Ghostman by Roger Hobbs

Published by Knopf on February 12, 2013 

A ghostman is an imposter, someone who can make himself (or other criminals) disappear by changing appearance or identity. The titular ghostman lives by a motto he found in The Aaeneid: "If you can't reach heaven, raise hell." That pretty much sums up what you need to know about Ghostman: the protagonist is an intellectual who raises a lot of hell.

Ghostman starts with the theft of more than a million dollars from an armored car. The robbery turns into a bloodbath that leaves one of the two thieves dead at the scene. This concerns Marcus Hayes, who planned the robbery, because he's in a fatal predicament if he doesn't recover the loot. Hayes turns to Jack Delton -- the ghostman -- for help because Delton (not his real name, but it's the alias we're given) owes Hayes a debt for reasons that are explained in a series of flashbacks. It's the kind of debt Delton may have to repay with his life. Delton has to beat a very short clock if he's to save Hayes' life -- and his own.

Delton is soon jetting from Seattle to Atlantic City in search of Jerome Ribbons, the robber who seems to have disappeared with the stolen money. His search brings him into contact with a dangerous man known as the Wolf -- even more dangerous than Marcus. To keep the tension high, Roger Hobbs ends most chapters set in the present with "X hours to go."

The flashback chapters describe an audacious bank robbery in Kuala Lumpur. It's the sort of Ocean's Eleven scheme that pushes the boundary between improbable and ridiculous, but without the fancy gadgetry.

The primary plot -- the battle of wits between Marcus Hayes and the Wolf, with Delton stuck in the middle -- is clever. Apart from an overdone Russian roulette scene (there must be a more original way to show us that the protagonist isn't afraid to die), the story is, for the most part, convincing. I'm a bit skeptical of Delton's ability to take on and defeat thug after thug, usually while armed only with his wits, but the invincible protagonist is commonplace in the world of modern thrillers.

Readers who need to admire the sterling character of a thriller hero should give Ghostman a pass. Delton has only a few redeeming qualities (he doesn't kill people unless he feels it's necessary and he tries to avoid harming women and children) but he is nevertheless an interesting, if not particularly likable, character. He's certainly more likable than Hayes, the Wolf, or the other robbers, making it easy to root for him as the least of many evils.

Hobbs writes lively prose and moves the story forward at a pace that is well suited to a thriller. He fills Ghostman with interesting crime trivia (the safeguards against stealing money that's en route from the U.S. Treasury, the origin of the term "wheelman") without bogging down the story. Other than Delton, however, there isn't much here in the way of character development. This is a plot-and-action novel; it isn't character driven. Fortunately, the plot and action are sufficient to hold a reader's interest. The climax is a bit anti-climactic but the novel as a whole is enjoyable.

RECOMMENDED

Wash by Margaret Wrinkle

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on February 5, 2013 

Wash is an examination of slavery -- more specifically, the breeding of slaves as if they were horses -- from a variety of perspectives. Although some of the novel is narrated in the third person, the text is frequently divided into sections that tell the story from an individual character's point of view. Wash (more formally known as Washington) is a slave whose service as a stud is made available to other slave owners. James Richardson owns Wash, having purchased his mother, Mena, when she was pregnant. Mena's story is told by Wash and by Thompson, who leased her from Richardson. Thompson's son, Eli, fleshes out the story of Wash's youth. Pallas, a midwife who works on a neighboring farm, is Wash's lover of choice.

Wash is both a riveting portrait of inhumanity and a life-affirming story about healing. From its vivid description of manacled captives aboard ships to the art of branding the face of a runaway slave, from Pallas' administration of herbs to cure Wash's fever to the mixture of love and spiritualism that restores Pallas after three years of sexual abuse, the novel captures all points along the spectrum of good and evil. The nature of freedom -- freedom of the mind versus freedom of the body -- is one of the book's driving themes. Another is the difficulty of understanding, and the risk of error in judging, a person whose life you have not lived. For Pallas and Wash, and even for Richardson, the novel is a story of survival and growth.

The novel begins near Nashille in 1823, moves back in time to North Carolina, then returns to Tennessee and again moves forward. Richardson, a veteran of the Revolutionary War and a failed general in the War of 1812, is now a farmer, a land developer (he's building a new town called Memphis), and a breeder of slaves. Although he has doubts about the morality of the latter business, Richardson's business partner, Quinn, has convinced him that breeding slaves is a surer way to eliminate his debt than hoping for profitable cotton harvests. Quinn, however, disagrees with Richardson's strategy to breed for intelligence. Quinn thinks slaves should have strong backs and weak minds, the better to foster obedience and discourage insurrection.

Richardson is a multi-dimensional character, a product of his time and upbringing who, nagged by self-doubt, broken by the war, torn by his dependence on slavery, and detached from his family, confides only in Wash. In his senior years, he comes to question all the assumptions upon which he has built his life. Wash is also a deep-grained character, a man locked in a constant struggle to suppress his rage. Pallas comes into focus in the novel's second half. She provides the novel with its moral center. She is both forgiving and understanding: "people didn't mean half the things they did and sometimes, slack was all we had to give each other."

