The Snow Bees by Peter Cunningham

First published in Great Britain in 1988 

Peter Cunningham is an extraordinary writer of moving family dramas, including the Monument novels, set in rural Ireland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also written more than a half dozen thrillers, including The Snow Bees.

The Snow Bees is a standard story of drug cops battling drug lords with a slight twist: the man who infiltrates the cartel, Patrick Drake, is an accountant, not a cop. Drake volunteers for the assignment after his brother-in-law, Alan Ridgeway, a fellow accountant in the same prestigious London firm, is murdered at a winery he was auditing in France. Ridgeway had discovered that the winery was shipping more wine than it produced. He suspected that the winery was involved in illicit activity and that the accounting firm's founder, John Abelson, was involved.

In a related plotline, a DEA agent working undercover in Spain is murdered, but not before telling his brother, D.C. drug cop Joe Vendetti, that someone high in the DEA's hierarchy was working with the cartel. It is Vendetti who recruits Drake to infiltrate the cartel. The novel's other key player is drug lord Marcellino Adarraga, who lives in Columbia but dreams of freeing his homeland, Euskadi, and uses his profits to fund Basque terrorists.

Patrick manages to join the cartel with improbable ease, and the relationship he develops with Adarraga's beautiful lover is both predictable and unlikely. As was customary twenty years ago, the "good guys" in The Snow Bees indulge in a fair amount of overwrought hand-wringing about the evils of cocaine. Notwithstanding those concerns and despite the all-too-conventional plot, The Snow Bees tells a rousing story that features strong characters and tense moments. Cunningham writes with the same grace and style that make the Monument novels so memorable. The Snow Bees is far from Cunningham's best work -- it hasn't aged as well as his other novels -- but the quality of Cunningham's writing and the excitement that he manages to generate make it worth reading.

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The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H. Cook

Published by Mysterious Press on August 7, 2012 

Thomas Cook's books are always filled with penetrating insights, sharp observations of human nature. Deception and betrayal, common themes in Cook's novels, percolate from the center of The Crime of Julian Wells. Although the story is driven by a secret -- what is the crime to which the title refers? -- it is the reaction to betrayal, its poisonous impact ("like a landslide in your soul"), that gives the story its heart.

The Crime of Julian Wells begins with Julian's suicide. The suicide baffles Julian's best friend, Philip Anders, from whose perspective the story is told. Philip is a literary critic, while Julian was an expatriate writer mired in darkness who traveled the world to chronicle stories of crime and cruelty. "It was evil he was after," Philip recalls, "some core twist in the scheme of things." Also confounded by Julian's decision to end his life is Julian's sister Loretta. While Philip and Loretta both knew Julian to be restless but exuberant in his youth, they also recognized that Julian's state of mind changed after he traveled with Philip to Argentina.

The dedication in Julian's first book -- "For Philip, sole witness to my crime" -- had always seemed to Philip a joke. Julian's death causes Philip to reconsider its meaning. Obsessed with the notion that he had, in fact, witnessed a crime he failed to recognize, Philip scours his memory while embarking on his own investigation, a quest that makes him ponder the fate of two people he met in Argentina toward the end of the Dirty War, friends who subsequently disappeared: Father Rodrigo, who appeared to be a poor parish priest, and Marisol Menendez, a tour guide who assisted Julian and Philip. Following the trail from a seedy bar in Paris to a hotel bar in London favored by spies and zigzagging across the globe from there, Philip endeavors to uncover the secrets that his friends had concealed.

How does one destroy a monster, one of the characters asks Philip, without becoming a monster? Julian spent his adult life trying to identify with the victims of monsters in the hope that he could tell their stories. Through much of the novel Cook invites the reader to ask whether Julian's crime, whatever it was, made him a monster or a victim -- or both. Using a particularly clever device, Cook develops Julian's personality through the books Julian wrote. Philip rereads them after Julian's death, and the passages he quotes furnish insight into Julian's life while providing clues to his fate. His search for the truth about Julian leads Philip to some unpleasant truths about his own life.

Philip frequently alludes to (or quotes from) novelists and poets and travel writers. He often references Eric Ambler, an author with whom Cook has much in common. Like Ambler, Cook is as much a philosopher as a writer of suspense novels. He illuminates the shadows that darken the human heart. With the clarity of truth that the best fiction supplies, Cook reveals not just the pain that drove Julian to his death, but the pain that is common to all who have been broken by deception and betrayal.

