Fake Money, Blue Smoke by Josh Haven

Published by Mysterious Press on December 6, 2022

Counterfeiting, art theft, swordplay, and a train robbery. What more do you need to make a thriller? Or, for that matter, a love story?

Matt Kubelsky was sentenced to prison after being convicted of murder while he was serving in the Army. After his lawyer obtained a sentence reduction, Matt was transferred from Leavenworth to a federal prison in New York and released after five years. He is surprised when his former girlfriend, Kelly Haggerty, offers to pick him up when he's released. He might be even more surprised when she offers him a job.

Kelly is a counterfeiter. She has concocted a scheme to use fake money to pay thieves to steal Klimt sketches using information she purchased from an insurance guy (using fake money) about the security plans to transport the sketches. She intends to sell the sketches to an art collector in Qatar. She needs Matt to (1) hire the art thieves, figuring that Matt probably made the right connections in prison, and (2) act as her bodyguard when she gets paid for the stolen art.

There are a couple of salient facts that Kelly doesn’t tell Matt. To avoid spoilers, I won’t reveal them. Suffice it to say that the scheme is more complex than Matt imagines and that Kelly, while greedy, is motivated by more than greed.

Matt readily accepts the gig because he needs money and because his only other plans involve (1) covering up the swastika tattoo on his neck that kept him from getting murdered in prison and (2) getting even with the people he blamed for his imprisonment. The first plan is easy to execute but the second takes a little more time. He also needs to protect himself from the white supremacists who feel betrayed when they realize they have been paid for art theft with counterfeit currency. Fortunately, the art collector in Qatar likes Matt and gives him a sword that helps him with vengeance and self-defense.

Kelly is a resourceful criminal with a pleasant personality. Matt has a flexible moral standard (he doesn’t object to murdering those who deserve it) but, like Kelly, he isn’t all that bad if you ignore his willingness to commit crimes. Josh Haven makes it easy for readers to hope that Matt and Kelly will survive the threats they face and perhaps even prosper.

Fake Money, Blue Smoke is a light crime novel, notwithstanding the occasional beheading. The art theft involves a classic train robbery. It’s difficult for a crime fiction fan not to welcome a train robbery. Matt and Kelly seem to reignite the passion they felt before Matt went to prison. Whether their emotions are genuine or whether they are using each other (or both) is a question the reader will ponder until the novel’s end. And while the culmination of the criminal scheme involves a twist that isn’t surprising, the ending suits the beach read nature of the story.

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A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley

Published by Knopf on December 6, 2022

An unfortunate marriage at the age of 18 to a man twenty years older takes Eliza Ripple from Michigan to Monterey. When her husband is killed in a bar two years later, Eliza begins a career as a prostitute, working for a madam who takes good care of her employees. In 1851, Monterey is relatively lawless, although its residents enforce their own brand of justice if they deem the task worthwhile. Neither the townspeople nor the sheriff are particularly troubled when prostitutes are murdered.

Eliza is a pleasant young woman who earns a good living as a prostitute. Some of her customers are sailors ashore between voyages. One is in the construction business. One is a lawyer who makes vague references to a wife. One is an older man who brings her to his home where his wife seems tolerant of his adventures. One takes her out to dinner; another only meets her in the brothel but seems to enjoy her companionship as well as her body.

Eliza befriends Jean, a woman who works in a bordello that services women. Eliza spends much of her free time with Jean, roaming around Monterey and the surrounding countryside, occasionally on rented horses. When they discover a dead body, Eliza’s keen powers of observation help her identify the murder victim as a prostitute who once worked in her establishment. The term “serial killer” had not yet been coined, but Eliza and Jean begin to connect the disappearances of multiple working girls. They decide to track down the killer.

The story follows Eliza for a couple of years after her husband’s death. Eliza’s haphazard investigation of the missing prostitutes drives the plot, but the deeper story is told by the details of Eliza’s life. As she considers whether each of her customers might be the killer, she evaluates the behavior of all men. Some, like her dead husband, are cruel. Some are superficially kind but seem to be on the edge of violence. Some are needy. Some are indifferent. A few are genuinely decent.

