Traitors Gate by Jeffrey Archer

Published by HarperCollins on September 26, 2023

For several novels (this one is number six), Jeffrey Archer has been following the stellar career of William Warwick as he has worked his way up the chain of command in London law enforcement. Warwick is a model of rectitude, a perfect officer who has a perfect marriage to a perfect wife and the smartest and most perfectly behaved children in all of England and thus the world. The ideal kids love learning British history because what could be more fascinating than knowing the year that William the Conqueror died? To be fair, British royalty is even more fascinating to every character in the novel. American readers might need to stifle a yawn at the various history lectures and Inside Royalty discussions that fill the pages while the plot pauses for a nap.

William becomes Chief Superintendent early in this novel, continuing his meteoric career ascension. He receives the news of his promotion while orchestrating the transportation of the crown jewels from the Tower of London to Parliament, where the Queen is about to give a boring speech. Readers who love the esoterica of British royal customs (I don’t know how many Americans are in that group) might enjoy all the gushing prose about Her Majesty’s performance of her royal duties. The fascination with the Queen is compounded by drooling descriptions of the red robes with white ermine worn by Lords, the Queen’s carriage, and all the other frivolity that accompanies British pomp and circumstance. Readers who have no interest in such pageantry can skip several sections of the novel. (Many will want to skip past the conversation that extolls the virtues of Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair takes office during the novel, but characters keep their opinions about Blair to themselves.)

As always, William turns to Detective Inspector Ross Hogan when he needs something shady done and doesn’t want to sully his reputation. As always, the story features courtroom scenes involving William’s father, a barrister with a rigid stick up him bum who usually prosecutes for the Crown but occasionally represents defendants on the condition that they are actually innocent. As always, Booth Watson is an unethical barrister who opposes William’s father while serving the interest of greed. As always, Watson’s greediest client is Miles Faulkner who, as always, is assisted in his efforts at grifting his by ex-wife Christina, unless he happens to be grifting Christina as he does in this novel, as always. At this point, an AI could probably write these novels, perhaps more creatively than Archer.

Courtroom theatrics are generally the best elements in the Warwick novels, although Archer muddles some of the details. In one trial, Williams’ father elicits testimony from Hogan that methamphetamine is more commonly known as ecstasy, when in fact they are entirely different drugs. One might think that a cop would know that, even if the elder Warwick is too busy hobnobbing with members of the upper class to be bothered with knowledge of the cases he prosecutes. In a different case, the narrative three times refers to a witness as the client of Watson when Watson is prosecuting. As a prosecutor, his client is the Crown, not the witness. These are the kinds of errors an editor should have noticed. Still, the central courtroom scene has the kind of Perry Mason gotcha questions that enliven courtroom dramas.

Watson starts off the novel by trying to pull a con on a widow, offering to underpay for her gallery before reselling it at a hefty profit to Miles. William’s wife Beth intervenes to save the widow. Beth is an art dealer but has been invited to apply as the director of a prestigious art museum where she once worked. Beth’s business partner Christina is yet again looking to undercut Beth, making her the worst friend in history and raising questions about Beth’s inability to see what a wretch she’s chosen for a BFF.

Miles keeps getting released (or escaping) from prison so that William can lock him up again. His grand scheme in this novel — well, I mentioned the crown jewels, so you can guess his criminal goal. Another subplot involves Miles’ switch of a real Rubens for a forgery that was donated to the museum where Beth is about to be reemployed. Naturally William wants to switch it back, notwithstanding that the original is now in Miles’ Manhattan apartment. This segment of the novel feels like a space filler, given the recurring theme of Miles and Christina exchanging forged paintings for real ones throughout the series.

The crown jewels caper is less a theft (because what pawn shop will pay a fair price for the crown jewels?) and more an opportunity to embarrass William. There is little suspense as William finds ways to thwart Miles’ various criminal schemes, but the crown jewels plot is at least more original than the switched paintings. In another moderately interesting subplot, Miles tries to set up Hogan for attempting to influence a juror in the drug case by shagging her during the trial. William is certain that Hogan would shag the woman if given the opportunity but is confident that Hogan would wait until after the verdict. It’s good to have friends who understand your virtues and weaknesses.

I suppose there is a final book in this series upcoming, as William has not yet been given the top job. Miles will presumably be released from prison to torment William yet again. I’m recommending this book because readers who haven’t read the other books in the series might not be bored by this one, but I hope Archer soon finds less tedious characters to write about.

