Simply Lies by David Baldacci

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 18, 2023

Mickey Gibson is a mommy. Her father is a retired cop. Now she tracks assets on a computer for a private investigation firm. Her father is protective and scolds her when she takes risks because that’s how the formula for this kind of story works. And that’s about all you need to know about Gibson. It’s also about everything you’ll learn about Gibson from reading Simply Lies. She’s a stock character and David Baldacci makes no effort to add anything of interest to her off-the-shelf personality.

Gibson gets a call from someone at her firm who has never contacted her before. She’s instructed to travel to a house in a nearby Virginia city and inventory its contents, which are about to be seized by their client to satisfy debts. She’s told where to find a hidden key. When she uses the key to enter the home, Gibson finds a dead body.

The victim is Daniel Pottinger, an alias assigned to a mob accountant who was in witness protection until he disappeared. His wife also disappeared, perhaps because Pottinger killed her. His son and daughter, neither of whom had good thoughts about Pottinger, left witness protection when they turned eighteen and haven’t been seen since. Pottinger purchased the house where his body was found for five million, suggesting that he stole money from the mob and stashed it before entering witness protection. He may have been involved in other criminal enterprises.

Gibson calls the police. The lead detective soon learns that Gibson’s firm didn’t send her to the house. Gibson briefly becomes a murder suspect and is gets suspended from her job, giving her a motivation to find the person who dispatched her to find Pottinger’s body. That person is known to the reader as Clarisse. Her true identity is hidden from Gibson and the reader, but the reader knows that Clarisse had a connection with Gibson at some point in their intersecting lives. When they were both younger, Clarisse was jealous of Gibson for all the usual reasons.

Baldacci peppers in scenes of Gibson taking her kids to the park and dealing with their vomit to establish her credentials as a supermom. The scenes come across as set dressing. Given how often she hands the kids off to babysitters or her parents so she can do her detective work, parenting is at best her part-time job. It certainly isn’t the chore she makes it out to be. The window dressing is apparently a substitute for a personality that Gibson otherwise lacks.

Baldacci makes a point of telling us how much Gibson loves her kids and dad, so the formula requires her entire family to be threatened before the novel ends. That happens after two-thirds of the story has been told, the point in the formula at which tension should begin to mount.

Gibson is too good to be interesting. The evildoers are too evil — in multiple and thoroughly disgusting ways — to be interesting villains. The plot has credibility problems, but predictability is its larger failing. The unsurprising resolution of the central mystery — who is Clarisse? — is a bit of a yawner. I found myself not caring about the related mystery — why did Clarisse drag Gibson into the death of Pottinger?

The plot is muddied with bitcoin and NFTs and other contrivances to distract the reader from the story’s formulaic nature. A subplot involving a character who turns out to have an assumed identity adds a final contrivance that broke this reader’s back. An action scene at the end comes across as padding, as does a treasure hunt that depends on a silly cipher. Baldacci knows how to keep readers entertained as he spins his plates, but in the end I was left wondering why I’d watched plates spin for more than four hundred pages.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Calling Ukraine by Johannes Lichtman

Published by Simon & Schuster on April 11, 2023

I knew little about Ukraine until former president Trump tried to blackmail the country into making damaging statements about Biden in exchange for receiving military aid that Congress had already mandated. Even after Trump explained his “perfect” telephone call to Zelensky, I didn’t trouble myself to learn much about Ukraine. Zelensky changed that by forcing the world to understand and condemn Putin’s unlawful aggression. The setting of Calling Ukraine gives readers a chance to learn a bit more about Ukrainian culture, although the novel is far from a travel guide.

The “Calling” in the title refers not to Trump’s imperfect call but to a small call center in Lutsk. Davey, a college friend of John Turner, started a business that is similar to Airbnb, except it focuses on apartment buildings that already have hotel licenses. Davey hired a bunch of Ukrainian programmers to build the business because they’re smart and less expensive than American programmers. To save money, he decided to offer customer service from the same building that houses the programmers and hired a small team of English-speaking Ukrainians to deal with his angry customers. He discovered that the customer service agents don’t know how to set American customers at ease with the kind of small talk they expect. Davey wants to hire Turner to teach the agents the skills they need to communicate with Americans.