Eliza and Jane discuss the topics of the time — slavery and the threat of a war that might divide the country — defying the understanding that, as women, they are not capable of expressing meaningful opinions. Eliza’s customers tend to pontificate, sometimes discussing political or philosophical questions that interest Eliza, although they do not invite her to do anything but listen. She takes advantage of her free time to read Dickens and The Scarlet Letter, exercising her mind in ways that her madam encourages, even if her customers might regard her intellectual pursuits as a waste of time. Reading Poe introduces her to Dupin and suggests a model of detection that will help her investigate the deaths of her professional colleagues. Dupin’s powers of observation parallel Jane Smiley’s observant attention to detail as Eliza and Jean search the streets and faces of Monterey for clues.

The “hooker with a heart of gold” is a familiar character, but Smiley does not content herself with the familiar. Eliza is something of an early feminist. She views prostitution not as subjugation by men but as a pragmatic path to freedom, much like the underground railroad that interests Jean. Eliza’s husband steered her course until her madam took note of her after her husband’s death and began to direct her life as a working girl. Smiley encourages the reader to wonder whether Eliza will eventually become the captain of her own ship and how she might find a less dangerous occupation. At the novel’s end, Smiley supplies a satisfying answer.

The plot is equally satisfying, culminating in a moment of peril and resourcefulness as Eliza and Jane learn who is responsible for the dead prostitutes. At the same time, Poe fans should not expect the second coming of Dupin. Crime and detection provide the novel’s framework, but they are secondary to the novel’s other virtues. Smiley’s prose is a model of elegant understatement. While the novel is not particularly suspenseful — I would categorize it as a pleasant historical drama, not as a thriller — I do not imagine that suspense was Smiley’s intent. A Dangerous Business is the quiet story of a woman who comes of age in a difficult time for single women (as most times have been), who learns about life, and who strives to benefit from those lessons. Readers who expect nothing more will likely enjoy the book for what it is.

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No One Left to Come Looking for You by Sam Lipsyte

Published by ‎ Simon & Schuster on December 6, 2022

No One Left to Come Looking for You is a celebration of performance. The Shits perform music, or its rough equivalent, but the band members are also performing life. Their performance is hindered by crime, but in the end, nothing gets in the way of a good shriek.

Jonathan Liptak plays bass in a band called The Shits. Jonathan has decided he wants people to call him Jack, as in Jack Shit. That’s about as clever as Jack gets, which may be why Vesna broke up with him, although Jack attributes the breakup to his flake-outs and whiskey dick.

The Shits’ genre is “innovative and eccentric guitar-based noise rock,” which I take it means loud with no melody. A magazine described The Shits as “scabrous, intermittently witty, post-skronk propulsion not unlike early Anal Gnosis.” Another magazine praised its most recent seven-inch recording as “the most promising wedge of deconstructed neo-proto-art-scuzz since Gimp Mask Goethe’s notorious debut.” A fan named Corrina praises the band because it doesn’t care about all the bullshit, “like notes and stuff.”

Hera Benberger was The Shits’ drummer until she left to join Thorazine, an anemic band that isn’t loud at all. Hera comes from money, but Jack and the other band members are from middle-class suburbia. Craig Dunn (stage name Cutwolf) plays guitar. The band’s lead singer, Alan Massad (stage name Banished Earl), stole Jack’s guitar.

Jack assumes that the Earl will trade the guitar for drugs. Jack roams around in search of the Earl until a guitar shop owner tells him that a guy named Mounce is trying to sell the guitar. Jack tries to intervene, but Mounce is big and nasty while Jack is soft and pudgy.

The band has a gig coming up and stands to earn 13% of the $5 cover charge that maybe 25 people will pay to hear the band play. The gig is in jeopardy if Jack can’t find the Earl and his bass. Without the Earl’s vocals, the band is “a raucous, semi-coherent noise band.”

The plot follows Jack, who divides his time between aimlessly searching for the Earl and aimlessly living. One of those activities brings him into contact with a friend just after the friend is mortally wounded. A corrupt cop and Mounce make Jack wonder whether he will survive long enough to play what might be the band's final gig.

The story takes place in New York City during a week in 1993. Bill Clinton is the new President and Donald Trump isn’t paying his contractors, one of whom is the Earl’s father. Corruption is an urban menace that becomes instrumental to the plot. The band’s response to the abuse of power by the wealthy is reflected in its style: “post-wave neo-noise art punk with a sincere approach to anarchy.” The legendary band leader who mentored Jack fostered an ideology of “anarcho-bewildered” while teaching Jack to dislike law enforcement “insofar as its function is to protect the property of the rich and repress all resistance to the tyranny of the transactional order.”