The story is dramatic but the drama is never overdone. Margaret Wrinkle's sentences are like velvet ribbons uncoiling and connecting, textured and luxurious. If her prose has a flaw it is that the voices of her characters are equally eloquent and, for that reason, not particularly distinctive. Wrinkle draws wonderful parallels between horses and slaves: the fierce ones need to be broken, the strongest serve as profitable studs, and some, especially the ones who have been abused, will never be tamed. The horse imagery, Wash's connection and identification with horses, gives the novel some of its best moments, including a memorable ending.

The downside to telling a story from different perspectives is the redundancy it creates. Seeing the same scene from different pairs of eyes gives the reader fresh insights, but a few of the scenes don't alter the perspective enough to warrant the repetition. That's a minor quibble and certainly not one that diminishes my enthusiasm for this fine novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Extinction by Mark Alpert

Published by Thomas Dunne Books on February 12, 2013

Extinction reads like a cross between The Six Million Dollar Man, a mediocre spy novel, and a cheesy "computers try to take over the world" science fiction novel. It is a fast-paced, unchallenging time-killer that doesn't stand out from other formula fiction.

Jim Pierce builds prosthetic devices. His estranged daughter Layla is a computer hacker. China's Ministry of State Security is displeased that Layla hacked the Chinese government's network with the help of a former Chinese agent named Dragon Fire. Dragon Fire (whose ability to travel unimpeded to the US on short notice goes unexplained) shows up in New York long enough to give Layla a flash drive with information about the evil Dr. Zhang, who has networked the brains of twenty-nine lobotomized dissidents. The network, hidden in a remote compound, is named Supreme Harmony. It is designed to analyze surveillance videos in real time. In a surprise to Dr. Zhang but not to readers of trashy thrillers, Supreme Harmony has an "I am alive" moment and develops a collective consciousness of its own, not unlike the Borg. And like all Computers Gone Bad, it decides it needs to destroy humanity to preserve itself.

Pierce lost his wife, son, and arm during an attack by "al Qaeda martyrs" in Nairobi, one of many overused plot devices upon which Mark Alpert relies. Now Pierce has a bunch of prosthetic arms. He can detach one and snap on a replacement in seconds. One incorporates a machine gun. Yes, a machine gun arm. That, at least, is good for a laugh, as is a Dr. Strangelove moment involving a different prosthetic arm. Even more amusing are the weaponized flies that are forever chasing Pierce and Kirsten Chan, the deputy director of the NSA, a woman who turns into a field agent solely to give Pierce a new romantic interest.  All of this may be based on sound science, but that makes it no less silly in execution.

Life is just a little too easy for Pierce, Kirsten, and Layla. When Pierce needs to make it through a roadblock, the police conveniently leave a gap big enough for Pierce's vehicle to squeeze through. When Layla needs to find a computer password, it's conveniently written on a Post-It note. When Layla needs to escape from a room, she finds a convenient ventilator shaft that's big enough to crawl through. A can of insecticide (handy for killing weaponized flies) seems to last forever. Two characters fortuitously find each other in a remote part of China. The leading characters seem to have infallible memories for trivial details, including maps and history, but the silliest aspect of this life-saving knowledge is Pierce's convenient recollection of a forty digit binary code that he had no reason to memorize. Pierce also has the amazing ability to "bury" specific memories, and to bury them in specific locations, next to his other buried memories. He can even choose to bury some memories deeper than his other buried memories. Really? I wish I could do that.

Much about Supreme Harmony is left unexplained. Why does Supreme Harmony find human behavior "inexplicable" if it has absorbed all the thoughts, memories, and emotions of the humans it has assimilated? Why does a machine intelligence care whether it survives? If it absorbed some sort of survival instinct from its human hosts, why didn't it also absorb the human instinct to preserve and perpetuate the human race? If it is offended by body odor, why isn't it offended by genocide? If it cares so much about the environment that humans have devastated, why doesn't it care about the humans? If it feels contempt for humans because they spend so much time hurting each other, why doesn't it feel contempt for itself when it decides to kill everyone on the planet? Is Supreme Harmony such a stupid computer that it seriously believes orchestrating a war between China and the United States will perpetuate its existence? If Supreme Harmony is so worried that someone might discover its existence and unplug it, why doesn't it worry about nuclear warheads raining down on its servers?

The background to Supreme Harmony is presented in expository chapters that make for dull reading. The novel as a whole is written in a style that ranges from ordinary to awkward. Despite the graceless prose, banal dialog, cheesy romance, and unoriginal plot, Extinction does offer some interesting information about drone surveillance and cyborg insects and biotechnology. The swift pace quickly brings the reader to concluding chapters that are more imaginative than the rest of the novel. Diehard fans of formula fiction might therefore get a kick out of Extinction, but I don't know how many readers will tolerate the silliness long enough to reach the ending. 

