The Innocent by David Baldacci

Published by Grand Central on April 17, 2012

As The Innocent opens, Will Robie is carrying out a mission for his Agency masters.  He assassinates a man (and his four ultra-evil bodyguards) who is planning a military coup in Mexico that will create a government hostile to American interests.  This is followed by the rather improbable assassination of a Saudi prince.  Robie doesn’t let himself be bothered by his assignments, but he finds himself with a dilemma when he’s ordered to kill a nearly middle-aged woman in D.C., particularly when he discovers (after breaking into her apartment) that she’s the mother of two, including the infant sleeping next to her, and a U.S. government employee to boot.  The dilemma is resolved when Robie’s handler shoots mother and child from a distance and attempts to take out Robie in the process.

After this dramatic opening, the story takes a strange twist when Robie, who is now the target of the government he once served, hooks up with a fourteen-year-old girl named Julie whose parents have been murdered.  They barely survive the explosion of a bus on which they had been riding.  Who was the target:  Robie or Julie?  What, if any, is the connection between the woman Robie was sent to kill and Julie’s parents?  Many gun battles and explosions later, the answer to those questions remains unclear.  That’s what held my attention to the end of this fast-moving novel.

I wouldn’t call the plot byzantine, but it is deliciously complex.  To my amazement, every plot thread (even an incident or two I didn’t expect to be important to the overall plot) comes together in the final chapters. The story covers a lot of ground and introduces a gaggle of supporting characters, ranging from Gulf One army buddies to traitorous FBI agents, from the retired assassin who is Robie’s mentor to the White House political analyst who becomes his romantic interest.  Robie can’t trust anyone, including the FBI agent with whom he is partnered (another potential romantic interest for the studly Robie).  None of the characters are given great depth but they seem real, and that’s enough in a story that is driven by plot rather than character.

David Baldacci’s prose style is punchy and efficient.  Short sentences and single-sentence paragraphs during action sequences contribute to The Innocent’s blistering pace.  There are times, particularly in the final chapters, when Baldacci succumbs to melodrama.  Since the story continues to be engaging, that is a forgivable sin.

This is a dual climax thriller.  The novel seems to be moving toward a particular scene, but when that scene occurs, there are still many pages left.  That scene borders on the preposterous and the unmasking of a key bad guy -- clearly intended as a shocker -- is disappointingly obvious.  The second and final climax is unsurprising but satisfying.

With all the action, suspense, and mystery that Baldacci provides, The Innocent will probably appeal to a Hollywood producer, particularly since brash, snarly fourteen-year-old girls always make appealing movie characters.  Thriller fans don’t need to wait for Hollywood; The Innocent ran like a movie in my imagination as I was reading it.

RECOMMENDED

Happy Birthday, Turk! by Jakob Arjouni

First published in German in 1987; published in translation by Melville House on February 15, 2011

The Ergün family is troubled.  Vasif Ergün emigrated to Germany from Turkey and worked as a garbage collector before he became involved with some shady characters.  After his death, his son-in-law, Ahmed Hamul, followed in Vasif’s questionable footsteps.  Vasif’s wife is the backbone of the family.  Vasif's son Yilmaz is bitter that his father preferred the company of Hamul.  Vasif’s daughter Ayse has problems of her own, problems that other family members try to hide.

Now Hamul has been stabbed to death, his corpse unceremoniously dumped behind a brother.  The police aren’t excited about the death of a Turk, so Hamul’s widow, Ilter, turns to private investigator Kemal Kayankaya to find her husband’s killers.  Kayankaya’s investigation is hampered by uncooperative family members, unhelpful police officers, and sinister figures who threaten his welfare.

Happy Birthday, Turk!, the first of Jakob Arjouni’s Kayankaya novels, is a fine example of German noir.  Kayankaya is a hard-drinking, easily angered outcast, an orphaned Turk who, although raised as a German citizen, endures the daily bigotry of Germans who don’t like his dark skin and non-Aryan features.  Kayankaya’s intelligence and biting wit do nothing to ingratiate him with his fellow Germans -- not that he tries to win friends.  More often, he tries to win fights with his powerful fists.

The plot of Happy Birthday, Turk! is tight and filled with twists that are interesting if not entirely surprising.  The pace is swift.  I admire writers of crime fiction who don’t waste words.  Arjouni captures people and locations (and food) in a few perfect sentences.  A waiter:  “He reminded me of a gay hippopotamus.”  A living room:  “All it needed was an open drain, and the place could have been cleaned with a garden hose.”  Arjouni isn’t Raymond Chandler, but he has his own distinctive style.  Happy Birthday, Turk! isn’t my favorite Kayankaya novel, but it is a strong start to an excellent (if short-lived) series.

RECOMMENDED

Rain Dragon by Jon Raymond

Published by Bloomsbury on April 24, 2012

As I was reading Rain Dragon, I often wondered what the story was about.  It begins as an account of a couple trying to drift into a better life, then evolves into a description of a corporate counter-culture, then hints at a failed (or failing) relationship before turning into a disquisition on advertising and marketing strategies.  Large chunks of the novel read like a primer for progressive business management -- enlightening, but not really the stuff of a successful novel.  Finally, right at the end, Rain Dragon turns into a human drama, but by then it’s too late for the novel to establish an identity.

Damon and Amy decide to leave behind the trendy world of LA to “go north” in the hope of remaking their lives in the alt-trendy environs of Oregon.  They want to work at the Rain Dragon farm, an organic operation that makes yogurt, grows flowers, produces its own honey, and allows its people to indulge the belief that they are contributing to “an alternative society based on principles of sustainability and justice, counteracting all the self-destructive drives that humanity had blindly adopted since the industrial era and the onset of the consumer society.”  Rain Dragon’s CEO, Peter Hawk, also does some motivational training and consulting in business development and management.  To become paid employees at Rain Dragon, Damon and Amy will have to serve a volunteer apprenticeship for an undefined time, until they can prove their value to the organization.  Amy takes to the place naturally, fitting in well as an assistant beekeeper, but Damon can’t find a niche.  The role he finally adopts brings him closer to Hawk but seems to drive him away from Amy.

The story is told in the first person from Damon’s perspective.  Amy eventually falls into the background with the other secondary characters.  That didn’t bother me because Amy is incredibly annoying -- the kind of nightmare who manufactures turmoil because she isn’t comfortable with a serene relationship -- although in that sense she is a realistic character.  In fact, all the characters in Rain Dragon seemed real to me, although none were particularly appealing.  I don’t need to like the characters in order to enjoy a novel, but I do need to be interested in them.  Rain Dragon’s characters love to natter on about the nature of the world but their personalities are just too colorless to compel attention.

Jon Raymond’s writing is of such a high quality that I feel I should have liked Rain Dragon more than I did.  The discussion that Peter Hawk has with the CEO of a paper company about different business models -- Hawk wants employees to self-actualize, the CEO just wants them to work a little harder -- is fascinating, but it doesn’t create the kind of dramatic tension that makes a novel memorable.  When the drama finally arrives, the novel is nearly over, and so was my interest.  The big moment toward which the story builds is utterly predictable.  More troubling is that when it finally arrived, I just didn’t care.  Rain Dragon has its moments, but not enough moments to earn a strong recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Viral by Jim Lilliefors

Published by Soho Press on April 10, 2012

Every thriller set in Africa must, it seems, include in its cast a tough-minded female doctor doing humanitarian work. In Viral, that role is played by Sandra Oku. She watches dozens of villagers die during the course of a morning, victims of a mysterious and fast-acting respiratory disease. As the disease spreads through the village and to surrounding farms, Sandra realizes that this is the threat of which her cousin, the journalist Paul Bahdru, had warned her, albeit in vague terms. Days after that conversation, Bahdru is scheduled to meet with private intelligence analyst Charles Mallory. As Charles waits for Bahdru to appear, a package is delivered to Charles containing Bahdru's head. When Charles fails to keep a telephonic appointment with his brother Jon (having hinted that he will provide Jon with a big story for Jon's weekly news publication), Jon goes to Africa in search of Charles, who in turn wants Jon to be witness to a tragic story that needs to be told. Another witness is, of course, Sandra Oku. There weren't supposed to be any witnesses, she tells Jon, so it isn't surprising when witnesses start to die.

And so the stage is set for the reader to guess at the exact nature of the threat -- a revelation that comes a little more than halfway through -- and to guess how Jon and Charles will defeat the bad guys. They are the main characters; Sandra and many other characters weave in and out of the story's fabric but play secondary parts. This isn't a medical thriller; we hear some familiar information about how a virus might be created and defeated, but the focus is on the two brothers, not on doctors or microbiologists.