No One Left to Come Looking for You is fun and funny. Sam Lipsyte’s edgy characters, plot, and prose capture a certain generational vibe that is echoed in the noise-music played by The Shits, music of the early 90s that built upon but rejected its roots. Music that purported to be about authenticity. It was, in fact, a performance of authenticity, meant to impress fans by sending the deliberate message that fans and performance were unimportant. Lipsyte exposes that hypocrisy without mocking the sincerity of the musicians who were trying to express something that they deemed to be important.

Jack’s only goal has been to move The Shits closer to, and possibly through, “the portal of depraved magnificence.” As the title suggests, Jack is a loner. Alienation is choice reflected in the band’s music and attitude (they don’t interact with each other or the audience while they perform, lest they allow impurities into their noise), but Jack comes to see other people like the stars in the New York City sky. You can only ever see two or three, but it’s good to know that others are out there. The novel drives toward that lesson in a fast and furious journey that, fortunately, is more coherent than the music Jack plays.

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Hunting Time by Jeffery Deaver

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on November 22, 2022

Readers of the Colter Shaw series will know that Shaw was raised as a survivalist. He makes his living collecting rewards. The rewards are usually offered to find missing people, although they are sometimes offered by the government to provide information leading to the capture of fugitives.

Shaw begins the novel doing something like a sting to thwart the theft of a portable nuclear device from the private company that made it. That’s not the kind of assignment Shaw usually takes but a friend recommended him for the gig and he needs to earn a living. He works with the company’s security officer, Sonja Nilsson, who took a job in the industrial pit of Ferrington because someone published stolen government documents that outed her as a former military assassin.

The company's CEO, Marty Harmon, soon hires Shaw for another project. The company’s top engineer, Allison Parker, is on the run. Her ex-husband, Jon Merritt, went to prison for beating her. Now he’s out of prison. He told another prisoner that he planned to kill Allison and his daughter Hannah. Allison hit the road with Hannah, although Hannah doesn’t really believe her father would harm her.

Merritt is a former cop with a reputation for heroism. The law enforcement effort to find him is unenthusiastic. Harmon wants Shaw to find and protect Allison until Merritt is returned to prison.

The story follows the path of an action thriller. Two tough guys try to chase down Allison while Merritt uses his skill as a former police detective to deduce her hiding spot. Shaw and Sonja follow the trail, pausing once with the intent to shag before they remember the higher duty they owe to Allison and Hannah. The story gives action fans the usual array of fistfights, shootouts, and explosions.

As thriller heroes go, Shaw is more cerebral than violent, making the series a welcome change from thrillers that spend more time describing guns in loving detail than building characterization. One of the characters echoes NRA propaganda by claiming that an assault rifle is no different than a deer rifle, as if anyone hunts deer with an M4. The NRA proudly used the term assault rifle before it decided to discourage its members from doing so. Gun enthusiasts often gravitate to tough guy thrillers so Jeffery Deaver may have included a gratuitous recitation of propaganda to please those readers. But since the guy who makes that claim is a murderer, maybe Deaver is subtly sending the opposite message. Who knows? I can only say that Shaw is handy with a gun but doesn’t make them his life.

Shaw has the annoying habit of calculating odds in terms of percentages. He decides there is a “10 percent chance” of something happening when it would be more accurate to say there is a “low risk,” as he has no actuarial or statistical basis for the percentages he invents. The percentages are a gimmick. He also likes to quote rules that his survivalist father taught him. Rules are another gimmick that have become popular in modern thrillers. As much as thriller writers like to substitute gimmicks for personalities, I wish they wouldn’t.

Fortunately, the gimmicks don’t distract from the plot, which quickly moves to the kind of resolution that readers seem to like. The story takes some welcome (because they are unexpected) twists — not every character is who he or she seems to be — but by the end, characters generally lie in the bed they’ve made. This isn’t the kind of novel that allows an innocent character to die or evil deeds to go unpunished.

This novel seems to set up the next one, continuing Shaw’s efforts on behalf of a corporate employer and perhaps giving him an opportunity to finally shag Sonja. Whatever happens, Deaver has established the Colter Shaw series as one of the better choices for fans of action novels.

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A Quiet Life by Ethan Joella

Published by Scribner on November 29, 2022

Most of the events in A Quiet Life take place in Pennsylvania. Those events revolve around the intersecting lives of three characters, all of whom have experienced a recent loss. The intersection is likely meant to illustrate the universality of loss and the importance of connecting with others in times of personal tragedy.

Chuck Ayers’ wife died. He’s having difficulty disposing of her things. He can’t decide whether to embark on the annual vacation that they always took as a couple, a trip to Hilton Head for which he has already paid.

Kirsten Bonato has been numb since her father was murdered. She put her ambition to become a veterinarian on hold and took a job at a pet rescue. She has a thing for her boss David, but Grayson is “promising and new.” One suspects that Grayson will be in Kirsten’s past as soon as someone even newer comes along.

Riley’s father Kyle picked up Riley from school. He has a shared custody arrangement but it wasn’t his day to have Riley. Riley's mother, Ella Burke, is understandably upset but since Kyle has parental rights and probably isn’t a threat to Riley’s safety, the police don’t want to devote significant resources to what is more likely a custody dispute than a kidnapping. Later that night, Ella discovers that some of Riley’s clothes and toys are missing from her room, raising the fear that Riley’s disappearance is meant to be permanent. Kyle's eventual explanation of his motive didn't strike me as being particularly credible.

The three central characters indulge in internal monologues, although Kirsten’s tend to focus on whether shiny and new Grayson is a better deal than handsome David who makes her feel safe and squirmy inside. Chuck’s thoughts are less frivolous. He thinks about and talks to his dead wife but he's strangely obsessed with a young woman named Natasha who was once his wife’s project. He fears that he did not treat Natasha well. His wife’s desire to help Natasha triggered the most serious argument of their marriage. It is an argument he now regrets. He seems to think that making amends with Natasha will help him make amends with his wife.

Ella is hard on herself for going outside on the day of her daughter’s disappearance, as if staying home would have made a difference. Ella also spends time rehashing her failed relationship with Kyle in resentful detail, musings presumably designed to show the reader that she is unnecessarily hard on herself for being clueless about Kyle's character flaws when he accused her of being frigid and dull.

The lives intersect in ways that seem forced. Chuck meets Kirsten at the pet rescue when he contemplates adopting a pet to ease his loneliness. Kirsten turns out to be a former student of Chuck’s wife. Ella delivers newspapers when she’s not working in a bridal shop. Chuck meets Ella when she slips on the ice while delivering his newspaper. He gives her a pillow and a blanket because, if you’ve slipped on an icy sidewalk, you know you want nothing more than a pillow and a blanket while you lie on a sheet of ice. Ella meets Kirsten through David, who conveniently turns out to be Ella’s neighbor.

Chuck is the only character I cared about. His grief is profound. Ethan Joella portrays it in a way that makes pain palpable without reducing it to a cliché. Ella’s fear about her daughter’s safety is believable but carries less impact, although mothers might relate to a contrived “every parent’s worst nightmare” scenario more than I did. Kirsten’s loss is almost an aside to the story of her love triangle, a loss invented to wedge Kirsten into the story’s larger theme.

The power of kindness is a secondary theme. Chuck’s wife changed Natasha’s life by being kind. Chuck improves Ella’s life through improbable acts of kindness. Kirsten lifts Ella’s spirits, and then Chuck’s, by being a kind soul. Oddly, Ella thinks to herself that she misses kindness when everyone, including a cop who is helping her find Kyle, is kind to Ella.

And, of course, the story is about the importance of connecting with others. The execution of that theme is sometimes a bit schmaltzy, if only because its execution is far from subtle. As characters interact, they quickly dissect each other, instantly identifying the cause of their pain, perhaps saving them from years of therapy. Kirsten thinking that her dead father sent her to help Chuck cope with his sorrow is a bit much. Characters come to embrace their neediness as if neediness is a welcome revelation. A reader can almost hear Streisand singing “People Who Need People” in the background. Obvious sentences like “Chuck smiles at the scene and thinks how necessary love is” underscore the narrative’s lack of subtlety.

The predictably happy endings make the novel a bit too “feel good’ for my taste. The tidiness with which the stories wrap up is improbable. The novel also suffers from redundancy. For example, Chuck tells us repeatedly of his belief that he will find his dead wife, or himself, in Hilton Head. Ella reruns her happy memories of Riley, even though she’s only been gone a short time. Kirsten’s indecision about which man she wants to sleep with next is tedious.

There is an audience for books like A Quiet Life. Joella’s smooth prose and keen observation make for easy reading. Some of the story’s emotional moments seem genuine. A Quiet Life is not a book I disliked. It just isn’t a book that made me believe the story was real. I’m recommending it despite its faults because the parts that I liked, including Chuck’s story, I really liked.

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