Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming

Published by Mysterious Press on November 7, 2023

Kennedy 35 is the third installment in Charles Cumming’s BOX 88 series of espionage novels. The protagonist, Lachlan Kite, is now the head of BOX 88, an off-the-books, ultra-secret organization that brings together agents from American and British intelligence agencies.

Kite is married but separated from his wife. He begins the novel in Sweden, where his wife is a physician who recently gave birth to his daughter. He hopes to spend several weeks with his family, perhaps repairing his relationship with his wife, but his plans change when he gets a message from Eric Appiah, a friend from Senegal who went to school with Kite. Appiah does some freelance work for BOX 88. If me wants to meet with Kite, the meeting must be important.

Having learned a lesson about trying to maintain a relationship while concealing the nature of his work, Kite tells his wife as much as he can about Appiah. His story takes him back to 1995. Kite was sent to Senegal with his girlfriend, Martha Raines, who was there to complete his cover as a backpacking tourist. He was to play a collateral role in a plan to kidnap Augustin Bagaza, a Rwandan Hutu who shared responsibility for the genocide of the Tutsi people. Bagaza is in Senegal with his Congolese Hutu girlfriend, Grace Mavinga, a woman who delighted in murdering the Tutsi. France was complicit in the genocide and may have an interest in protecting Bagaza to safeguard its shaky international reputation.

About half of Kennedy 35 follows Kite’s mission as he travels through dangerous cities, maintaining surveillance of Bagaza in anticipation that BOX 88 operatives will snatch him before he and Mavinga can flee the country. Kite’s role in the mission becomes more dangerous when Philippe Vauban, a French journalist with PTSD whose Tutsi girlfriend was murdered by Bagaza, suffers a psychotic episode and decides to embark on a mission of revenge.

Cumming crafts tense scenes as Kite moves from boring afternoons in a small Senagalese resort to the adrenalin rush of surveillance and tradecraft in the space of a few days. The story from 1995 ends with a shootout and Mavinga’s flight from the country.

The rest of the novel takes place in 2022, beginning with Kite’s contact with Appiah. An American writer/podcaster, Lucian Cablean, has tumbled to the story of Bagaza’s disappearance in 1995 and has heard rumors about Kite’s secret organization. To protect BOX 88, Kite meets with Cablean, learns of a friend’s death, discovers that Cablean has also been targeted, and tracks down Martha Raines and Mavinga. The second half of the novel is interesting but less compelling than the story set in Senegal.

The 1995 story works because Cumming has mastered the creation of atmosphere. The smells, sounds, and tastes of Dakar become part of the story, complete with potholes and noisy motorbikes and unreliable taxis, dance clubs populated by wealthy men and beautiful young hookers. Cumming also captures the pain of a genocide that American media barely reported. Some genocides are important to Americans and others involve victims who don’t have white skin.

While the novel’s second half features less action, Cumming does imagine a clever plan to protect the secrecy of BOX 88. While the novel is self-contained, the ending might be described as a cliffhanger, as it ends with Kite taking a disturbing telephone call that seems likely to upend his life. I didn’t need that incentive to look forward to Cumming’s next novel, as he has firmly established himself as one of the better spy novelists currently working in the genre.

RECOMMENDED

The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown by Lawrence Block

First published in 2022; published by Subterranean Press on October 31, 2023

Fredric Brown wrote pulp fiction from the 1930s to the 1970s. Lawrence Block is a prolific crime writer whose most productive years began in the 1970s, although he won most of his awards in the 1980s and 1990s. The burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr is one of his ongoing characters.

Bernie owns a used bookstore in Greenwich Village. He’s fortunate to own the building that houses the store so he doesn’t need to worry about rent increases. Bernie hasn’t burgled much in recent years because he can’t pick a digital lock and security cameras are everywhere.

One night, Bernie falls asleep reading Brown’s What Mad Universe, a 1949 novel about an alternative universe that predates the modern understanding of the multiverse. When Bernie wakes up, he finds himself in an alternate universe that is similar to his own but better. A couple of Greenwich Village businesses that closed are still operating. A fence who died long ago is still alive. Amazon doesn’t exist so his store is doing a brisk business. Security cameras and digital locks are mostly nonexistent. And his best friend Carolyn wants to have sex with him. In his universe, Carolyn is a lesbian; in this one, she still is but she has the hots for Bernie.

Bernie takes advantage of the changes to steal a famous diamond, unencumbered by digital locks and security cameras. The convoluted plot then introduces jade figurines that alternate Bernie may already have stolen, an insurance scam, a few murders (the victims seem to be from Alice in Wonderland), and a classic reveal in which multiple suspects gather in the bookstore so that Bernie can set things right before returning to his own universe.

