charter requires everyone to work in an assigned job until  they reach the age of 75, when they have a nice birthday party before being recycled. The ship’s population is capped at 18,000. Each death permits a new birth, which must be authorized by bureaucrats.

The idea of dying before the body is ready for a natural death doesn’t bother the ship’s population until they near their destination. Continuing to kill people when the ship may soon be sending colonists to the planet seems unnecessary to those who are about to die as well as their families and friends. Protests mount.

On the other hand, it isn’t clear that colonization will occur. Every probe sent to the planet (apart from those that scout uninhabitable land masses) has malfunctioned. A probe that managed to send pictures before the connection was lost seems to have taken a picture of something with eyes. Probes flown over a desert land mass seem to show the ruins of a building. Some people believe that the ship should press on to a new destination rather than interfere with indigenous life, although conquering or killing indigenous life is pretty much the story of human history.

Each chapter focuses on a character. The key characters are Mark Rector, who works in the security force (Secfor) and believes government should rule with a fist; Jarred Pantel, the governor whose sole goal is to retain or increase his power; Sheila Jackson, a scientist who opposes the governor’s plan to start colonization before they have more data about the planet; Eddie Dannon, a coder and hacker who develops a way to jack her mind into the ship’s software; and George Iannou, a reluctant protest leader whose loyalties are unclear.

The plot noodles around for way too many words, wrapping around familiar concepts that include first contact, the development of digital sentience, and the Gaia hypothesis. Most of the story, however, consists of passengers on the ship arguing with each other. It takes far too long for passengers to make their way to the planet and solve its mysteries. Once they finally arrive on the planet, they take their shipboard arguments with them. The ensuing events seem secondary to the quarrels that are the novel’s true plot. I suppose it might be fair to say that political revolution within a confined spaceship is the true plot, but this isn’t the kind of meaningful revolution we got from Heinlein, who had grumpy but determined men using catapaults to chuck moon rocks at the Earth. Mammay's is a revolution reminiscent of the January 6 insurrection, where aimless people wandered around and made noise.

Mammay’s prose is adequate, although his style is wordy and prone to lazy clichés (“it hurt like nobody’s business”). A good third of the novel could have been cut without harming the plot or character development. The essential parts of the novel relate a story that has some interesting moments, but not enough to stand as riveting fiction. As a fan of generation ship novels, I was disappointed.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

First published in 1927; published by Penguin Vitae on November 14, 2023

Death Comes for the Archbishop tells the story of Jean Marie Latour, a French priest who served for ten years as a missionary in Ohio before the Vatican made him a Bishop and assigned him to the western territory that the US acquired from Mexico. The story follows Latour from his arrival in Santa Fe to his death as an Archbishop. The novel’s copyright expired this year, which likely explains Penguin’s decision to reissue it, though Penguin claims to be doing so to celebrate Willa Cather’s 150th birthday. Regardless of motivation, Cather was a remarkable writer and any effort to keep her work in print is worthy of celebration.

In Santa Fe, Latour takes charge of a diocese with unknown boundaries. After the US creates the states of New Mexico and Arizona, Latour’s jurisdiction extends to both, although he will need to negotiate with Mexican bishops to the extent that political boundaries divide existing parishes. Conferring over distances of thousands of miles is no easy task when telegraph wires remain to be strung and travel must be accomplished on horseback. Latour’s diocese later expands to the Colorado Rockies when the gold rush inflates the population. The prospectors have plenty of saloons and gambling rooms but no priests.

Joseph Vaillant, another Frenchman, has been Latour’s best friend since their days in the seminary. He joins Latour as a reliable ally. Vaillant prefers Tucson to Santa Fe, but he feels his true mission is to find distant communities that priests never visit. Vaillant wishes to convert Indians and restore religious teachings to Mexican Catholics who can’t quite remember what they are supposed to believe, apart from veneration of the Virgin Mary.

Vaillant does not suffer from the sin of pride; he is as comfortable with the poor and uneducated as he is with the Cardinals in Rome. Unlike the more reticent Latour, Vaillant is built for the life of a missionary. He eventually takes on Colorado as his most challenging assignment.

The story provides a clear-headed and amusing look at priests in the wild West. Some are pious, some are gamblers or drinkers, some have left a trail of pregnant women across their parish, some are outright thieves who betray parishioners (most of whom are Mexicans or Native Americans) to acquire their land. Latour and Vaillant are pious and devoted to their faith, making it their duty to clean house, albeit cautiously.

While some of the priests under Latour’s command are not particularly interested in maintaining their vows of poverty or chastity, one priest suggests that the local priesthood represents a living church, “not a dead arm of the European church. Our religion grew out of the soil and has its own roots.” It is an indigenous church, one that is more fun than Rome’s, but the Catholics in Latour’s diocese are devout. Latour concludes that European formalities would destroy their faith and that disciplining a scandalous priest might come at the cost of losing his loyal flock. A competing view suggests that the parishioners are adaptable and will follow a pious priest just as readily as one who has a more relaxed attitude about religious decorum.

The novel focuses on the personalities of Latour and Vaillant rather than their religious beliefs. Apart from relating the occasional miracle, Cather’s goal is not to proselytize but to explore Latour’s challenging life. Cather ignores church doctrine while emphasizing Latour’s devotion to orchards and gardens. Latour wants his priests to save souls but also to bring fruit and vegetables into starchy Mexican diets.

