Hostile Intent by Don Bentley

Published by Berkley on May 3, 2022

After someone tells Matt Drake’s wife to grow a pair, Drake decides to confront him when (as Will Smith learned) he should just let it go. But Drake is a tough guy who loves guns (the insult comes at a gun range while Drake is helping the little woman improve her shooting technique) so he needs to show the world, or at least the reader, that tough guys never bypass an opportunity to be tough. Looking for toxic masculinity? Call Matt Drake.

Drake is a case officer for the DIA. He’s all man, as he proves by telling us how turned on his lovely wife makes him and by making sure the reader knows that he really enjoys shagging her. He tells puny weak men to turn in their “man card” when they fail to meet his standards of masculine behavior. He can’t look at a woman without rating her sex appeal. All standard fare for tough guy heroes, even more so for insecure wannabes who love tough guy novels like this one.

Tough guy heroes spend a lot of time assuring the reader of their competence and overall superiority at all things requiring toughness and even things that don’t. They are apparently too insecure to let readers judge for themselves. Too much of this novel is dedicated to a tough guy’s worship of himself.

Drake works for and with tough guys who have all the Ranger and Delta and Green Beret credentials that make tough guys so darn special. They speak to each other in tough guy dialog to reassure each other that they aren’t secretly pansies. Don Bentley makes sure the readers know exactly what guns they are carrying and what scopes they’ve affixed to their rifles so that gun porn addicts can get their fix.

A good chunk of the novel is spent summarizing earlier novels. The summaries are unnecessary, as Hostile Intent would work as a stand-alone even without the summaries. They seem to have been included to boost the page count in a novel that fails to develop subplots or anything else beyond tough guy rhetoric. Bentley also ups the wordcount with obsessive data dumps. Want to know the horsepower of a V-8 engine in a Range Rover? Or the candlepower of its LED headlights? But what about the high beams? The speed at which a paratrooper’s boots hit the ground? Useless data substitutes for useful characterization. I guess all a reader needs to know about tough guys is that they’re tough. And they love their sexy wives, or at least they love having sex with them.

The plot anticipates a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Be prepared to endure President Zelenskyy being belittled as a coward. Apart from Bentley’s lack of prescience about how the invasion would take place, his belief that Europe would be indifferent to the invasion, and his wild miss on the character of Ukraine’s president (it turns out that in the real world, you don’t need to be a tough guy to be brave), the story has little to do with that war as it focuses on the tired theme of a loose nuke entering the marketplace and creating the threat of World War III. Drake and a team of tough guys are dispatched to recover the nuke, taking on the Russian Army in the process. The plot is just an excuse for Drake and his band of tough guys to be tough in combat, and for some Russian tough guys to be tough (but not as tough as the Americans), and for a Mossad agent to be extra tough because tough guy writers worship Mossad.

Bentley’s writing style is pedestrian when it’s not ridiculously clichéd (“failure wasn’t an option”; “swaying like a drunken sailor”). The novel offers plenty of action to fans of tough guy action novels, but the absence of characterization or an interesting plot makes Hostile Intent a less interesting choice than tough guy novels that offer more substance, better characters, and snappier prose.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Liarmouth by John Waters

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 3, 2022

Readers who want a book that mentions the male sex organ on nearly every page will fulfill their desire with Liarmouth. Daryl Hotchkins is obsessed with his penis. True, all guys share that obsession, but Daryl’s has a mind of its own. Again, that’s true of every guy’s, but Daryl’s talks. Now guys do talk to their units on occasion (usually to say something like “Calm down, buddy”) but Daryl’s talks back. Out loud, sometimes sounding like a car’s GPS.

Daryl is a petty criminal. His principal occupation is stealing luggage from airports. Daryl’s partner in crime, Marsha Sprinkle, is a more substantial sociopath. Marsha makes children cry because children annoy her. She also steals vehicles and causes general mayhem while fleeing arrest. She promised to shag Daryl to reward a year of productive work, but she has no intention of allowing Daryl, or anyone else, inside her.

The third key character is Marsha’s daughter Poppy, who operates an unlawful trampoline business, her lawful trampoline business having been shut down for violating safety protocols. Poppy has a dedicated band of followers who bounce their way through life. Poppy has replaced the seats in her van with trampolines to better transport her cultists. Marsha thinks of Poppy as “the womb-ravager.” Poppy’s attitude toward Marsha is no kinder, in part because Poppy is one of the many victims of Marsha’s thievery.

Liarmouth is, in a word, strange. In two words, strangely amusing. That won’t come as a surprise to readers who have seen John Waters’ films. Nor will the obsession with sex organs, sexuality in all of its forms, and particularly drag queens. Waters gained fame for transgressive films. His first attempt at a novel is mildly transgressive, although the boundaries have been pushed so far since Waters was in his prime that Liarmouth is fairly tame by contemporary standards of transgression.