While the novel’s dip into science fiction is a bit odd (Block dabbled in the genre in his early years but generally stuck to crime fiction), the story flows effortlessly. Block riffs on Candide’s notion about the best of all possible worlds. The novel’s message (Block spells it out to make sure the reader takes his point) is “If you want something badly enough, you’ll get it. And then you won’t want it anymore.” When we scratch an itch, the itch goes away. A corollary is that we don’t always know what we want until we get it.

The book is ultimately about friendship. I don’t know if it’s politically correct for two people to have a cisgendered relationship after a lifetime of feeling no sexual attraction because of their sexual identities, but Block is too old to give a crap about being politically correct. His point is that we are all free to scratch our itches, that it’s nobody’s business if we do, and that friends are allowed to mark and change the boundaries of their friendships without judgment. While this is the strangest of the Bernie Rhodenbarr novels I’ve read, it proves that Block, at the age of 85, still has worthwhile stories to tell.

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Distant Sons by Tim Johnston

 

Published by Algonquin Books on October 17, 2023

Distant Sons is the story of two young men following the same path, men who meet by coincidence or fate. They are both on the move, both trying but failing to leave their pasts behind, both uncertain they should allow that choice to be dictated by others. The crimes that underlie the plot — three boys who went missing forty years earlier, a women who has been dead ten years — lurk in the background, but the story’s suspense surrounds the choices the young men will make as they move forward with lives that have suddenly intertwined.

Sean Courtland is a carpenter. He has driven into Wisconsin from Minnesota when his car overheats. A man who gives him a ride to a mechanic tells him about an old man named Devereaux who needs a carpenter. Devereaux wants to build a first-floor laundry room because he’s become too old to walk up and down the basement stairs.

Sean gives Devereaux a call. He takes the job despite rumors that connect Devereaux to three boys who disappeared forty years earlier. Sean expects the project to take about a week but realizes he might need to help to get it done within that time frame.

Sean offers a ride to a young man named Dan Young. They chat a bit and Sean offers Dan a job helping with the plumbing on the Devereaux job. Dan left his truck in Minnesota after someone put a bullet hole in it. Dan is suspected of causing a woman’s death ten years earlier. The suspicion is probably unfounded, but who knows?

Dan notices something odd about the carpentry in the basement. Sean has noticed that Devereaux’s dog whines whenever someone goes into the basement. While this isn’t a supernatural thriller, Dan has visions that make him wonder whether Devereaux or his creepy uncle or both are responsible for crimes that have long gone unsolved.

Setting aside ancient crimes, Sean intercedes when he sees Blaine Mattis bothering Denise Givens, a waitress in a tavern where Sean has been eating his meals. Sean accidently smacks Denise’s face she he tries to punch Blaine but Denise tells the investigating officer that the blow was accidental. Sean ends up dating Denise and even does a small home renovation that will help her father navigate his wheelchair through a doorway. Denise gets a restraining order against Blaine but he isn’t the kind of guy who cares.

Distant Sons unfolds over the course of an eventful week. It is a bad week for both Sean and Dan, arguably a bad week for everyone whose lives intersect theirs. While Sean blames himself for being a harbinger of doom, Denise’s father reminds Sean of Shakespeare's observation about “wills and fates” that “contrary run.” Maybe Sean made life worse for some by coming to the small Wisconsin town where he meets Dan and Denise, but maybe he made life better for others. In the end, balancing good and bad is beyond Sean’s power. He can only do what he thinks is right and hope for the best.

Tim Johnston captures the quiet eloquence of capable men who feel deeply but say little, men who don’t vocalize their thoughts unless the effort of expression seems worthwhile. The mystery of the missing boys is ultimately resolved, but this isn’t a story about heroic efforts leading to a serial killer’s capture. It is a simpler story of people poking around the edges of mysteries, people whose lives are at risk for reasons they cannot reasonably anticipate. It is a powerful and surprising story of fates that run contrary to wills.

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A Stranger in the Citadel by Tobias S. Buckell

Published by Tachyon Publications on October 17, 2023

A Stranger in the Citadel is set on a human world of the far future, one that still recalls legendary names like Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Some more recent legends have become gods: Washtun (the god of honesty and transparency, in whose honor cherry trees are planted); Elv (who is honored by music festivals and blue suede shoes). Much knowledge of the past has been lost, largely due to the destruction visited by the archangels.

The story begins within the walled city of Ninetha. The Lord Musketeer protects and rules the city with the help of his musketeers, although he is clearly protecting the interests of the affluent. His ancestors likely built the wall so that the blessings of the Cornucopia — a machine attributed to divinity that manufactures medicine and food and most other things people might want, apart from weapons— are kept from the peasants, who eat a bland daily diet called vittle.

