Burner by Mark Greaney

Published by ‎ Berkley on February 21, 2023

A UN summit in New York will finalize an agreement between the West and Russia to restore Russia’s most favored nation status in exchange for Russia’s agreement to end its war with Ukraine. While Ukraine is not a party to the agreement and will likely fight on its own to regain its lost territory, the agreement does not require Russia to restore the land it seized. This is a bad deal for Ukraine, but the West wants Russian oil and gas. I can understand that premise, but when he plotted Burner, Mark Greaney probably didn’t know that western nations would get by just fine without Russian oil. Maybe the novel’s prediction will still come true, but those who hope for justice in Ukraine will be outraged if it does.

Court Gentry is certain that nobody in power cares about outrage against injustice. Power invites the kind of corruption that has always plagued Gentry, both during and after his tenure with the CIA. Gentry is still subject to a CIA kill order. His current CIA nemesis, Suzanne Brewer, pauses the longstanding order whenever she needs Gentry’s services. She sends a desk jockey, Angela Lacy, to meet with Gentry after tracking him to his boat in the Caribbean, where Gentry is fulfilling a contract from a wealthy Ukrainian to sink yachts owned by Russian oligarchs. Angela has no idea that man she’s meeting is the Gray Man.

A Russian who handles financial transactions for Russian spy agencies has copied those transactions to a phone. Having had his fill of Russian deviltry, the Russian gives the phone to the Swiss banker who processed those transactions. By matching the data in the phone to the bank records, a smart forensic accountant will be able to trace payment recipients in western nations who are taking bribes from Russians. It turns out that their numbers are plentiful. Naturally, those folk want to stop the banker before the records are made public.

The Swiss banker, Alex Velesky, is a Ukrainian who has no love for Russia. He sends the bank records to the cloud and plans to deliver the password and the phone to Ezra Altman, a forensic accountant employed by DOJ who has spent years building a database of suspicious Russian financial transactions.

Velesky must overcome several obstacles. First, Brewer has hired Gentry to recover the phone after telling Gentry that the phone includes evidence of CIA financial transaction in Russia that, if exposed, would place CIA operatives in danger and imperil national security. Second, Zoya Zakharova has been hired by a rival bank (or so she thinks) to recover the phone so that the bank can use the data to poach some of Russia’s banking business. Third, the Russians have tumbled to Velesky’s plan and have sent their best man to recover the phone.

Series fans will recall that Gentry and Zoya have a thing going on. They’ve both been deceived about the nature and purpose of their missions and, naturally enough, they will eventually stop fighting each other and start fighting together. The fighting includes the stuff from which thrillers are made — gun battles, knife fights, jumps between rooftops, even the overused crawl across the top of a train car while the train is in motion. Thankfully, there isn’t a ridiculous fistfight on top of the train, as Greaney avoids crossing the line that separates improbable realism and impossible movie stunts.

While Burner is fundamentally an action novel, Zoya’s alcoholism and substance abuse (and Gentry’s fears and frustration with Zoya’s addictions) add depth to the characters. Greaney sets up Lacy to play a courageous role despite Zoya’s skepticism that she has what it takes. He also sets up an ending that demands sacrifice in the name of principle — the kind of principles for which Russians and their corrupt counterparts in the US and Europe have no use. All of that makes Burner a saccharin-free “feel good” story, although a fair amount of indiscriminate death precedes the relatively happy outcome.

Greaney is one of the best action thriller writers in the business and, unlike too many novelists who write about tough guys, he doesn’t depend on divisive politics and gun worship to attract an audience. Series fans won’t be disappointed, while new readers can easily enjoy Burner without reading all the Gray Man novels that precede it.

RECOMMENDED

The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 14, 2023

In Swedish, the sun doesn’t set; it “walks down.” Or so says Karl Rapp, a Swedish painter who is believes the fierce sky in South Australia must be illuminated by a different sun. While a sunrise might be “the soft but sturdy pink of a cat’s paw” or the “glossy pink of Bess Rapp’s neck,” it is the deep demonic reds of the Australian sunset that inspire him.

The Sun Walks Down is set in South Australia. The plot unfolds during a week in 1883, although backstories offer a wealth of information about the history of the characters and the region.

A lost child is at the center of a wide-ranging story of gossip, judgment, fear, mistakes, mundane life, and discrimination against indigenous people. The child, Denny, is one of seven children of Mary and Mathew Wallace. Denny becomes lost when he is sent to gather kindling as a windstorm arrives on the wedding day of Robert Manning and Minna Baumann. The dust is blowing with such force that Minna's father brings a pony into the church during the wedding. Shearers are about to arrive at the stations, an inopportune time for a child to disappear.

Robert, a local constable, organizes a search for Denny. Denny’s sister Cecily insists on joining Robert's search. Matthew conducts his own search with the help of Billy Rough, the indigenous employee who lets him win their nightly fistfights. Sergeant Foster from the Port Augusta police brings two indigenous trackers, despite his dislike of “blackfellows.”

Denny is afraid during his trek through the desert, but his fears are driven by myths and Bible stories, not by an encounter with a malicious person. Suspicions of foul play are nevertheless fueled by a bloody handkerchief, the light of a distant fire at night, and the recovery of the child’s boots. Nearly everyone is viewed with suspicion, particularly indigenous men, but even Denny’s mother and the local vicar are on Foster’s radar.

While Denny’s disappearance is the adhesive that joins the characters together, most of the novel explores the complexity of their simple lives. Fiona McFarlane explains why Karl and his wife Bess decided to leave Sweden and the ironic erosion of Karl’s trust in Bess. McFarlane traces the history of the Baumann family before and after it planted roots in Australia. She presents Minna as a desire-driven woman to whom the fidelity of marriage will clearly be a challenge, a woman who hoped that marriage would liberate her from her mother’s moods. Minna enjoyed kissing Karl shortly before (and again after) she married Robert, but believes the pleasure she derives from other men is proof of her love for Robert.

McFarlane portrays Cecily as a young woman at a crossroads, faced with the possibility of doing something special with her life or trading an education for the meager but secure income of manual labor. Cecily wants to “burn with one true and important idea” but doesn’t want to choose an idea; she wants the idea to choose her. Cecily’s teacher advises her that women like Cecily “don’t wait for our hearts to decide anything for us. We don’t fall in love — we stride into it. We choose.” Cecily believes herself to be in love with Robert and perhaps with all men of a certain type.

Lesser characters weave into the story, playing important if tangential roles. A man with a camel from Pashtun has a telling conversation with Minna about the local German prostitute, famously known for draping a blanket over her donkey when her services are engaged. The vicar joins the search for Denny, or perhaps he just wants to be by himself.

Billy Rough learned the game of cricket and excels at bowling but his skin color kept him from playing outside of South Australia. Tal, the best tracker among local the indigenous people, turns out to be the novel’s most sensible character. Ralph “Bear” Axam believes himself to be in love with Minna, perhaps because she is newly married and therefore safe to love. Even the novel’s dogs are given distinct personalities.

Denny’s story is not meant to be dramatic — to most characters, his disappearance is a nuisance that distracts from the serious work of eking out a living in an unforgiving land — but its resolution is satisfying. The novel’s beauty lies in its details. Bullocks and wallabies witness human folly. The possum-fur coat worn by a tracker with an injured arm is coveted by a white woman who hides her own injured arm in a shawl that lacks the same mystical qualities. A burning tree, set afire to guide Denny home, inspires the religious fervor of a burning bush. Denny’s grandfather, a man who “keeps a vigilant watch on his bowel movements” and would “prefer to hear no more than one new piece of information a day,” devotes himself to ineffectual prayer when he learns of Denny’s disappearance. Foster’s ruminations about “true pioneers” illustrate the inflated self-importance of those who mistake humility for weakness.

McFarlane creates a convincing world that exists in a time and place distant from our own, yet her characters could live in any place at any time. Their varying responses to a moment of crisis in a frontier community make The Sun Walks Down a remarkable novel.

RECOMMENDED

The Last Orphan by Gregg Hurwitz

Published by Minotaur Books on February 14, 2023

After an uncertain start, the Orphan X novels have followed an upward trending arc. Gregg Hurwitz continues that ascent in The Last Orphan.

The action begins when Evan Smoak visits the hospital where the woman who won his heart is receiving care. Despite taking precautions, Smoak is captured after a chase through hallways and stairways and streets and a parking ramp. His captor is Naomi Templeton of the Secret Service. Being captured, even by an elite team of counter-assault agents, makes Smoak wonder if he’s losing his edge, as does missing a small target from a distance of twenty feet, a shot that he is fully capable of making.

Smoak is on a sort of special parole, the terms of which he has repeatedly violated. Rather than sending him to Gitmo, Templeton puts him on a video call with the president, who wants a favor from Smoak — a favor he can trade for his freedom, albeit on a leash. Smoak, of course, will immediately slip the leash.

The favor involves finding and assassinating Luke Devine, a wealthy man who might be a psychopath but is certainly a narcissist. Devine is skilled at manipulating others to get what he wants. Deniable blackmail is one of his tools. The president believes Devine has become too powerful. Perhaps he is simply inconvenient. In any event, Smoak agrees to make his own assessment.

The story reunites Smoak and sixteen-year-old wunderkind Josephine Morales, who has been exploring her boundaries since the end of the last novel. He also gets an assist from Candy McClure. Both Jo and Candy are, like Smoak, former participants in the Orphan program that trained them in the art of killing.

The story features the usual blend of Jo’s computer hacking and Smoak’s exploits as an action hero. The plot becomes a bit deeper than controlled mayhem when Devine makes a credible case that the president has not ordered his assassination with clean hands. How Smoak will process that information sets up the novel’s resolution.

Smoak continues to develop as a character. Smoak alternately enjoys and is irritated by Jo’s teen snark, but she gets under his skin in ways that make him question his life. Smoak is anal and compulsive — traits that probably keep him alive — but his emotional limitations also limit his ability to connect with others. As he confronts the fury that drives his life, he begins to suspect that his hatred of feeling vulnerable is standing in the way of the openness to others that demands vulnerability.

The action scenes are on a par with Reacher and Gray Man novels — making the story fun to read and easy to visualize — but Smoak is developing a stronger personality than most other fictional tough guys. The novels are moving away from their unoriginal foundation — Jason Bourne meets the Equalizer — and are carving out a unique space in the action hero genre. Smoak’s continued evolution as a character makes the series a good choice for action hero fans.

RECOMMENDED

The Applicant by Nazli Koca

Published by Grove Press on February 14, 2023

The Applicant takes the form of Leyla's diary. Leyla believes that autobiographies are always embellished with fiction. Why not disguise her life as fiction, changing only the names of the innocent? Yet she wonders whether it is possible both to live and narrate a life without subjecting either the life or the narrative to censorship. If Leyla is censoring her life, she is at least letting the reader see the good parts.

The “my novel is my life” premise only works when lives are interesting or characters have something to say. Leyla has something to say about just how uninteresting her life is and how helpless she is to find productive ways to escape the drudgery. Oddly enough, the drudgery of her life turns out to be interesting.

Leyla’s life is filled with the drama of a young unattached woman who feels out of place. Leyla is from Turkey but she’s living in Berlin, making immigration — invisible borders and the arbitrary documents required to cross them — a prominent theme. Leyla needs funds to renew her student visa, but she can only do that if she wins her appeal after being kicked out of the university for writing a thesis that “wasn’t academic enough.” She also needs to hold a job to convince the German government that she can support herself legally.

There has recently been a coup in Turkey and Leyla doesn’t want to return to live under a dictatorship, but if she stays in Germany by claiming refugee status she won’t be able to go home to visit her family. Conversely, if she returns to Turkey — where her debt-ridden mother and sister are staying with her aunt — she will only qualify for a minimum wage job and will never save enough money to return to Germany.

The story addresses discrimination against Turks in Germany, particularly in academia. The professor who failed Leyla is notorious for passing every student without reading their shoddy theses, but he held Leyla to a higher standard.  She is bitter that she must be either “a perfect student or a poor refugee” to remain in the country. To be fair, however, Leyla was far from a perfect student.

Leyla wants to be a writer but doesn’t want to write “the kind of book that gets one’s family’s home raided by the police.” She earns a reputation by interviewing minor celebrities in front of small Berlin audiences but the celebrities take all the entrance fees. She parties and hangs out with Aria, an unpublished writer, and with Victor, her gay Cuban roommate, and with Mona, who defies description.

Leyla’s friend Defne suggested that Leyla replace her in the the job Defne was leaving at a hostel, but didn’t mention that it was a cleaning job. Leyla cleans by day, hoarding half-empty bottles of alcohol that guests leave behind, and by night visits clubs and gets messed up on alcohol, weed, and ketamine. She sleeps with guys at random.

Female sexuality is a central theme. Mona suggests that Leyla earn extra income as an escort, since she might as well be paid if she wants random sexual encounters. Leyla writes memories in her diary of working with Mona for a couple of months when she should have been focusing on her thesis. Having been exploited by men throughout her life, Leyla is astonished to learn how easy it is to take money from them.