RECOMMENDED

The Caretaker by Ron Rash

Published by Doubleday on September 26, 2023

The Caretaker is an unconventional story of love and loss. It combines a domestic drama with a war story, yet the loss is occasioned by lies rather than battlefield violence.

After their two daughters died, Daniel and Cora Hampton should have been kind to their son Jacob despite his instinct to rebel against their controlling nature. Instead, they disinherited him after he eloped with Naomi Clarke, a 16-year-old hotel maid. Naomi did not satisfy their small town standards of propriety.

After Naomi became pregnant, Jacob was drafted and sent to Korea. Jacob’s parents refused to look after Naomi so the task fell to Jacob’s friend Blackburn Gant, the caretaker at the local cemetery. Jacob and Naomi live in North Carolina but, after a confrontation with Daniel while Jacob is still in Korea, Naomi returns to her parents’ home in Tennessee to give birth.

Ron Rash takes the time to develop detailed backstories for the central characters. They all suffer from poor parenting. We learn how Blackburn’s parents disregarded his polio symptoms and made him work in the fields until he fell, clenching the soil with his fists for an hour, barely able to breathe until his father found him. He can walk with a bit of a limp but his facial muscles droop. Rash conveys Blackburn’s feeling of helplessness as he is stricken, followed his sense of shame at his appearance.

Naomi’s parents wanted her to marry a man who would help them with their farm. They made her drop out of school in third grade and were distressed when she left home to work in a motel. Naomi is sympathetic because, despite having little control over her life, she perseveres.

Daniel and Cora wanted Jacob to finish college and take over the family store. We see Jacob thriving at manual labor in the family sawmill because his father thought he would gladly return to college after spending the summer performing grueling work. Daniel didn’t understand that Jacob preferred work that tired his body, not his mind. He was made foreman before the end of the summer.

This is a story of parents who don’t listen to their children, who expect them to accept a dictated path rather than making their own lives, who treat children as property. It is ultimately a story of parental selfishness. When we think of evil people, we think of violence. Daniel and Cora Hampton do not behave violently but they are the personification of evil. Naomi’s parents are little better.

Jacob sees and causes death in the war. Rash describes Jacob’s most traumatic war moment in vivid detail. Jacob survives his wounds and holds on in anticipation of reuniting with Naomi and his child when he comes home. Losing that opportunity convinces him that he has lost everything. Naomi’s sister remarks that “the heart’s full knowing came only with loss.” Jacob wonders whether love is strongest after it can no longer be shared.

This review has danced around the plot. It’s impossible to explain why The Caretaker is so good without giving away the surprise that drives the story. To avoid saying too much, I can only reveal that Jacob, Naomi, and Blackburn are all devastated by a scheme that serves only the selfish interests of Daniel and Cora. Naomi’s father becomes an accomplice to the scheme when he learns of it.

The story seems to move toward an inevitable climax yet when the moment arrives, it takes a sharp turn, one that is foreshadowed yet (at least to me) unexpected. The novel’s final moments offer Blackburn a difficult choice, one that invites him to be just as selfish as the worst characters yet a choice that, in the logic of the novel, might serve everyone by setting multiple lives on a better course. What choice will Blackburn make? This is the kind of novel that invites readers to think about the choice that they would make. From strong characterization to an original plot to searing moments of drama, The Caretaker is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

RECOMMENDED

Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop

First published in France in 2021; published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 19, 2023

Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story combined with an adventure story, set in the eighteenth century when adventures were still possible and when interracial love was often viewed as an abomination.

The story begins in the third person. Michel Adanson is old and nearing death. He made an academic career as a botanist. To the exclusion of everything else in his life, including marital happiness and a relationship with his daughter Aglaé, he has devoted himself to cataloging the various plants, shellfish, and animals he has encountered on his travels. His hope to publish a 20-volume encyclopedia of nature has been dashed, in part due to lack of interest among academic publishers.

About six months before his death, a broken femur inspires the revelation that over the course of time, Michel’s work will be forgotten, supplanted by “the eternal churn of human beings crashing over one another like waves” that would “bury him under the sands of his ancient science.” What suddenly seems important to Michel is “to figure in the memory of Aglaé as himself and not merely as some immaterial, ghostly scholar.”

To that end, Michel composes the story of an episode that shaped his life, a personal history that he has never shared. He hides the story in a desk, anticipating that Aglaé will care about him enough to decode his clue and find it. She does. The story helps her understand why her father’s last word was “Marak.”