Cook's plot is constructed with precision. His characters come alive with the virtues and flaws that define a life. His radiant prose is forceful and direct; this is not a novelist who wastes words. Few authors of literary suspense novels can match Cook. The Crime of Julian Wells is not Cook's best book, but it is a strong addition to his impressive body of work.

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vN by Madeline Ashby

Published by Angry Robot on July 31, 2012 

Jack’s wife Charlotte and daughter Amy are von Neumann-type humanoids.  The vN were created by religious folk who thought it would be nice for the unsaved to have some helpers after being left behind.  That’s an original premise, albeit an unlikely one --  given that those who aren’t called to God’s side during the End Times are by definition unworthy of salvation, are religious extremists likely to devote resources to making their sinful lives more comfortable?  If you can suspend your disbelief of that premise, the offbeat story that follows is full of entertaining surprises.

A less original premise (thanks to Isaac Asimov) is that a vN can never harm a human; a failsafe causes the vN to suffer if it sees a human in pain.  That premise is tested by Amy’s grandmother (Portia) and other members of her clade, who seem perfectly content to cause havoc in the human population.

Amy engages in an act of humanoid cannibalism, busts out of jail, and watches a male vN give birth to a baby -- all in the first couple of chapters.  Amy also contends with bounty hunters and rapidly emerging breasts while trying to ignore Portia’s ever-present nagging voice, which she has internalized for reasons that are (like many of the novel’s events) bizarre.  Later she meets up with a vN named Javier who has a history of giving birth to children before abandoning them.

At times vN has the flavor of a comic book, complete with a super-powered heroine.  There’s also an element of silliness -- maybe you could call it playfulness -- that pervades the story.  To some extent the story is a family drama, albeit one in which most members of the featured families (Amy’s and Javier’s) are mechanical.  To some extent the novel is a love story.  It is in part an action/adventure story, in part a comedy, in a part a science fiction story that is light on the science.  For all its strangeness -- including an ending that, like the rest of the story, I would never have predicted -- there is a poignancy that breaks through in the final chapters and comes to dominate everything else.  I was uncertain how I felt about vN in the novel’s first half, but it grew on me as the story progressed and as I came to appreciate the characters.

vN follows memes that are commonplace in science fiction:  whether intelligent sentience entitles a humanoid to human rights; whether freedom is simply the ability to say no.  It expands the last question in an interesting way by asking whether freedom for an AI is the ability to harm a human.  On the other hand, perhaps true freedom (for human and humanoid alike) is the ability to experience joy -- or love.

vN also touches on serious issues not frequently addressed in science fiction, including pedophilia and the perils of democracy (at least when tyrannical decisions are made democratically by vN).  Still, this isn’t a story that a reader is encouraged to take too seriously.  It is enjoyable, lively, and sweet, with just enough profundity to make the story worth thinking about after the fun ends.

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Broken Harbor by Tana French

Published by Viking on July 24, 2012

A family of four, attacked in their Broken Harbor home. The parents stabbed, the children suffocated. The Murder Squad assignment goes to veteran Dublin detective Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy, partnered with rookie detective Richie Curran. Oddities at the crime scene include unexplained holes in the walls, a plethora of baby monitors, and a large animal trap in the attic. Before the novel's midpoint, it seems that a meticulous investigation has solved the crime, but life isn't that easy for Scorcher. The second half is strange and a little creepy (in a good way). While Broken Harbor works as a whodunit, it shines as a psychological thriller, an intense examination of the internal makeup not just of a murderer, but of murder suspects and the detectives who try to understand them.

In the universe of police procedurals, Broken Harbor stands apart. Everything about the novel feels authentic, from the detailed descriptions of evidence collection and blood splatter analysis to the subtle interaction of the characters. What seems tedious in similar novels is tense and immediate in Broken Harbor. Tana French keeps the story simmering in the first half, before slowly turning it up to a full boil. The smooth partnership that develops between Scorcher and Richie risks coming undone as Richie points out inconvenient problems with the airtight case Scorcher believes they've developed against their prime suspect.

