Device Free Weekend by Sean Doolittle

Published by ‎ Grand Central Publishing on February 28, 2023

We spend too much time looking down at our phones. That, at least, is the argument made by a central character in Device Free Weekend, as well as an army of sociologists, psychologists, and talking heads. The character who makes that argument, Ryan, occupies a position similar to Mark Zuckerberg’s. The Zuckerberg clone is filled with regret that his social media site has contributed to various social problems, including divisiveness and alienation. The site connects people, but too many people connect to fuel their rage, fill their addled minds with lies, and organize or join hate groups. The site also makes it possible for Russia to influence elections and reduces the amount of time children spend with their parents. These are not original observations about the downside of social media, but they drive the plot in this not-quite-credible thriller.

Seven young people were friends in college. Ryan went on to develop a social media empire in Seattle called Link. Lanie and Beau got married and had kids. They used Link to become real estate influencers. Will and Perry also ended up as a couple. Emma was Ryan’s friend when they were children living in the same Minneapolis neighborhood. Stephen was Ryan’s best college friend until they had a falling out over Emma. But that was long ago, Emma and Stephen are divorced, and the hatchets were eventually buried. Or not.

Ryan invites his six college friends to join him for a device-free weekend on his private island off the coast of Washington. With all the elements of a college reunion relationship drama in place, Device Free Weekend adds a twist. Ryan is dying and he plans to take Link with him. Since he is not quite mentally stable, he wants to burden his friends by making them part of his personal drama. Mental illness is, I think, the only plausible explanation for the plot device that sets the story in motion.

We learned from The Big Chill that a reunion of friends can be a dramatic event, but Ryan isn’t satisfied with bringing friends together to rehash their emotional baggage. Ryan intends to lock them inside his island home and confront them with a version of the Trolley Problem. He has kidnapped the Link board members and tied them up on his yacht. He gives his friends a choice that they must make unanimously. They can push a red icon on a tablet and blow up the yacht, killing Ryan and the Board. Or they can push a green icon and approve Ryan’s plan to blow up the buildings that house Link and the company’s servers, causing massive economic damage but (since this will happen on a holiday) perhaps without inflicting death. If they do nothing, Ryan will blow up Link anyway, so he promises to make them multimillionaires if they press the green icon.

Ryan knows his friends won’t kill a boatload of strangers, even if they might want to kill him for trapping them all in his house. The real question is whether they will make themselves complicit in destroying Link, an event that will happen anyway. Ryan’s desperate need for his friends’ approval seems at odds with the certainty that, even if they press the green icon, they will never again approve of Ryan. Maybe he doesn’t care because he’s dying anyway. Maybe he’s such a narcissist that sucking his friends into his scheme is all that matters. Regardless of the exact nature of Ryan’s mental status, it is difficult to understand his motivation for testing the ethics of his innocent friends.

Naturally, the plan does not unfold as Ryan envisioned it. Events appropriate to a thriller ensue as his friends try to thwart his scheme. Will and Perry are inadvertently locked out of Ryan’s home when they should be locked in, setting up a chase across the island by Jud and Kai, two of Ryan’s underlings who are helping him with his insane scheme. The plan is further disrupted when Jud and Kai depart from the script. Meanwhile, the imprisoned friends quarrel about ethics while they try to escape from the house. Moderately entertaining action scenes involve explosions, chases (including a chase up a ladder affixed to a tower), and crashing a stolen TV news truck into a building. Sadly, none of this seems sufficiently real to be gripping.

As I’ve noted, the premise is hard to swallow, even if one accepts that a wealthy CEO might be so caught up in his own ego that he engages in unhinged behavior. Perhaps successful CEOs can become wildly irrational while maintaining control of their business empires; Musk’s erratic takeover of Twitter might be a less violent example. Perhaps people behave differently when they are on the verge of death and freed from considertation of consequences. Still, a deeper exploration of Ryan’s psyche might have resulted in a more convincing story.

Characters in general are a bit shallow. The Ryan-Stephen-Emma triangle takes a silly turn at the end, powered by Ryan’s megalomaniacal quest to control reality. The moment seems forced.

For a book that says “thriller” on the cover, Device Free Weekend is light on thrills. Still, the ending is not easy to predict and the story generates some fun moments. Ten years ago, I might have regarded Ryan’s lectures about social media as prescient and given the novel high marks for that reason. At this point, I have reservations about encouraging readers to spend time with a book that takes on obvious targets and doesn’t deliver the kind of engaging story that I want from a thriller.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Slava: After the Fall by Pierre-Henry Gomont

First published in France in 2022; published in translation by Europe Comics on January 25, 2023

This graphic novel is set in the 1990s. Russia has transitioned from a country of corrupt government officials controlling the means of production to one of corrupt oligarchs controlling a privatized economy. Slava Segalov “grew up in a world where ‘salesman’ meant ‘scammer’.” He aspired to be a starving artist but, after he tired of starving, joined his childhood friend, Dimitri Lavrin, in the business of  looting abandoned Soviet buildings. Dimitri steals goods to sell to Russian consumers who are eager to own the things they always coveted. While Slava was once a student of philosophy and art, Dimitri — a lifelong grifter — is teaching Slava to be a capitalist (i.e., thief).

Slava and Dimitri are driving a van full of looted goods when a band of highway robbers forces the van off the road. An armed woman named Nina rescues them for the bargain price of 500 rubles. She takes them to an abandoned resort that Dimitri regards as ripe for looting. Nina is squatting there with her father (Volodya) and doesn’t appreciate the concept of being looted in exchange for saving Dimitri’s life. Volodya, on the other hand, wants to make a deal with Dimitri even if he’s a grifter because “We’re Russians. Racketeering’s in our blood. Before, during, and after communism. It courses through our veins as surely as vodka.”

Nina is squatting in the resort because the mine that employed her is being privatized. Dimitri understands (and admires) the investor’s scheme to acquire the mine dirt cheap in exchange for lavish promises of high-paying jobs, followed by closing the mine and selling its assets for a tidy profit. The miners are less sanguine when Dimitri explains the investor’s scheme, but Nina’s boyfriend proposes a grift of his own to benefit the miners.

The story takes the four central characters on an eventful journey through the mountains and villages of a corrupt land. Slava begins to question Dimitri’s cynical nature. Dimitri believes Slava has only acquired morality because he is enchanted by Nina. As a prototypical Russian, Volodya solves problems by drinking and fighting. Nina is attracted to Slava but doesn’t want to betray her boyfriend.

The story is amusing but dark, rooted in the pain of ordinary people who have little hope of improving their lives because they are part of a system that does not value ordinary people. The story creates satisfying tension as the characters clash and unite in pursuit of separate and common agendas. While the ending is satisfying, it doesn’t avoid the harsh reality of life in an empire ruled by crime.

Pierre-Henry Gomont’s art is somewhere between cartoonish and stylized realism. Think Doonesbury with a bit more detail. The story is narrated in the margins between rows of panels. Dialog and thought balloons sometimes rely on a picture — a raging fire or a man swinging from a noose — rather than words. I’m no art critic, but I thought the art made a significant contribution to the story, as should be the case in a graphic novel.

RECOMMENDED

The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo

Published by Atria Books on February 14, 2023

In this alternate history, Argentina won a war with the US by weaponizing pigments.  Major cities were lost in the psychopigment blitzkrieg. Veterans are still depressed after being exposed to Deepest Blue. San Francisco suffers from the residue of a Magenta Obsession bomb (warning signs caution visitors that “your emotions might not be your own”). Cities like Boise and Iowa City are the new centers of urban importance in what is left of the United States.

Pigments can be inhaled, swallowed in gel caps, or absorbed through the skin. Some pigments have become popular recreational substances. Each pigment produces a different mental state: Cerulean Guilt, Apricot Awe, Scarlet Passion. Slate Gray produces ennui. Sunshine Yellow is prescribed as an antidepressant.

A clumsy attempt to explain psychopigments depends on psychobabble — an “invisible fog of feelings that humans emit with every sentiment” is distilled and synthesized before being unleashed in “an overwhelming concentration of that same miasma” that becomes “contagious, pushing the feelings of one village member into another, gaining strength from every carrier.” Okay, but what?

Within that postapocalyptic setting, The Shamshine Blind attempts to develop a police detective thriller. It is essentially an “exotic drug dealer” novel, the kind where cops work to stop new designer drugs before they create havoc, except that drugs have been rebranded as pigments. The concept has imaginative appeal but it doesn’t quite work.

Kay Curtida works for Pigment Enforcement, a law enforcement agency that tries to keep new pigments off the market while assuring that known pigments are not abused. Paz Pardo is so busy building her world of psychopigments that it takes some time before she gives Curtida anything to do. Curtida is supposedly working on a counterfeit Sunshine pigment that her agency calls Shamshine, but other detectives have that investigation under control. While Curtida waits to take on the challenge of a new pigment, she entertains herself with relationship drama, fretting about her mother (who wants her to get married) and the return of Doug Nambi to her life, with whom she had a thing when they were both cadets.

Curtida takes an interest in Winfred Pimsley, who is “a crook but my kind of crook.” When the plot eventually gets rolling, Curtida discovers what seems to be a new pigment in the pigment collection that Pimsley keeps in his antique store. Perhaps it was synthesized by Priscilla Kim, a notorious pigment bootlegger, but what might it be? Ananda Ashaji, leader of a cult called the Pinkos, has been ranting about Hope Depletion Events. Could the new pigment give people hope? Doesn’t sound like such a bad thing in a world where hope is a vanishing commodity. Perhaps it is something more nefarious than hope, a pigment that emulates the opiate of the masses.

A mundane plot is overshadowed by the underdeveloped background of Argentine rule (complete with hyper-inflation) over the US. The story imagines a faith-based paramilitary terrorist organization called Knights of Liberty that may be competing or cooperating with the Pinkos. I’m not sure whether other readers would be as confused by the story as I was. Perhaps I lost interest too early to make a serious effort to arrange the plot elements in my memory.

An unreasonable amount of relationship drama does nothing to make the story more interesting. Did Curtida want to forget that she had sex with Plato because he was a high school lothario who had sex with all the girls? Why is Curtida worried about what her mother will think about her fake marriage to Meekins? My answer to questions surrounding the novel’s relationship drama questions was: Who cares?

To her credit, Pardo works diligently to avoid making an inherently messy plot entirely incomprehensible. I’m sure a reader with a notepad and more focused attention might make sense of it. I didn’t find a reason to bother. While the story shows imagination and promise, neither the regrettably noirish plot nor the excessively fretful characters spoke to me.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

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.

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