Aglaé’s own story is that of a young woman who craved but did not receive her father’s attention. Her mother forced her into an unwise, short-lived marriage before her second husband, despite his absence of passion, gave her two children during another doomed marriage. Aglaé has come to believe that love and happiness exist only in romantic fiction. It is in this state of mind that Aglaé discovers the notebooks that contain her father’s story. I was disappointed that we do not learn more about Aglaé's reaction to the notebooks after she reads them. She is an important character until she disappears from view.

The novel’s greater focus is on the two stories that Aglaé discovers. One is Michel’s written account of his trip to Senegal when he was a young man in pursuit of botanical knowledge. Guided by Ndiak, son of the king of the Waalo, Michel hears about a revenant named Marak Sek who returned to Africa after being sold into slavery. It turns out that Marak is very much alive, not the walking dead. By coincidence or fate, Marak meets Michel after he falls ill.

The other story is Marak’s, told in the first person to Michel who recounts it in his notebooks. Marak survived two attempted rapes, escaped her confinement, was found and nurtured by a tribal healer, and has taken the healer’s place. While she does not live in her uncle’s village, she accepts the risk that he will find her and return her to the slave trader from whom she escaped. Her uncle’s reputation might be at risk if she is free to reveal his attempted incest.

Marak’s story is filled with harrowing moments. Enraptured by Marak’s beauty and fighting spirit, Michel falls in love with her. Perhaps he feels lust more than love. He denies that he is governed by desire, but the novel does little to explain what other qualities inspire Michel's love. In any event, their relationship propels the adventure story when Marak’s village turns out to be less safe than she had hoped.

Ndiak is the story’s philosopher. He talks about the “what if” moments in life that determine events. What if Michel had been taken to a different village when he fell ill? The chain of events that determined Michel’s and Marak’s lives would have been very different. Those events also change Ndiak’s life by inspiring him to understand the evil that is perpetrated when his fellow Africans sell each other into slavery.

By the end of his stay in Senegal, Michel discovers that European plants adapt nicely to Senegalese soil. Rather than enslaving Africans and exporting them to America, it would have been more profitable to pay Africans to grow sugar at home. Yet Michel knows that nobody wants to disturb the profits generated by the slave trade. Michel feels shame that he does not take an active role in clarifying the economics of slavery. He feels similar shame that, after returning to France, he did not confess his love of a Black woman. As a product of his times, Michel is not an exemplary character, but readers might appreciate his capacity for interracial love and his occasional spark of decency.

For reasons I won’t reveal, Michel’s life moves forward without Marak. The grief of loss cements his dedication to science as an alternative to heartache. He tries to forget but the novel suggests that the heart remembers what the mind chooses to ignore. Michel’s love story proves to be tragic in multiple ways, but an event near the end of his life proves that powerful memories may be suppressed but never forgotten. A work of art, a piece of music, can have “the power to reveal to ourselves our secret humanity.”

The final chapter makes clear that even if the significance of our lives and memories might be lost on others, they are nevertheless important. Michel’s story might be of no consequence to anyone but himself and perhaps Aglaé, yet the novel reminds us that listening to stories of others helps us understand our own lives. Integrating those stories into our own memories and sharing them contributes to a collective understanding of humanity. David Diop makes those points with subtlety in a story that is always interesting, sometimes exciting, and occasionally moving.

RECOMMENDED

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Published by Tor Books on September 19, 2023

Starter Villain is more a crime/conspiracy novel than a science fiction novel, but John Scalzi writes science fiction so it needed an sf hook. Which is, talking cats.

Scalzi has written dramatic science fiction that is notable for its pathos. Some of his work is lighter. Starter Villain is meant to amuse. It made me smile consistently. I even laughed out loud a couple of times, but it’s not the kind of work that puts a reader through a gamut of emotions.

Scalzi focuses the novel on a decent man who happens to like cats, probably a man who is a lot like Scalzi. Charlie Fitzer is unlike Scalzi in that Fitzer lost his career as a writer — a journalist who covered the business world — when the economy tanked. Fitzer is working as a substitute teacher and falling behind on his bills. His father bequeathed his childhood home to a trust for Charlie and his half-siblings but gave Charlie the right to live in the home provided he paid the insurance and utilities. His half-siblings believe their father’s intent was that Charlie should get back on his feet before the house is sold out from under him. They are irked that Charlie is making insufficient progress toward that goal.