Scorcher is opinionated and his opinions are far from politically correct. At the same time, he has a realistic view of crime and its victims. He views compassion as a liability that impedes dispassionate investigation. He has the same opinion of children ("they turn you soft"). His life is complicated by a sister who is about a half step removed from psychosis -- a more original character than the brooding wife or bitter ex-wife found in most police procedurals. His childhood is dominated by a melodramatic incident that at least serves to explain his brusque personality.

Scorcher's opinions make him interesting but his differences of opinion with Richie make the novel work. Scorcher thinks he has life all figured out, believes he understands how the world works, but Richie brings a different, conflicting perspective. Richie, unlike Scorcher, feels compassion for both victims and suspects, a difference that leads to a fascinating argument about right and wrong in the context of the case they are investigating.

In fact, apart from the curiosity the story arouses concerning whatever was going on in the attic and who the murderer might be, the evolving relationship between Scorcher and Richie is the key to the novel's success. Most of the novel's tension derives from their quarreling about the killer's identity, and the tension escalates late in the story when their lives become a tangled mess. It's not often that a thriller writer manages to combine an intriguing plot with strong, fully-textured characters, but French pulled it off.

French turns some nice phrases (a woman means to give Scorcher "an imposing stare but came off looking like an electrocuted pug dog"), but her eloquent prose is never so showy as to distract from the plot. The story maintains a steady but unhurried pace, reflecting an investigation that is urgent but careful. The ending is sad but satisfying -- very satisfying. In short, for fans of thrillers that derive their entertainment value from human drama rather than explosions and shootouts, Broken Harbor is a winner. 

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Disappeared by Anthony Quinn

Published digitally by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media on July 24, 2012 

Disappeared takes place in Northern Ireland in the aftermath of the Troubles.  For all the political intrigue that gives the novel its foundation, Disappeared focuses on a handful of characters engaged in a quest for the truth.  On a slightly larger scale, it is the story of citizens in a divided country striving to recover from events that tore apart their lives, their families, and their nation.

Oliver Jordan, an IRA member suspected of being a police informant, disappeared in 1989, the presumed victim of a kidnapping and murder.  Seventeen years later, Joseph Devine, a retired legal clerk and former police informant, is murdered.  Father Aiden Fee follows directions to the body and prays for Devine’s soul, as he does for all the informers in his parish who end up dead.  Inspector Celcius Daly, pondering the motive for Devine’s murder, finds himself wondering if the death is connected to the recent disappearance of retired Special Branch undercover agent David Hughes, an elderly man who suffers from dementia.  He finds another connection in the person of Malachy O’Hare, a firebrand solicitor who has made a career of representing IRA members.

The story begins to take shape when the reader learns the unusual circumstances under which Devine’s obituary was published.  The questions that Daly pursues are those that puzzle the reader.  Was Jordan killed because he was an informer or was he, as his widow insists, loyal to the IRA?  What does Jordan’s son, Dermot, know about his father’s past?  Why did Special Branch cover-up the details of Jordan’s disappearance?  What is the significance of Devine’s collection of antique duck decoys, to which the story makes frequent reference?  Are the ghosts that visit Hughes real or imagined?  The questions are answered in a convincing, tightly-plotted story.

While Disappeared has the elements of a mystery, it isn’t much of a detective story.  The novel’s greatest weakness is the information dump that comes as the story nears its conclusion.  The circumstances of Oliver Jordan’s fate are revealed not through detection but in a rambling (and rather improbable) confession that seems to come out of the blue.

To a surprising extent, the novel hinges on information more than emotion.  Despite the human drama that is at the story’s core, I felt detached from it all.  Like Dermot, I had an interest in learning the truth about his father’s disappearance, yet I cared little about the novel’s characters.  A couple of characters who initially appear to be central to the story all but disappear by the novel’s end, while the others failed to resonate with me.

Despite my failure to connect with the story on an emotional level, I enjoyed reading Disappeared.  Anthony Quinn peppers his prose with clever phrases and creates vivid images of the Irish countryside.  The ending is disappointing:  a belated attempt to turn the novel into a thriller is weak, and quite a bit is left unexplained.  When one of the characters tells Daly that he’ll have to live with a bit of uncertainty, that lesson might just as well be directed at the reader.  Notwithstanding those concerns, the engaging plot and colorful prose make Disappeared worth reading.

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