Leyla considers the hypocrisy of men who regard sex and money as the ultimate prizes in life but make it illegal for women to have sex for money. She wonders why women are expected to earn their equality by beating men at their own game after centuries of providing domestic labor for free, when it is so much easier to change the rules and gain power through sex. At the same time, she comes to regard the commodification of her sexuality as socially paralyzing.

As Leyla is waiting for her visa status to resolve, she initiates a sexual encounter with a Swedish Volvo salesman who picks her up in a Berlin bar. When she visit him in Sweden, she tries to convince herself that she isn’t using him as she contemplates living a middle class, Ikea-furnished life. Maybe she even loves him, although she thought the same about Mona. Yet the Swede doesn’t share her liberal philosophy. He doesn’t read or think deeply. He is always calm while Leyla is a tight bundle of anxiety. Perhaps their personalities are too dissimilar to make a relationship work.

The novel’s limited drama lies in the choices Leyla must make. Should she marry the Swede? He’s handsome and attentive and kind. Her mother thinks a handsome Swede who has a job is a perfect choice. To live with the Swede, Leyla would need to abandon her “adventurous writer’s life,” perhaps losing the only material she can find that’s worth writing about. She would also need to live in Turkey while awaiting a Swedish residential visa. Yet her other choices — returning to school, finding a decent job that is consistent with her visa restrictions — are largely beyond her control. Perhaps a return to Turkey and a career writing advertising copy is her fate. She feels that she is on the verge of making a terrible mistake but does not know which choice will be the mistake. That’s life in a nutshell.

Late entries hint that Leyla might find at least modest success as a writer. Whether she will make the right choice about her life is up in the air. The ending has a coming of age moment — a realization that it’s time to grow up — that seems forced. Maybe a transition to maturity is expected in the story of a young person’s life, but Leyla’s life is interesting precisely because she’s not sufficiently mature to make good decisions. I liked Leyla because she put maturity on hold. It’s only when partying and a dead-end job get old that Leyla predictably decides to face reality. Okay, that’s nice, but predictable behavior doesn’t make for compelling fiction. Still, getting to know Leyla before she reaches her turning point is worth a reader’s time.

RECOMMENDED

Cold People by Tom Rob Smith

Published by Scribner on February 7, 2023

Cold People might best be regarded as a fantasy, or maybe as a thought experiment. Its implausible plot rules out caregorization as science fiction. Regardless of how the novel might be classified, the story it tells is far from engaging.

Alien invaders fill the skies with their ships while broadcasting an ultimatum to humans: move to Antarctica within 30 days or die. Personally, I’d break into one of the homes abandoned by rich people and spend my last 30 days sampling their wine cellars, but I have a serious aversion to cold weather. The survivors in Cold People have a serious aversion to being disintegrated.

The aliens have disabled the world’s most destructive weapons, leaving nations powerless to resist an alien occupation. Having rendered humans helpless to resist, why not disintegrate them all instead of disintegrating everyone who fails to make it to Antarctica? It’s not like the aliens are doing humans a favor by turning the least hospitable continent into a reservation. The question is never answered. Sadly, I found the many unswered questions to be more pressing than those the novel addresses.

The politics of self-interest during the invasion might be the most interesting part of the novel. One fellow converts an oil tanker into a ferry and takes as many passengers as he can, provided they aren’t too young or too old to work for the group’s survival. Israel uses its military to occupy its airports, commandeers all civilian aircraft regardless of the nations from which the planes originated, kicks all non-Israelis out of the airport, and uses the stolen aircraft exclusively to transport Israelis to Antarctica.

Some nations use the thirty days to fight against each other, hoping to secure a national foothold in Antarctica by wiping out competing nations. The wars don’t amount to much in the absence of missiles and bombs.

It turns out that people need to pull together to survive in Antarctica and that religious, ethnic, and national differences are no longer of consequeence. At Hope Town, settlers have put aside differences and embraced everyone in their diverse communities. But the novel isn’t really a kumbaya celebration of humanity coming together, because people soon understand that no amount of cooperation will keep them alive after they drink all the brandy and when the survival gear they brought with them wears out.

We are told little about how humans survive at all. Nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers still have power, but they can’t house a million people. Catching enough fish and seals to feed a million people seems like a daunting task, but establishing microbreweries just seems like a misuse of scarce resources.

Maybe I could have lived with the absence of necessary detail if the story had not moved well beyond implausibility. A geneticist who was carrying out forbidden experiments in China decides the human survival requires newborns to be genetically engineered to withstand cold weather. Within a generation, the engineering has produced two versions of ice-adapted parahumans. Children like Echo are born in the usual way and live a relatively normal life apart from having scales and preferring the cold to a warm environment.