Turner has spent the eight years since college trying, with little success, to establish himself as a freelance journalist. Davey is offering a modest salary, but Turner can live like a king on almost nothing in Lvov. Feeling the need for a change in his life after losing his father, Turner takes the job. He initially notices that most Americans and Europeans in Ukraine are sex tourists who are attracted to the nation’s beautiful women. Then he realizes that the most useful Ukrainian language program is geared toward sex tourists, emphasizing phrases like “Would you like to have a drink with me?” and “I can give you money but not that much.”

Much of the story addresses Turner’s observation of Ukrainian people, who are more direct and less optimistic than Americans. He finds them to be friendly but not outgoing. They need help making small talk with customers because they don’t understand the point. Nor do they understand why “I can’t help you with that” or “You should have read the user agreement” are less appropriate responses than “I completely understand why you feel that way but I’m afraid I don’t have the authority to change the agreement you made with the company.” Turner doesn’t understand why Americans need small talk and obsequious responses, but he devises a strategy for coaching the agents in the fine art of bullshit.

Turner is attracted to an agent named Natalia. He doesn’t want to act on his desire because she’s married and a subordinate. In any event, Turner is avoiding relationships because he doesn’t want to come across as a sex tourist.

Natalia and her husband Anatoly happen to live in an apartment across from Turner’s. They have loud arguments. Sometimes the arguments end with Anatoly hitting Natalia. Turner doesn’t know how to deal with the violence. He wants to intervene but Natalia doesn’t want his help. Turner is told that the police won’t interfere. He finally hits upon a scheme that does not end well. Saying more would give away a plot that depends on the element of surprise.

Most of the story is told from Turner’s point of view. Since Turner engages with few Ukrainians and doesn't travel much, his observations of Ukraine are minimal and not particularly insightful. Johannes Lichtman doesn’t paint a detailed image of Ukraine, although he offers a quick take on the nation's history. Turner is invigorated by Zelensky’s election, given that Turner “tried to disengage from politics back home, as much as such a thing was possible, to get away from the doomy hopelessness of Trump’s America.” By discussing politics, Russia, life in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union, and life in Ukraine under Zelensky’s predecessor, Turner comes to appreciate some of the differences between Ukraine and the United States. As Natalia tells him, Americans get second or third chances, as many as they want. Ukrainians are lucky to get one.

The last and best part of the novel is told from Natalia’s point of view. Her grounding in reality contrasts with Turner’s American attitude that people can make the life they want. She isn’t an oligarch so she doesn’t expect to live an indulgent life. She’ll settle for a life that allows her to use her mind and to survive in reasonable comfort. She does not need to be in a perfect relationship but she does not want to be punched or choked by the man in her life. She’s a strong woman who makes unexpected choices that might not reflect well upon her character, but it would be difficult for a reader not to wish her well.

Calling Ukraine finds humor in an office setting and in the cultural ignorance of an American abroad. Both Turner and Natalia learn something about themselves. The story ends before Russia invades Ukraine, although the drums of war are beating.

A plot twist that might seem forced in a thriller is underplayed in Calling Ukraine and is all the more effective because it comes almost as an afterthought that explains a turning point in Natalia’s life. The balance between humor and drama, between Turner’s perspective and Natalia’s, makes it seem as if the reader has been treated to two different books blended into one. Neither story is satisfyingly complete, but this might be one of those times when it is best to leave the reader wanting more.

RECOMMENDED

Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling

Published by Atria Books on April 4, 2023

Camp Zero is a novel of climate change, sisterhood, survival, and the privilege that accompanies wealth. In the relatively near future, southern climates have become unbearable, forcing migration to the north. The true impact of global warming in the United States is only hinted at in a story that primarily focuses on northern Canada. We nevertheless learn that one American city — a new one, constructed to house wealthy Americans offshore to avoid the threat of rising sea levels — has prospered despite (or because of) climate change.

Damien Mitchell lives in the Floating City. He invented the Flick, a device that is wired into the brain to provide internet connectivity. Damien has not told the public of a long-term downside to using the Flick. Camp Zero might be sending a message about the downside of staring at smartphone screens all day long, but the damage caused by the Flick is measurable. Unfortunately, after Michelle Min Sterling introduces that story element, she does nothing with it. Doing nothing with story elements is a recurring issue in Camp Zero.

Rose is Damien’s client in the Floating City. Rose is a half-Korean sex worker whose true name is revealed in an anticlimactic moment late in the novel. Using the promise of a decent life for Rose’s mother as an inducement, Damien convinces Rose to travel to Dominion Lake in Canada, where a camp employs Diggers to dig holes in the frozen ground. Rose is instructed to use her talents as a working girl to spy on Meyer, the architect who believes he is building a new settlement for Americans who are fleeing from the climate crisis.

Rose joins five other sex workers who are collectively known as the Blooms. They are supervised by a woman named Judith who extracts their Flicks, a seemingly pointless exercise since Dominion Lake has no wireless connection. Whether the Blooms feel exploited or happy to have a job (or both) is unclear, as neither the sex workers nor Judith are developed in depth. Only two Blooms are of consequence to the plot. Rose’s background is presented as a sketch while Willow’s underdeveloped character ties into another part of the story. Since the Blooms eventually seize an opportunity to make a better life, a reader can infer that they are unhappy with their present lives, but the women are so insubstantial that I found it difficult to connect with their plight.

Dominion Lake was once an oil drilling town but jobs became scarce after the US finally banned oil. Life in Dominion Lake is primitive. The Blooms operate from an abandoned mall. Why the stores left so many goods behind when they closed is never explained.

Grant Grimley came from money. With the help of his parents, he survived a hurricane that devastated Manhattan, but his girlfriend was less fortunate, perhaps because Grant’s parents regarded her as unworthy. Grant went north, accepting an invitation to teach English at a newly built campus in Canada. The campus at Dominion Lake turns out to be something less than he expected. His students are Diggers who, with Meyer, are supposedly awaiting an influx of funding so they can build a bigger community. Why it was deemed wise to give Grant a useless job is never made clear.

The story of Dominion Lake is woven into the separate story of White Alice. White Alice is a research station within snowmobiling distance from Dominion Lake. Because it was once used as a military radar base, it supposedly establishes American sovereignty, giving the US a foothold in an area that has an untapped supply of rare earth elements. The White Alice story, compressed in time, begins before the Dominion Lake story but eventually catches up.

The all-female team at White Alice has replaced a team that either went mad or starved to death when its home base stopped resupplying the scientists. This was apparently an attempt to see how well scientists survive without food and fuel in the frozen wilderness. The result was predictable, leaving the reader to wonder why the experiment was carried out. That’s yet another question the story neglects to answer.

To assure that the experiment is not replicated, some of the new scientists visit Dominion Lake in a search for supplies. One of them comes back pregnant. They decide to make their own little colony at White Alice, collectively raising a baby who grows up to be a proficient raider as they steal oil and supplies from other towns. Sustaining the colony will require an influx of new blood — that is, new breeding stock. The men who might be suitable for the task meet varying fates.

Had the characters been given more depth, had the story addressed unanswered questions, Camp Zero might have been a strong entry in the growing subgenre of climate change science fiction. Sterling imagined interesting scenarios but did too little with them. While the story confronts the conflict between idealism and survival, its revelatory moment instructs us that “it’s a shit world, but it’s the only world we have.” As inspiration goes, that lesson is wanting. The novel did enough to hold my interest but not enough to realize its potential.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Insatiable Volt Sisters by Rachel Eve Moulton

Published by MCD x FSG Originals on April 4, 2023

The Insatiable Volt Sisters is a literary horror story. Unless the author is Mary Shelley, I’m not sure that “literary” and “horror” belong in the same sentence. Stephen King (to whom Rachel Eve Moulton seems to pay homage by naming a character Carrie) once argued that writers either create genre fiction or literature but not both. In later years, after sharpening his writing talent, King backed away from that position, but there is some truth to the suggestion that plot-focused genre fiction isn’t easily blended with literary fiction’s focus on character and setting and deep themes. Some writers perform that trick, but Moulton sacrifices the storytelling that horror fiction demands by focusing on her literary aspirations. In the end, Moulton uses the trappings of horror fiction to dress up a domestic drama that explores feminist themes. She never manages to create the buildup of dread that is essential to a good horror story.

The plot cycles between 2000 and 1989, although the reader learns much (maybe too much) about the early history of Fowler Island in Lake Erie. We are told at least twice that Eileen and Elizabeth Fowler, sisters who developed the power to communicate with each other without speaking, built the island’s downtown and roads, as well as the Island Museum. Elizabeth married Seth Volt, who dug a quarry and built a Victorian house that islanders call Quarry Hollow. Legend has it that Seth imprisoned Elizabeth in the house, separating her from her sister. They learned to communicate by telepathy to overcome their separation.

The half-sisters Henrietta (Henri) and Beatrice (B.B.) are descendants of Seth Volt. They were born two years apart to different mothers but were often mistaken for twins, perhaps because their mothers looked so much alike. Their father James, a reclusive poet who somehow made a living, apparently had a type. After Olivia Rose vanished, James knocked up Carrie and brought her to the island as his new wife. The sisters grew up in Quarry Hollow and know it to be haunted, perhaps by Oliva Rose, but not by her alone.

Fowler Island is where depressed women go to die. “The island feasts on female sadness. It licks it up like ice cream.” Women visit the island and disappear, perhaps by jumping (voluntarily or otherwise) into the quarry, which is now filled with water. The quarry is known to the Volt sisters as the Killing Pond. Nobody seems to care about the missing women. Their bodies are never recovered so they are quickly forgotten. Moulton seems to be making a heavy-handed argument that society in general doesn’t care about women, although in most places, when someone comes across a female foot that has been detached from its body, the police at least investigate. Not on Fowler Island.

The island devil, a “great big and dripping thing with leathery fins,” lives in the Killing Pond. Perhaps bodies never surface because they are consumed by the monster, apart from the stray foot. When, on occasion, “the essential part” of the monster walks on land, it can change its shape to suit its whims. The monster’s true identity is a barely concealed secret until Moulton decides to state the obvious.

The other key character is Sonia, the curator of the island museum who helps mop up the blood and feet when women disappear. Sonia helped James raise B.B. after Olivia Rose disappeared.

For reasons that are revealed near the novel’s end, Carrie separated from James without warning, leaving the girls to fear that she had disappeared like Olivia Rose. After she returned, the girls sensed that Carrie would leave James and made drama because they feared she would only take her biological daughter with her. Their scheme to remain inseparable ends with a transformative experience for Henri. The island is indifferent to the scheme because it has plans for the Volt sisters.

Early in the novel, in a chapter that takes place in 2000, B.B. finds her father’s body, minus a part he seems to have shed. B.B. calls Henri to deliver the news. When Henri tells her mother that she will return for the funeral because B.B. needs her, Carrie reminds Henri that the island is “a magnet for trouble” and a “lighthouse for disaster.” Carrie eventually agrees to join Henri although she vows not to enter Quarry Hollow. Really, she should have known better. In any event, the Volt sisters are together once more.

The plot is all over the place. It combines a haunted house story with one of demonic possession while exploring sisterly relationships under extreme circumstances, failed marriages under extreme circumstances, and the disappearances of women who fled extreme circumstances. Themes of female despair and empowerment drive the novel. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to note that the ghosts who haunt the house are the residue of the women who died on the island. In death as in life, they are enslaved by toxic masculinity. Exactly why that is true is never addressed. It seems to be assumed that male demons feed on women because that's what men do.

The eventual show of strength displayed by the Volt sisters is a stretch, if only because their acquisition of girl power is unconvincing, even in a horror novel that demands suspension of disbelief. A late scene in which Carrie and Sonia overcome adversity by battling a devil while they’re underwater is just silly. So is the thought that ghosts of dead women urge a living woman who allies with them to “be strong” and “not to quit” until they transform the woman into “a lightning bolt of a girl.” You go, sisters! This is the kind of plot I might expect from a comic book. I just couldn’t take it seriously.

Because the novel is literary, Moulton devotes great attention to character development. Carrie and Sonia are collateral characters but they relate their thoughts in detail — Carrie’s thoughts of how it feels to be a disappearing mother, her changing feelings about James and the plan she made to escape from the island, her fear of the house and of James’ potential responsibility for the vanishing women; Sonia’s thoughts of being a maternal stand-in and the custodian of island lore. The detail slows the pace, inhibiting the fear that the novel never conjures.

Descriptions of the island monster crawling out of the goop are a bit chilling, until we realize that it’s a standard lizard monster with changeling powers. Moulton’s failure to enliven a horror story with original ideas leaves a shell that she fills with striking sentences and an ode to sisterhood that, while well-intentioned, falls short of being compelling.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Dark Angel by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 11, 2023

Letty Davenport saved the war for Ukraine. Who knew?

The Letty Davenport series is similar to the Prey series that stars her father. The books tend to be gritty, unlike John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers novels, which mix in a larger amount of humor. Still, even Sandford’s darker novels are lightly seasoned with humor. Most of the humor in Dark Angel comes from snarky asides as characters rib each other, although Sandford also milks a team of hackers who devour microwave burritos for laughs. Burritos aside, the story’s focus is on good guys killing bad guys. The action becomes more intense as the story builds to a high-energy climax.

Letty works for a senator who loans her to Homeland Security in an odd disregard for the separation of powers. Letty is working on a stakeout involving the theft of government property when she meets a CIA agent who introduces herself as Cartwright. After the mission is completed, Cartwright invites Letty to join a social group consisting of women who are good with guns.

Letty is next assigned to infiltrate a West Coast group of computer geeks who reputedly hacked into the software that runs Russia’s train systems. While Letty is told that the group plans a ransomware attack on a natural gas provider in the Midwest, her handlers seem to have a greater interest in Russia’s trains. That interest coincides with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The American government wants to maintain deniability, but having rogue hackers rerouting trains that carry Russian military supplies would be a nice way to stick it to Putin.

Letty doesn’t need to know anything about hacking because her job is to protect someone who does. She is sufficiently young and hot to pass as a successful hacker’s girlfriend. The hacker is an overweight guy who helps out the NSA with his specialized knowledge of machine control software. He isn’t Letty’s type but they learn how to work together by establishing a cover as they drive from Florida to California. After arriving at their destination, they make a couple of contacts, engage in a bit of blackmail, and gain credibility by helping hackers who plan to take down a right-wing hate site. Their efforts lead them to the hacker they need to meet.

When they're not stealing the latest Intel chips, Russian assets are also looking for the train hackers, leading to the novel’s first significant bit of violence. Guns are drawn or fired repeatedly as the story progresses, culminating in attacks on the hacker group because it is trying to make life better for Ukraine. Since the government doesn’t want to involve its own actors (and wants to conceal its involvement from the FBI and local police), Letty recruits members of the women’s shooter group to help protect the hackers. Mayhem ensues.

Sandford never fails to entertain. He tells dark stories in a breezy style, crafts plots that move quickly and in surprising directions without causing confusion, and creates likable characters who are fundamentally decent without becoming saccharine. Some of his stories are enlivened by current events, but this is the first I’ve seen that allows a character to stick it to a foreign leader. Given the mess that the Russian Army made of Putin's invasion, Sandford's take on how American intelligence operatives might have contributed to the disaster comes across as plausible. That makes Dark Angel even more enjoyable.

RECOMMENDED