Charlie has a wealthy uncle he hasn’t seen since the uncle had a falling out with his father at his mother’s funeral when he was five years old. Charlie learns from watching a financial network broadcast that his uncle has died. His uncle’s assistant, a woman named Mathilda Morrison, shows up unexpectedly to tell him that he’s in charge of his uncle’s funeral. Charlie responds dutifully. The only other people who show up at the funeral are the designees of wealthy criminals (think oligarchs) who want to stab the uncle’s corpse to make sure he isn’t faking his own death (again).

After someone blows up Charlie’s house, Mathilda explains that his uncle was a successful criminal. She provides temporary housing for Charlie and reveals that his cats have been genetically modified, enabling them to communicate by keyboard. Charlie’s uncle used modified cats to spy on his enemies, Charlie, and pretty much every important person who owns a cat.

Charlie is soon introduced to a criminal organization to which his uncle belonged, or joined and left, or never joined, depending on who is telling the story. Ian Fleming loosely based SMERSH on rumors of the organization and loosely based Blofeld and his cat on one of its members. The plot concerns the organization’s belief that Charlie, as successor to his uncle’s criminal enterprise, owes the organization billions of dollars because his uncle either stole property belonging to the organization or competed unfairly with its members or breached an agreement to tithe his profits to the organization. Charlie takes a casual approach to their demands but proves to be a smarter businessman than any of the criminals, all of whom have a sense of entitlement but no business sense at all.

While I prefer Scalzi when he’s telling stories with more drama than talking cats can provide, I can’t fault the entertainment value of his lighter fare. His novels are often a roadmap for how to behave decently even when surrounded by people who behave selfishly. Charlie is easy to like and Scalzi rewards the reader’s interest in the character. The plot is surprisingly coherent for a book that features talking cats and unionized dolphins. Starter Villain moves quickly, seasons a pleasant story with amusing moments, and reaches a satisfying resolution.

RECOMMENDED

The Traitor by Ava Glass

Published by Bantam on September 19, 2023

Emma Makepeace is a predictable spy novel heroine. She volunteers for dangerous assignments, expresses her displeasure when her bosses want her to play it safe, disregards their instructions when she feels she is the only one who can complete the mission, outfights thugs, and exposes the mole. The existence of a mole is one of the plot elements that makes The Traitor predictable, but nothing about the story is fresh.

Emma is in MI6. Despite her success in Alias Emma, she feels her gender is a barrier to the assignments she deserves. She begins the novel by trying to catch a Russian who is laundering money through a British bank. Emma is pulled off that project and tasked with figuring out why a low-level MI6 number cruncher was murdered. The investigation brings her to a Russian oligarch who is suspected of selling chemical weapons. She joins the staff of the oligarch’s yacht with the hope she will find evidence of those sales.

Emma follows the usual path of an undercover agent. She takes risks to search the oligarch’s yacht-office, dodges the suspicions of the oligarch’s security thug, and befriends (uses) the oligarch’s gorgeous, bored, drug-addled girlfriend. The oligarch eventually learns that Emma is a government agent. While MI6 blames that discovery on Emma’s tradecraft, Emma is convinced that someone sold her out to the oligarch. Hence, the obligatory mole.

Later in the novel, Emma befriends (uses) another oligarch’s girlfriend. This oligarch is the boss of the oligarch whose yacht she infiltrated. Emma thinks that surveilling him will let her discover the mole. Well of course it will, and of course Emma’s plan places her in grave danger.

Emma has almost no personality. Her complaints about not being taken seriously because of her gender are at odds with the important assignments she receives. She feels unappreciated because she has sacrificed any semblance of a personal life to serve king and country. Her last relationship fell apart because she couldn’t tell her boyfriend why she was always jetting off without notice. Although she bemoans her fate, Emma manages a spark of romance with another MI6 agent. This leads to cheesy sentences like “With Jon, though, everything felt possible” — sentences that would be at home in a romance novel.

Fortunately, the cheese is not overdone. Unfortunately, the plot — including the identity of the mole — is entirely predictable. Emma outfights large thugs with blows that are only vaguely described and occasionally stabs them with a tiny knife. The plot is mundane, the action is underdeveloped, and the compulsory mole subplot is so obvious that the reader will guess the mole’s identity well before the reveal. Had the mole been anyone else, I might have recommended the novel without reservations. I thought Ava Glass might at least try to surprise the reader, but she makes no effort at all.

While Glass has technical ability as a writer, she fails todeliver the suspense and credible action that spy novels require. The Traitor is at best a time-killer for spy fiction fans who are waiting for a better novel to give them their espionage fix.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS