Dead Lions by Mick Herron

Published by Soho Crime on May 7, 2013 

Dead Lions has everything a good spy novel needs -- intrigue, strong characters, crafty tradecraft, byzantine plotting, sharp prose -- with the addition of a healthy dose of humor. The heroes (if you could call them that) are slow horses: Intelligence Service officers who aren't trusted with serious work, assigned to Slough House in the hope that they will retire or die of boredom.

Dickie Bow, a former spook with a drinking problem who went off the books after the Cold War ended, spots a Moscow hood in London and, acting on instinct, follows him. While riding a bus a couple of seats behind the hood, Bow dies, apparently of a heart attack. Jackson Lamb, in charge of Slough House, investigates Bow's death, while his employees are diligently avoiding productive work -- not that they're ever given productive work to do. The slow horses are an engaging group of misfits, and as the novel unfolds, we get to know them all. We even start to like them ... most of them, anyway.

The Cold War is over, but as Lamb investigates Bow's death, he begins to wonder whether there are Russian spies who didn't get the memo. Particularly the greatest spy of all, a legend who never existed -- unless he did. Lamb's minions at Slough House aren't particularly suited for field work, but Lamb decides to mount an operation that will get to the bottom of Bow's (presumed) murder and a (presumably) long-dormant scheme involving sleeper agents. Meanwhile, without Lamb's knowledge, two slow horses are borrowed from Slough House and tasked with creating a security plan for an upcoming meeting with a Russian industrialist. As you would expect, these plot threads eventually join into a single strand.

I've read any number of spy novels that are more somber than this one without being half as clever. The plot is both wild and wickedly smart. It's also more believable than the plots in many novels that are meant to be taken more seriously. Mick Herron writes in a tone of perfectly understated sarcasm that never fails to amuse. At the same time, he manages to tell a conventional spy story that is sometimes heart-warming and always intriguing. Toward the end, he delivers the excitement of a thriller. All of that, coupled with the cast of quirky characters, make me want to read the novel that introduced the slow horses.

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McNally's Secret by Lawrence Sanders

First published in 1992; published digitally by Open Road Media on March 12, 2013

Expelled from law school for streaking, Archy McNally joined his father's Palm Beach law firm as an investigator. Archy refuses to take life seriously -- he blames most of society's troubles on an excess of seriousness -- and his whimsical attitude is showcased in the McNally novels. McNally's Secret is the first. Lawrence Sanders wrote six more, and Vincent Lardo continued the series after Sanders' death.

Archy's father, Prescott McNally, assigns Archy to look into the apparent theft of a block of rare postage stamps from his wealthy client, Cynthia Horowitz. With about a dozen suspects to investigate, including staff, family, and house guests, Archy has a formidable task ahead of him. He handles it with aplomb, taking frequent breaks for cocktails and long lunches at the club. The stamp theft eventually leads to a couple of deaths, turning McNally's Secret into a classic murder mystery.

Archy is something of a playboy. He spends his evenings wooing a new woman, despite the repeated warnings he receives that the relationship will lead to trouble. I enjoyed the superficially charming aspect of Archy's personality, but he's also a smug, condescending snob. Those traits begin to wear thin by the novel's end. Fortunately, it's a short novel.

The multilayered mystery itself is fun and, if one of the plot twists is a bit predictable, it leads to yet another twist that is quite satisfying. As a good mystery writer should, Sanders plants the clues and gives the reader a fair chance to pick up on them. While I'm a bigger fan of Anderson's grittier stories (I have fond memories of reading The Anderson Tapes thirty years ago), McNally's Secret should appeal to mystery fans looking for lighter fare.

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Point and Shoot by Duane Swierczynski

Published by Mulholland Books on April 30, 2013 

Had I read the first two books in the Charlie Hardie series before reading Point and Shoot, I might not have felt quite so lost as I tried to make sense of Hardie's flashbacks in the opening pages. What's this outfit called the Cabal and why is Hardie in low Earth orbit watching a daily video of his family in their kitchen? He's essentially been put to work (quite against his will) as a security guard whose job is to kill anyone who manages the nearly impossible task of breaking into the satellite. Of course, someone does. What is Hardie guarding? He doesn't know, but it's clearly something dangerous.