Much of the novel reads like an adventure story combined with a western. In an elegant voice, Cather captures the time and place with stirring descriptions of the New Mexico desert, the hardship of travel by horse or mule, and the fortitude of people who live in “the hard heart of a country that was calculated to try the endurance of giants.” Latour admires Indians who, unlike Europeans, respect nature without trying to conquer it. “It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse.”

Latour is happy to see an end to the Indian Wars and to slavery before he dies, but the story is more personal than political. Latour nevertheless makes an effort to save a small tribe from Kit Carson’s brutal approach to warfare. When the tribe’s chief ventures out from his sheltering canyon to meet with the Bishop, Latour develops an appreciation of the gods who dwelt in “inaccessible white houses set in caverns up in the face of the cliffs, which were older than the white man’s world, and which no living man had ever entered. Their gods were there, just as the Padre’s God was in his church.” Latour’s flexibility of thought demonstrates how open minds inspire better lives. In a time when people who are capable of seeing others are derided for being“woke,” Cather’s lesson carries enduring value.

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The Edge by David Baldacci

 

Published by Grand Central Publishing on November 14, 2023

Small town secrets are at the heart of David Baldacci’s latest Travis Devine thriller. I occasionally roll my eyes at all the tough guy trappings in tough guy thrillers, but I give Baldacci credit for telling a plausible and reasonably exciting story that incorporates thrills without the superhuman stunts that mar so many entries in the tough guy subgenre.

Jenny Silkwell was a CIA agent who recently earned high level access to the CIA’s resources. She returned to her hometown in Maine after explaining to her mother that she needed to take care of “unfinished business.” Her trip ended when she was shot in the head. Her body apparently tumbled over a cliff and landed on the rocky shore. An aging widower with mobility problems told the police that he spotted the body while walking in the rain. The police managed to retrieve it before it was washed out to sea.

The reader quickly learns that Jenny’s sister Alex was assaulted fifteen years earlier. Perhaps Jenny’s unfinished business relates to that assault. Alex suffers from situational amnesia that prevents her from identifying her assailant, although she replays the assault in her dreams. Blocking such critical information for fifteen years (even though the attacker’s name is just on the tip of her tongue) is improbable but convenient to the plot. I suppose every thriller is entitled to have one element that strains credibility.

Jenny’s father is hospitalized. He was a military officer turned senator whose friends include Travis Devine’s boss. Devine works for one of those off-the-books clandestine agencies that thriller writers are always inventing. His boss tasks him with investigating Jenny’s death. Devine immediately determines that (1) the story told by the guy who happened upon the body doesn’t make sense, and (2) the police theory about how Jenny was shot isn’t consistent with the trajectory of the bullet that killed her. That the police didn’t take note of these facts means (1) they are incompetent small town cops or (2) they would prefer that the truth not be revealed or (3) both.

Given her job, Jenny might have been killed by foreign adversaries. Devine begins the novel by killing a foreign hit team (apart from a young woman who escapes) and encounters more foreign assassins as the story unfolds, but he suspects that Jenny was killed by locals because of the “unfinished business” she was trying to resolve.

The story follows Devine as he questions nearly everyone in town, many of whom might have something to do with Alex’s assault and/or Jenny’s death and/or a coverup of one or both of those events. Notable characters (who might also be suspects) include the widower who found Jenny’s body, his plucky granddaughter (whose parents died in a mysterious fire), Jenny’s business-minded brother, a couple of local (and one not-so-local) cops, and members of a family that operates the local funeral home, including the town doctor/coroner. More deaths ensue as Devine onducts his investigation.

As is typical of thrillers in this subgenre, Devine does a lot of tough-guysplaining about guns and ammunition and military training. He also explains how to break yourself free from duct tape and zip ties and the best ways to disable an opponent (going for the throat has been a go-to move for a few years now). All of this has been covered in so many tough guy novels that it would be better for characters just to execute their moves rather than wasting words explaining why they’re doing it, but that might shortchange readers who get excited when they read about guns and fighting. Still, most readers don’t need a textbook that covers the basics of being a tough guy. I was more interested in a lobsterman who lobstermansplained the negative impact that global warming is having on lobsters.

Baldacci boosts the word count by recounting Devine’s memories of West Point (where outstanding men learned to do their very best) and his days helping CID investigate crimes (where most of the rape accusations against soldiers proved to be false because warriors are honorable men). Devine’s military boosterism probably plays well with much of the audience for tough guy thrillers, but it becomes a bit wearing, given its disconnect from the real world.

An artistic character opines that most men are sad because they can’t live up to society’s expectations of man as Rambo. That opinion fits nicely within the subgenre’s theme that tough guys are superior to everyone else and puny little girly men all wish they were tough guys.

The story is complex without becoming confusing, although the reader might be challenged to keep track of characters and their relationship to each other. Fortunately, one of the bad guys lives long enough after being shot at the end of the story to give a long-winded confession that explains all the details Devine hadn’t yet deduced. Thank the gods for long-winded confessions that villains love to make at the end of thrillers. Readers would be so confused if they didn’t save the day.

Setting aside my reservations about Baldacci's tough guy and military tropes, I recommend The Edge to thriller fans. Baldacci maintains a good pace, sets up a couple of interesting mysteries, and delivers the action that thrillers require.

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