NOT RECOMMENDED

We Live in Water by Jess Walter

Published by Harper Perennial on February 12, 2013

Jess Walter's stories make me think of Donald Ray Pollock mixed with a dash of George Saunders. Many of Walter's Spokane-based characters are on the fringes of society. Walter writes about a homeless philosopher-beggar who, on good days, spends his money on a book instead of booze and asks his group counselor why he can't talk about his ideas instead of all of the stupid things he's done. He writes about an inmate who, released on a temporary pass to get dialysis, would rather go fishing. He writes about a tweaker who must choose between food and drugs.

Yet when Walter writes of these broken lives, he does so with such sensitivity that it's impossible not to identify with the characters -- with what they feel, if not with how they live. As one of his characters says, "Who isn't crazy sometimes?" His characters may be more extreme than most, but their unchecked behavior sheds light on thoughts and feelings that are buried within us all.

In a couple of stories, the narrator is living a conventional woe-filled life (divorce, career failure) but the story's focus is on a character from the fringe. The narrator of the title story (one of my favorites in the collection) has problems, but the largest of them is the hole in his life left by the father he doesn't remember, the father who left his son in a car when he inside a building to deal with a trifecta of trouble. Another story begins with the sentence "I'm on my way to Vegas with my friend, Bobby Rausch, to save his stepsister from a life of prostitution." In that story, a character's life is clearly headed for disaster, but it isn't the unfortunate stepsister.

Some stories are about relatively functional people who are a little off. A young man, ill-equipped for fatherhood but with high hopes for his three children, becomes obsessed with discovering which one is stealing from the coin jar that constitutes the family's meager vacation fund. A day trader sentenced to community service teaches algebra to high school kids and reads the same story to the same grade schooler every day. A stalker's job as a newspaper editor puts him in a position to mess with his ex-girlfriend's horoscope.

Sometimes Walter writes about people who do the right thing, like the mechanic who refuses to rip off an old lady. On the other hand, one of my favorite stories, a work of small genius, teaches that you never really know who you can trust.

"Don't Eat Cat" is a departure, a humorous take on zombie stories -- after the borders are closed, the fast food/finance industry has to rely on zombies to fill service jobs -- although it is, in the end, a tragicomedy. (It isn't the only departure ... the story about saving the stepsister from life as a prostitute is pretty funny, another instance of humor in a serious vein.)

Although the stories expose the rawness of life, they also expose the humanity that is common to us all. Not many writers can perform that balancing act with the deftness Walter displays in this collection.

RECOMMENDED

The Old Man and the Wasteland by Nick Cole

Published by Harper Voyager on January 22, 2013

Nick Cole published The Old Man and the Wasteland independently in 2011.  This appears to be one of the rare success stories of an author whose self-published work generated enough buzz to interest a major publisher.  It's easy to see why.

Inspired by Hemingway, The Old Man and the Wasteland is, according to Nick Cole's introduction to the revised (Harper Voyager) edition, an illustration of the lesson taught by The Old Man and the Sea: you can lose, but only if you give up will you be defeated. The Old Man and the Wasteland is short enough to qualify as a novella, and the revised edition reviewed here includes a preview of Cole's upcoming novel, The Savage Boy.

The old man in Cole's novel lives in a postapocalyptic wasteland in the American southwest. Like the other members of his village, he salvages whatever he can find that still has value. He was once a hero, having made great finds, a refrigerator among them, but later he became a symbol of bad luck, cursed for bringing a radioactive radio into the village. Now the old man hunts alone.

The novel addresses the three literary conflicts everyone learns about in high school English: man against man (a crazy hermit, a nomadic band of killers), man against nature (wolves, scorpions, monsoons), and most importantly, man against himself. As the old man searches for salvage, he strives to rekindle the person he once was, to find what he has lost within himself. At the same time, he knows that the key to survival is to "let go of what is gone," to set aside the pain of loss, to focus on the present, on salvage, not on "what had been or what was lost." The search for salvage is both a test of physical endurance and a test of character. Does the old man still have what it takes to find salvage that will help his village?

From Stephen King to Cormac McCarthy, post-apocalyptic tales have tended to be morality plays, allegorical explorations of good and evil. The protagonist journeys through a wasteland, encountering and rejecting evil in the quest for something good -- in this case, the quest for some part of the past worth salvaging. The falling bombs (and what could be more evil than nuclear bombs?) destroyed much of what was good, but the old man labors to restore the good, one scrap at a time. With determination, he may even be able to restore himself.

Cole wrote the novel in a style that is distinctly Hemingwayesque: plain and economical, deriving its power from the truth that the words conjure. One sentence -- "The line from where he had met the bee and the splotch of green was true and straight" -- aptly describes Cole's prose style: true and straight. The Old Man and the Wasteland tells an inspirational story that, in its own way, illustrates a life lesson just as effectively as the classic novel upon which it is based.

RECOMMENDED