Much of the story has a familiar feel. It differs in key respects from spreading-virus novels like Outbreak, from bioterrorism novels like The Cobra Event, and from corporate conspiracy novels like Contagion, but Viral blends in elements of each. It also echoes classic Ludlum thrillers in which the people who can help the hero die before they get the chance. The apparent goal of the bad guys' scheme is one I haven't seen in other thrillers, although thriller writers like to employ misdirection. In this case, it's a temptation that should have been resisted. What seems like an unusual and inventive story turns into one that is all too ordinary. Even before that plot twist appeared, the story had such a derivative feel that I couldn't get excited about it. The story cruises to a predictable but entertaining conclusion, although the last quarter of the novel is longer than it needs to be.

The best subplot involves manipulation of the media. I particularly liked the comparison of news stories to viruses that spread out of control. Cryptology fans will enjoy the ciphers that Jon must puzzle out. I thought his ability to do so was a bit of a stretch, and I was never convinced that Charles wouldn't have simply called Jon rather than playing cipher games, but most modern thrillers ask the reader to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good story. In that regard, the most difficult thing to accept is that Jon can pass for an African by wearing dark brown make-up while he labors all day under the hot sun.

Neither the good guys nor the bad guys have unique personalities; they are wooden creations that exist only to drive the plot. James Lilliefors' writing style is clean and competent and most of the novel moves quickly. Parts of the novel work quite well, but the attempt to reconceive it in the final chapters falls flat, in part because too much chitchat stalls the story's momentum. An attempt to jump-start the action again in the final pages was welcome but belated. In short, this is a likeable but flawed thriller.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

August is a Wicked Month by Edna O'Brien

First published in 1965; published in digital format by Open Road Media on April 3, 2012

Ellen Sage (an Irish woman living in London) has been separated from George for two years. Their son shuttles between their homes. George is taking their son on a camping trip. Although Ellen turns down George's invitation to accompany them because there will be "nothing to fill the hours of treachery between them," she is having difficulty adjusting to life without him. A week later a man shows up at Ellen's door complaining about his mistress. Although Ellen has met the man only once, they spend the day (and then the night) together. As she longs for him in the ensuing days, she thinks it was wicked of him "to renew her life for an evening when she had resigned herself to being almost dead." In a desperate mood, Ellen buys "freedom clothes" and travels to France in search of men who will provide temporary respites from her frustration. Despite her "humiliation in the presence of perfectly formed people" and her indifference to the Mediterranean's beauty, she soon finds herself in the company of an American actor and his entourage. The story takes off from there.

August is a Wicked Month provides an insightful look at a woman who is learning (or relearning) how to live her life. Cycling between ecstasy and joylessness, Ellen struggles to reclaim a sense of purpose, of dignity and freedom. It is a cliché to say that she is finding herself but Ellen is clearly on a quest for self-discovery. Of course, at the end of such journeys we don't always like what we discover.

To a surprising extent, Ellen is sexually adventurous (surprising only because this 1965 novel takes place at a time when attitudes about casual sex were still evolving, when -- as Ellen notes -- female chastity was still the ideal), perhaps because she feels a need for the intimacy that disappeared from her life even before her separation. To her dismay, her adventures are mostly flops. When Ellen proclaims August to be "the wicked month," she is being ironic, "thinking of her own pathetic struggles toward wickedness."

"Sage means wise or something like that" Ellen says of her name, and while it's true that Ellen gains some wisdom during the month of August, her insights are not entirely positive. They are, in fact, rather depressing, although Ellen does learn (in a painful way) to see beyond her illusions. Readers who like sunshiny stories with happy endings should avoid this novel. A tragic (perhaps wicked in a different sense) event toward the end of the novel forces a further reassessment of Ellen's life. Although that aspect of the novel veers toward strangeness, it also acts as a reminder that people grieve and heal in different ways. At the very least, it feels authentic; Ellen is an odd but entirely believable person.

Edna O'Brien's prose ranges from light and melodic to dark and dense. She shapes sentences that are unusual but memorable. On several occasions the narrative jumps to a different place or time without making an obvious transition, a jarring technique that causes unnecessary confusion. In most other respects, I admired O'Brien's writing style. O'Brien provides enough detail to establish the scene and flesh out the characters but exercises enough restraint to avoid stating the obvious. The characters are both funny and sad, the story both amusing and disheartening. In that regard, the story reflects the joy and pain of life as focused through a lens that spotlights a lonely woman cast adrift. It isn't always easy to read a story like that, but August is a Wicked Month ultimately rewards the effort.

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