Point and Shoot is a thriller infused with elements that border on science fiction. It's sort of tongue-in-cheek Ludlum, complete with a conspiratorial organization and a protagonist who, like Jason Bourne, has been the subject of unorthodox experiments. Yet unlike Bourne, a protagonist who is meant to be taken seriously, Charlie Hardie is anything but. In addition to crime fiction, Duane Swierczynski writes comic books, and there's a touch of superhero in Hardie -- a jaded, reluctant superhero, sort of Howard the Duck crossed with any of those Marvel characters who were constantly complaining about their lives. The story has a comic book sensibility in that it's not quite grounded in the real world, although that doesn't diminish the fun of reading it.

And reading this fast-moving, tongue-in-cheek novel is loads of fun. Hardie is wild, "a force of living mayhem" whose unending bad luck is reinforced by the fact that he's so hard to kill. The poor guy would sometimes prefer death to the unfortunate life he's living, making him a sympathetic, even likable, protagonist. The addition of a second character who is carrying a lot of Hardie's baggage doubles the fun, and the spectacularly over-the-top killers who populate the novel are just hilarious. For all the mayhem, however, the ironic ending has a certain sweetness. (Although there's a second ending, more like the beginning of another novel, that culminates in a cliffhanger. How annoying is that?)

Swierczynski makes frequent references to movies, beginning each of the short chapters with a quotation from a film. The book would make an entertaining action flick. It isn't deep but it isn't meant to be. Hard-charging prose, goofy characters, and a mayhem-fueled plot are enough for readers who like that sort of thing ... and I happen to be one of those. (Note to sensitive readers: if you shy away from the F-word and its variants, you really want to avoid Point and Shoot.)

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Flora by Gail Godwin

Published by Bloomsbury USA on May 7, 2013 

A keen observer of life, Gail Godwin is both a student and a teacher of human nature. Her novels tend to be probing studies of characters who struggle with their disconnection from the world around them.

At the age of ten (going on eleven), Helen Anstruther has already developed the most disagreeable characteristics of her mother, who died when she was three, and of her grandmother Honora, who has just died. Helen has inherited their haughty sense of superiority, their tendency to see the worst in others. Her mother's twenty-two-year-old cousin, Flora Waring, is recruited to look after Helen during the summer, when Helen's father (a principal during the school year) will be away supervising construction of buildings that will house the Manhattan Project. Although Flora has earned a teaching degree and is hoping for a job offer in the fall, she is woefully insecure, a trait that Helen feeds upon. Helen regards Flora as white trash from Alabama, a hugely embarrassing addition to her life. At the same time, she is blind to the faults of the father and grandmother who raised her.

Two children in town have contracted polio, causing Helen's father to issue an injunction from afar: Helen is not to leave the house. Although Helen complains, she feels a strong connection to the house, still full of her grandmother's things. The house, once a home to recovering tuberculosis patients (less charitably described as "a halfway house for rich malingerers"), is virtually a character in the novel. Helen's isolation isn't truly troubling. She has little use for friends (as one of them complains, she forgets she has them when they aren't around); she lives largely within her own imaginative mind.

Helen parcels out her time, instructing Flora on the art of being a teacher and, when she can, sneaking a peek at the letters her grandmother wrote to Flora over the years -- letters that reveal family secrets in guarded language that Helen isn't old enough to understand. As Helen makes her way through the summer, she develops a crush on the delivery boy from the grocery store, a young man named Finn whose physical and mental issues earned him a medical discharge from the Army. That he is Flora's age does not deter Helen from viewing Flora as an unworthy competitor for his attention.

Every now and then an older voice intrudes, an adult Helen filled with unfashionable remorse as she looks back on that formative summer. The richness of the characters is astonishing, given the novel's brevity. While we usually see Flora through Helen's unreliable eyes, we see her from a different perspective when we read Honora's letters or hear Finn describing her. While Helen is convinced that she is spending her summer educating Flora, it is actually Flora who teaches the novel's most valuable lessons.

Flora is, in fact, the story of the lessons Helen learned from a teacher she despised: that other people's lives are as worthy as her own; that their tragedies are more real, and more serious, than her own self-invented woes; that risking the pain of opening our hearts to others is essential to a fulfilling life. Godwin tells this dramatic story in radiant but understated prose; even a bombshell in the concluding pages explodes quietly. This is a story that touches feelings without obvious manipulation, a book that fills a reader with joy and sorrow in the same instant and leaves the reader wondering how that's possible.

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The Ophelia Cut by John Lescroart

Published by Atria Books on May 7, 2013 

Anthony Ricci, NYPD police sergeant and part-time hit man, enters a witness protection program to avoid swimming with the fishes. Now known as Tony Solaia, he finds himself swimming with Dismas Hardy in the chilly waters of San Francisco's bay. Soon after that, Hardy is representing Solaia, now working as a bartender, on a charge of selling alcohol to minors. The raid of the bar in which Solaia was working has been orchestrated by a politician, in concert with the owner of several massage parlors, as part of a Machiavellian scheme to achieve their mutual goals.

Solaia is the connecting thread in a story that weaves together a number of characters, many of whom will be familiar to fans of the series. Other than Hardy, the most significant to the plot are Hardy's brother-in-law, Moses McGuire, and Moses' daughter, Brittany McGuire, a beautiful young butterfly who briefly alights on Goodman's arrogant chief of staff, Rick Jessup, before landing on Solaia. Jessup's political machinations and history of violence give birth to the novel's primary storyline, culminating in a murder that provides Hardy with another case to defend. The plot turns into a whodunit, as neither Hardy nor the reader know who committed the murder. In addition to Hardy's client, there are a number of possible candidates from whom to choose. To his credit, John Lescroart kept me guessing until the novel's end.

As is common in series fiction, much of the story focuses on the interaction of established characters, their relationships and conflicts. The character of Brittany is drawn with particular sensitivity. The courtroom drama that is the hallmark of legal thrillers is absent in the first half of the novel, as Lescroart sets up the story and develops his characters. The leisurely pace of the novel's opening half might not appeal to some readers, but I appreciated the time Lescroart took to fine-tune the friendships and divided loyalties that are so integral to the plot. Once the story gets moving (about the time the trial starts), it moves swiftly.

Lescroart has a good handle on the games played by police, prosecutors, and judges to protect their own turfs. He also has a jaded (i.e., realistic) understanding of the political motivations that underlie high profile arrests, followed by futile prosecutions, of low-impact crimes like underage drinking. At the same time, he doesn't use the novel as a soapbox -- his characters express their opinions within the context of the story. Like all good legal thrillers, the novel is full of "Inside Baseball" lore about the art and pitfalls of criminal trials, from greedy expert witnesses to the perils of eyewitness identification, the burdensome hurdles the defense must overcome before it can argue that some other person committed the charged murder, and the ever-tricky problem of how a defense lawyer deals with the suspicion that a client, or some other defense witness, is telling a lie. Both Hardy and the prosecutor engage in the kind of theatrics that, if they happened more often in real life, would make trials a whole lot more fun to watch ... but those theatrics make the story fun to read.

Some aspects of the story stretch credibility, but never beyond its breaking point, and certainly no more so than is common in modern thrillers. The ending is a shocker, in a way that is perhaps a bit too karmic. It might make some fans of the series unhappy, but it reflects the reality that actions often have unexpected consequences, karmic or otherwise. Besides, by the fourteenth novel in a series, it's probably time to shake things up. In the end, and in addition to the ending, there are enough small but nifty twists in the story to make The Ophelia Cut thoroughly absorbing.

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