The other parahumans, torn from wombs after a brief gestation and then imprisoned in caves, represent a more extreme version of adapted humanity. They are freakishly strong and smart. One of them, Eitan, can make himself transparent to blend in with ice. Oh, and did I mention the snow gorillas with bright orange eyes? Is it remotely conceivable that a geneticist can achieve these results, even using military supercomputers on aircraft carriers, in a generation or two? Tom Rob Smith didn’t convince me.

The point of the novel seems to be that humans are willing to create creatures who aren’t actually human to perpetuate some version of humanity. How snow gorillas advance that cause baffles me. Why it never occurs to anyone that tinkering with genetics to create monsters might be a bad idea is even more difficult to understand.

Echo is the only parahuman we meet who isn’t a monster. Her adaptation is supposedly less extreme, but she learns that she can control temperature — for example, by freezing a gun that someone points at her. How is this a conceivable genetic adaptation? Don’t ask because you won’t get an explanation. Just as implausible is the telepathy with which the parahumans are endowed. Oh, did I mention they can alter the chemistry of ice? I’m surprised they don’t have x-ray vision or the ability to fly. The novel might make a good comic book or Marvel movie but it makes little sense as a work of literature.

So does the novel have any actual humans a reader might care about? Some chapters focus on an Israeli soldier named Yotam Penzak. He expects to be left behind in Israel because he is not among the smartest or most politically connected. He’s chosen because he is a witness to a failed Russian strike at the airport and will presumably defend the Israeli settlement on Antarctica with vigor. In the absence of nationalized settlements, Yotam is instead tasked with assisting the Chinese geneticist despite having no background in science. Yotam was apparently chosen for his job because he was capable of loving without regard to individual differences. Yotam ends up falling in love with and becoming an advocate for an extreme parahuman.

The novel also focuses on an American woman named Liza and her Italian lover Atto. They fell in love in Italy when Atto invited Liza on a boat tour. Atto was so enamored with Liza that he didn’t try to shag her, which only angered Liza by depriving her of vacation sex with a hot Italian. Simplistic themes borrowed from romance fiction being what they are, Atto and Liza end up together on Antarctica, where they conceive Echo. A normal human boy named Tetu overlooks Echo’s scales and falls in love with her. I guess there aren’t many women to choose from after most of humanity is wiped out.

Perhaps Yotam and Atto fall for parahumans as a metaphor for relationships that are not cisgendered. To make sure no reader misses the point, a character asks, “Why does love have to be just one thing?” Fair enough. If a normal human and a parahuman want to love each other, why is that anyone else’s business? My problem is not with the theme but with the absurdity of ice-adapted parahumans who develop superpowers.

We also meet Kasim Abbas, an Iraqi who is now charged with transporting ice-adapted kids to McMurdo Station where the most extreme parahumans are developed, leaving their parents behind. And we meet Jinju, who escaped from a dictatorship in China. These characters are reminders of humans who live in varying states of subjugation, designed to make the reader think about the morality of creating parahumans and immediately imprisoning them. The more salient question might involve the morality of creating parahumans at all.

I suppose the novel might prompt book club discussions of the morality underlying the creation and enslavement of parahumans, although I doubt that many book clubs will take an interest in a story that makes no sense. If humans are going to die out because they can’t adapt to life in Antarcica, is it better for some monstrous version of humans to endure even if parahumans resemble a mixture of telepathic fish and the Incredible Hulk? I’m not sure the question is worth pondering.

While Cold People could be read as a story about the need to embrace diversity and reject the horrors of subjugation, the ultimate themes are “love conquers all” (although it didn’t conquer the aliens) and “humans aren’t so bad” (an ahistorical view that seems to be contradicted by the creation and subjugation of genetically altered servants). Near the end, a character says “the only way to survive on this continent is to find someone to love.” I guess snuggling might slow the length of time it takes to freeze to death, but learning how to fish and building shelters would be a better survival strategy.

I was particularly inspired (to laugh) by the deep conversation that Echo has with Tetu about what it feels like to be in love, a question posed in the midst of an inevitable battle between humans and parahumans. It’s always good to pause and discuss the philosophy of love while what little is left of humankind is under attack.

I enjoyed Child 44 and its progeny, in part because Smith created a strong atmosphere of realism in an unlikely story. His utter abandonment of reality in Cold People is disappointing.

NOT RECOMMENDED