Iwo, 26 Charlie by P.T. Deutermann

Published by ‎ St. Martin's Press on November 28, 2023

P.T. ‎Deutermann’s recent novels have been working their way through the Pacific War. This one showcases the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. The protagonist is Lee Bishop, a naval lieutenant assigned to a destroyer. His job is to communicate with spotters on the island and to translate the coordinates they provide into firing solutions. Being the military, information provided by spotters goes through layers of bureaucracy before orders to fire are finally given. The delay endangers Marines who need immediate support. Bishop comes up with a plan to replace multiple competing grids with a single grid. The plan will streamline the process and save American lives.

Unfortunately for Bishop, he is sent to Iwo Jima to explain and test his plan. He’s given the job of a spotter, a job that most Marines don’t survive for more than 24 hours before a sniper puts an end to their spotting. Three Marines who have become known as the Goon Squad are assigned to keep him alive. Bishop is a mere naval lieutenant and not a Marine, but they bond anyway. Bonding becomes easier after they repeatedly save each other’s lives.

Bishop proves that his idea is effective. It’s so effective that he’s repeatedly sent into the field on new missions. He saves countless lives by calling in strikes on Japanese positions, devising ways to get the right shells to land on the right targets.

The missions are harrowing. Nobody writes combat scenes with more voltage than Deutermann. If it is improbable that one man can do as much damage as Bishop causes, Deutermann sold me on believing in the possibility of unlikely heroism.

It’s amusing that Bishop reviles the Japanese because they use sneaky tactics and fight to the death as he finds sneaky ways to outfight the Japanese and praises Marines for fighting to the death. Such is the logic of war. I can’t fault Deutermann for portraying that logic as it appears to combatants.

Apart from holding widely shared opinions (like other soldiers and sailors in Deutermann’s recent novels, Bishop hates everything about the Japanese), Bishop doesn’t have much of a personality. He’s dutiful and friendly and brave, but he isn’t developed with the same depth as the protagonists in some of Deutermann’s other novels. To the extent that his personality comes through, Bishop reveals it in an epilog when we learn that he has not gotten over the trauma he endured on Iwo Jima. The epilog is genuinely moving. It also takes an honest look at the difficult cost-benefit value of crippling three divisions of Marines to capture a single island.

Even if Bishop is a bit bland, this novel doesn’t need to rely on characterization for its success. Deutermann excels at bringing the reader into a battlefield. The carnage of war, the relentless fear that an attack is imminent, the hope of survival, the odor of fuel and sweat and decaying bodies (and sulfur in the case of Iwo Jima), the deafening noise of artillery, all contribute to growing tension as the reader follows Bishop and hopes that, against all odds, he will complete his missions and survive intact. I don’t go out of my way to read war novels, but I am never disappointed by P.T. Deutermann’s stories about World War II.

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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.

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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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