The musketeers are purportedly the children of the Lord Musketeer, but they are raised and trained by a warrior named Kira who is also a religious zealot. The religion’s most sacred principle is that books are evil, that writing is sinful, that “thou shalt not suffer a librarian to live.” People believe their ancestors made a contract with the gods — renounce books and you will not go hungry.

A librarian named Ishmael makes his way from New Alexandria to Ninetha, carrying his library on his back, hoping to gain and spread knowledge. He is captured and is about to be killed when Lilith, the youngest muskatress, intervenes. Her desire for mercy is sacrilegious to Kira but Lilith knows a secret that even Kira doesn’t know — her father has a book.

Lilith’s knowledge eventually sparks a religious revolution that brings down her ruling family. Much of the novel consists of Lilith in flight, following Ishmael to the top of the world, pursued by Kira and later by a slow but relentless archangel. Lilith finds that other communities resent Ninetha for keeping the benefits of its Cornucopia for the upper class. One community has adopted a power-sharing structure that causes Lilith to question the privilege with which she was raised.

The story of the archangels is a bit muddy, as is the novel’s ending. Perhaps the archangels are robot travelers from space who have their own religion to spread. The archangel’s explanation of a human death ritual is a bit puzzling.

Lilith is the kind of young protagonist whose mind is open to discovery, perhaps making her appealing to fans of YA fiction. The ignorant book banners who make parts of America deplorable might have inspired the novel, but the lessons Kira learns about books were made in more compelling terms by Bradbury, to whom the librarian alludes. Despite its worthy but not quite successful attempt to be something more, A Stranger in the Citadel works well as an adventure story in which a religion of banned books happens to form a background.

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The Exchange by John Grisham

Published by Doubleday on October 17, 2023

Mitch McDeere is the protagonist in John Grisham’s The Firm, a novel most readers seem to like more than I do (the movie, I thought, corrected the novel’s weak ending). Mitch McDeere is back in The Exchange, another novel that suffers from a disappointing ending.

Mitch and his wife fled from Memphis to avoid a revenge killing for bringing down a corrupt law firm — the story told in The Firm — and hid in Italy for a time. When the coast seemed clear, Mitch took a position in the New York office of the nation’s largest international law firm. Now it’s 2005, fifteen years after The Firm, and Mitch is a well-paid partner who travels the world litigating various business disputes, usually in an arbitration forum.

The firm’s Italian office represents a Turkish construction company that built a billion-dollar bridge over nothing in Libya, an ego-stroke project of Ghaddafi in which the dictator lost interest after the failure of a corresponding plan to divert a river so it would flow under the bridge.

Libya still owes the construction company $400,000 and isn’t paying. The head of the Italian office brought a claim against Libya in an international arbitration forum, but that lawyer is dying of cancer. He brings in Mitch to take over the case and persuades him to assign his daughter Giovanna, a young lawyer who works in the London office, to help him.

Mitch and Giovanna travel to Libya to rack up billable hours gazing at the  bridge. Giovanni is kidnapped on a field trip. The drivers and security specialists who accompanied her are beheaded or hung or otherwise executed in gruesome fashion.

Mitch is fortunate to have avoided the kidnapping/execution, but his convenient illness (doctors apparently never know why he alone got food poisoning, if that’s what it was) and his decision to send Giovanna to do his bridge gazing made little sense. I thought Grisham was setting up a deeper mystery that never materialized.

The novel begins with Mitch’s brief pro bono assignment to a death penalty appeal in Tennessee that ends when the prisoner commits suicide. I was hoping this might be a death penalty novel — that’s Grisham’s strength, in my view — but the opening quickly gives way to the story in Libya. I again thought Grisham was setting up a plot twist and the novel would circle back to Memphis. Again, I was disappointed.

Instead, the story is a fairly ordinary thriller about someone (maybe terrorists, maybe not) who kidnaps a dual citizen of the UK and Italy and threatens to kill her if a $100 million ransom isn’t paid. Mitch spends most of the novel flying here and there, trying to raise the ransom money from governments that pretend not to negotiate with terrorists but do so for the right hostage. Some of the novel’s best scenes involve Mitch’s frustration with the management committee of his law firm, which won’t risk taking out a line of credit to fund a large chunk of the ransom because that might reduce the firm’s quarterly profits.

Mitch’s wife becomes the contact point when the payoff instructions are delivered. The scenes involving Mitch’s terrified wife are tense and deftly executed.

Unfortunately, the rest of the novel feels like a half-told story. The kidnappers seem to know quite a bit about Mitch. Do they have a contact in his firm? Are they Americans seeking revenge for Mitch’s ratting out the Memphis firm? Who knows? Grisham seemed so set up several tantalizing possibilities, then leaves every question unanswered. The result is only a partially satisfying novel. I recommend The Exchange for its ability to build tension, but not for a story that feels like it should have been so much more.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS