Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

Published by Tor Books on April 25, 2023

I’m not tech-savvy, so I didn’t know that the Red Team is a term used to identify people who try to exploit weaknesses in digital systems while the Blue Team tries to insulate systems from attack. And since I’m also not cryptocurrency savvy, I can’t say that I followed all the details in Red Team Blues. Explanations of blockchains and such seemed to make sense as I was reading them, but five minutes after I closed the book I was thinking, “I’ve got no idea what you just explained to me, Cory.” I don’t think that matters (although tech and crypto savvy people might salivate over the details) because the story is fundamentally about people and the impact that certain events have on their lives.

Martin Hench plays on the Red Team. He’s a good guy, not someone who uses hacking skills for criminal purposes. He typically sells his services to victims of digital crimes, helping them recover their losses in exchange for 25% of the recovery. Martin lives on a very fancy bus and often spends his nights in Walmart parking lots.

Martin’s old friend Danny Lazer is a billionaire who founded a company that provides the tools for the next internet revolution. Danny’s wife died, leaving him to wonder why he wasted so much of his life chasing a fortune when he could have been spending more time with his wife, working a couple of hours each month and earning enough to pay for a comfortable life in a Baja beach shack.

Danny eventually sold his company and started a new one. He married his much younger former personal assistant, Sethuramani. He’s chasing money again, this time with a new form of cryptocurrency. He started the company so he would have something to leave to Sethu, who is quite capable of managing it.

However, Danny is in trouble. He acquired “the signing keys for four of the most commonly deployed secure enclaves.” I won’t try to explain what that means because, although Doctorow explained it in simple terms, my simple mind can only wrap around the simplest part of the explanation. Suffice it to say that, in the wrong hands, the keys to secure enclaves can be used to wipe out records of digital transactions and destroy the foundational trustworthiness of companies that use them. So naturally, someone stole the keys, threatening to bring down Danny’s new company and quite a few other companies, as well.

Martin earns three hundred million dollars by recovering the laptop that contains the keys, using techniques that Doctorow carefully explained and that I vaguely grasped. I didn’t quite buy the location from which the missing laptop is recovered (it depends on an innate trust in human nature that I wouldn’t expect to find in thieves), but that’s not an integral part of the story.

Martin’s digital detective work leads him to some dead bodies that are an integral part of the story. The father of one of the dead kids is seeking vengeance. Martin had nothing to do with the deaths, but be becomes a target. He can either use his wealth to skip the country and hide quietly until he dies, or he can incite a war among groups of very nasty people who depend on lawyers and technology to hide their money. He opts for starting the war, then ducks out of the way.

Much of the story (the part I understood and thus found interesting) follows Martin as he tries to hide from and ultimately thwart the criminals who want to kill him. To that end, he shuts off his phone and stays away from his fortune so he can’t be traced. He lives as a homeless man for a few days, opening his eyes to the people he used to look away from. Martin is a decent human to everyone he encounters (unless they’re trying to kill him) and is surprised by how less fortunate people reward his decency with kindness. Maybe the story is a little too hopeful in that regard, but in a country where we are constantly told that “those other people” are out to harm us, it’s good to remember that many of “those other people” are just like us.

Doctorow emphasizes the environmental damage caused by the servers that “mine” cryptocurrency and the nefarious uses (including money laundering and tax evasion) to which cryptocurrencies are put. Doctorow’s law enforcement agents (Homeland Security in a turf war with Treasury) are credible, in that they prefer a “harm management” approach to actual law enforcement. Keep the violence offshore, let the rich shelter their money and avoid taxes, and everyone stays happy. When Martin throws a wrench into the works, bringing some of the violence into America’s borders, I suspect that most readers will agree that he’s doing the right thing, even if the strategy risks collateral damage.

The novel is marketed as a thriller, but it is not the kind of story that depends on chases and fights to get the reader's juices flowing. The violence occurs offstage. Martin sets events in motion with his mind and keyboard rather than his fists. In the meantime, he has to confront the isolation caused by his lifestyle (most potential sex partners don't want to overnight on a bus) and decide whether it makes sense to reject a woman he admires when she is willing to let him into her heart.

Doctorow is an interesting writer but an even more interesting person. He refuses to attach Amazon’s Digital Rights Management technology to his audiobooks, so Amazon refuses to sell the audio versions. Doctorow has principled reasons for resisting Amazon’s DRM technology, so he produces and markets his own audiobooks. I’m not into audiobooks but I applaud Doctorow for standing up to Amazon.

This is the first novel in a trilogy. It does not depend on a cliffhanger to induce readers to buy the next book. The quality of Red Team Blues is reason enough to look forward to the next one.

RECOMMENDED

Moscow Exile by John Lawton

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on April 18, 2023

About twenty years have passed since 1948, when Joe Wilderness was selling black market coffee in East Germany. Some of that backstory is told in Hammer to Fall. That novel ended in a cliffhanger as Wilderness is shot on a bridge during a prisoner exchange in 1968.

Moscow Exile does not take up the story where Hammer to Fall left off. In fact, more than two hundred pages pass before Wilderness reappears. Moscow in Exile seems to meander but the story’s arc is purposeful. A circuitous path is sometimes the best route to an intended destination. Decades pass in the lives of characters both critical and collateral before their significance to the plot becomes apparent.

We meet the former Charlotte Young after she marries Hubert Mawer-Churchill. She leaves him when she falls for Avery Shumacher, but Hubert’s cousin Winston doesn’t blame her. He gives her a job in Naval Intelligence because of her ability to speak Russian. The job pleases her handlers; Charlotte is a Russian spy.

Charlotte goes by Coky after she marries Avery. He happens to be a wealthy American who is serving as Roosevelt’s eyes and ears in England. She moves to Washington D.C. with Avery when the war ends. After Avery’s unfortunate death, Coky marries Senator Redmaine, an early anti-communist crusader in the style of McCarthy. Coky detests the man but she’s following Moscow’s orders.

The other character of significance in the early going is Charlie Leigh-Hunt. Charlie is also spying for Russia, not so much for ideological reasons but because Moscow’s payments enhance his lifestyle. Charlie’s job, on the other hand, is to spy for MI6. He’s a bit worried because Burgess and McLean have been caught and Philby is on MI6’s radar. He’s shipped to Washington to replace Philby as head of station, the trusting British replacing one Russian spy with another. The CIA is less trusting.

On the voyage across the Atlantic, Charlie sleeps with Coky, having no idea who she is. He later discovers that she’s his new boss. or at least the conduit to his boss on the Russian side. All the more reason to sleep with her again, a practice he continues regularly. When the time comes to scamper to Russia, Charlie’s lifestyle becomes less indulgent, but the KGB officer in charge of him is attractive so he’s able to resume sleeping with the boss.

All of that is an absorbing background story that John Lawton spends half the novel telling. The balance of the story begins with Wilderness waking up in a hospital, having been shot at the end of the last novel. We learn that Wilderness is on a mission. The Russians treat him as a spy and potential defector after he’s taken to Moscow. The Russians don’t want him meeting with Charlie but it is a foregone conclusion that they will meet and share their secrets. The question is whether Wilderness will be able to make his way back to America.

Many of the secondary characters from the last novel resurface, including a British ambassador who would rather be raising pigs, a CIA agent who resembles a pig, and a couple of women who are far more competent than the men they replace. The story eventually circles back to Coky, tying all the plot threads together. There’s even another prisoner exchange on a bridge. What fun would a spy novel be without one?

Lawton has become one of my favorite modern spy novelists. His plots are realistic in that nothing ever goes according to plan. His characters are intelligent but flawed and for that reason interesting. His prose is a mixture of polished literary style and “Bob’s your uncle” colloquialisms. London, Moscow, and Washington D.C. are all described in atmospheric detail without bogging down the story. The plot builds tension after it comes into focus, but Lawton doesn’t depend on fight scenes or on-page violence to keep the story moving. I don’t know whether this novel brings an end to the Joe Wilderness series, but I look forward to reading whatever Lawton writes next.

RECOMMENDED

Salvage this World by Michael Farris Smith

Published by Little, Brown and Company on April 25, 2023

There’s nothing for the people of coastal Mississippi and Louisiana but hurricanes, storms, and floods. No crops. No jobs. No hope. This is the kind of landscape that Michael Farris Smith was born to chronicle.

Jessie’s mother died in childbirth. Her father Wade tells himself he did his best to raise her but he knows he didn’t. He spent too much time in the bottle, too little time trying to overcome his demons, self-pity first among them.

Jessie was not yet eighteen when Holt came into her life. Wade didn’t like Holt but he was powerless to stop Jessie when she jumped into his pickup and left Wade behind. Holt has physical and emotional scars from an abusive childhood but he cares about Jessie and the child they conceive.

Before meeting Jessie, Holt worked for the Temple of Pain and Glory, a tent revival that uses “hellfire and damnation” to camouflage “a more pure theology of greed and dread and lust.” Elser assures her audiences that a young girl with the power to control the weather has been sent by God to save them from hurricanes. Holt stole money and a ring of mysterious keys from the Temple and fled. He only tells Jessie that he is on the run when she is pregnant with his child.

After Holt tells Jessie the truth, he instructs her to grab the keys and run if bad people come. When an unfamiliar car comes up the driveway, that’s what she does, carrying her son Jace into the woods. She steals a car and soon realizes that the foul stench in the back is caused by a decaying corpse. Eventually she makes her way back to Wade because she has nowhere else to go.

The disparate pieces of the plot are adhered by happenstance, but each is a pleasure to read. We eventually learn why there is a body in the car that Jessie steals. The story ends in an ambiguous revelation as the reader gets a horrific glimpse of the secret that the keys unlock. The ambiguity might put off some readers, but the mood and the way characters react to their struggles is more important than understanding why events unfold as they do.

For Wade, Salvage this World is a story of redemption. He is old and alone, but he is given one last chance to set aside his mistakes, salvage the most important part of his life, and be the kind of father or grandfather his family needs, if only for a moment. For Jessie and Holt, the story is largely a fight to survive. They both have opportunities to remake their lives — slender opportunities, given their pasts and the land in which they live — but they must confront the evil that pursues them before they can think about moving ahead.

Smith scatters grit into every sentence. His prose is powerful, stark and evocative. The story’s darkness is echoed in scenes of violence or dread that unfold in tunnels or back woods at night, in religious beliefs that will not withstand the scrutiny of sunshine. Because the novel has few characters, Smith has room to develop themes of alienation and reluctant decency and survival in a hostile land through the backstories of secondary characters. Old men refuse to evacuate during hurricane warnings because a stubborn connection to their place in the world is stronger than their fear that the government might be right about something. Friends feel an obligation to help each other but they would rather not. Poverty and child abuse exist because they are part of a cycle that people are powerless to break.

Smith builds the tension of a thriller into a story of desperate lives. Characters salvage what they can in this novel, both literally and figuratively. For all the darkness, the story offers a glimmer of hope that relationships can be salvaged, that a grandchild born into a stormy world might grow up to have a sunnier life than their parents or grandparents. Still, Smith leaves the impression that they'll need to escape the land of tent revivals if they want to give themselves a chance.

RECOMMENDED

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.

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