Liarmouth has a plot, in that events follow each other in a logical cause-and-effect order. About half the plot is an extended chase scene after Daryl and Marsha are interrupted in a luggage theft at Baltimore’s airport. They go their separate ways for a time (Daryl hides out with a tickle fetishist, Marsha steals purses in a hospital after a collision that brings all the characters together), only to separate before Daryl and his talking penis can claim their reward.

The plot is freewheeling and easily sidetracked. Characters are always on the move, as Waters mocks air travel, Amtrack, and discount bus rides. Daryl’s search for his sexual payment is interrupted by his fear that his penis has turned gay. (If a man is straight but his penis is gay, the man and his penis are bisexual … or so the penis concludes.) When Marsha meets a man who is her sociopathic equal, will she finally kindle a lust for men? The reader never knows what might happen next. That’s sort of a virtue, although it gives the plot a sense of randomness. Then again, life often feels random when plans go awry.

Waters’ social commentary can be amusing, from skewering the upper class by imagining cheek lifts for dogs (maybe that’s a real thing) to using motel Magic Fingers devices as full-body vibrators. I could have done without the trampoline humor and the dick jokes get old after a hundred pages or so. My response to Liarmouth alternated between “this is sort of funny” and “this is really stupid.” The balance point is somewhere in the middle. This might have been a more effective novel if Waters had written it thirty or forty years ago, when it was still possible to shock readers.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Wild Life by David Gordon

Published by Mysterious Press on April 26, 2022

David Gordon’s books about Joe Brody are all kinds of fun. Joe is a military sniper turned criminal who tries to keep the shadiest side of his life hidden from the FBI agent he sleeps with. She knows he’s a criminal but doesn’t want to know the details. Joe is employed by a crime family, but all the crime bosses in the New York City area occasionally get together and hire Joe to perform a task that serves the public good. Joe’s job is essentially to make New York City a safer place for criminals and honest people alike.

Joe chased terrorists during the first novels in the Joe the Bouncer series, a contrivance that was getting old. In The Wild Life, Gordon diversifies Joe’s services. Someone has been making prstitutes disappear. The crime bosses feel protective of working girls, particularly when they work in establishments that are under their protection. A Romanian woman who worked in a dungeon was befriended by Joe’s employer before her dead body washed up. While the plot broadly involves political corruption, Joe’s concern is limited to the working women who end up chained to a wall until they meet their demise.

Joe’s detective work brings him close to the killer relatively quickly. Gordon employs a bit of misdirection as to the killer’s identity, but the universe of possible suspects is quite limited. This is a character-driven action story more than a whodunit.

Joe has fun pretending to be a person of wealth so he can hobnob with suspects of wealth. The impersonation is fun for the reader as well, as it gives Joe a chance to be sneaky and snarky. The action is typical movie fare, highlighted by a motorcycle chase and a few brawls.

The plot of The Wild Life isn’t particularly creative. As a middle-tier action novel, it doesn’t need to be. I suspect readers stick to this series because Joe is easy to like, the kind of morally flawed character whose virtues outweigh his questionable sense of morality. He enjoys reading, which makes him a sympathetic killer. And if he kills someone, the victim probably has it coming, at least in Joe’s calculus of good and evil.

Joe’s awkward relationship with the FBI agent adds interest to the story, as does the stereotyped collection of underworld leaders who, apart from running criminal organizations, share familiar qualities of older people who come together to play cards and gripe about younger people. The exception is Yelena, a younger Russian woman who took over her criminal organization in an earlier novel and who also has an awkward relationship with Joe — awkward for Joe, at any rate. The entire cast of characters and the unique nature of Joe as an underworld enforcer who does jobs that the police should be doing make the entire series enjoyable, even if no particular entry in the series stands out as better than the others.

RECOMMENDED

Rosebud by Paul Cornell

Published by Tordotcom on April 26, 2022

The five crew members of the Rosebud are artificial intelligences taking the forms of (respectively) a goth, an aristocratic scientist, a swarm of insects, a half-tiger person, and a body creation artist (and his family, all waving their hands at once). Humans in physical bodies wouldn’t fit on the Rosebud because the ship is tiny. Some were human once. Bob was made to believe he was human, but he was created as a Russian bot to troll social media. Quin is a product of insects’ foray into AI, an experiment that didn’t go over well with humans, leading to hive burnings that are part of Quin’s ancestral memory. This is a recycled crew that, to some extent, is grateful to have a continuing digital existence.

The Company dispatched the Rosebud in the distant past to send rocks on a path that will take them near Earth, where other ships will mine them for valuable ores and minerals. The crew has a vague understanding of Earth. At least when they were created, it was a repressive place where transgenders had to identify themselves with pink and blue badges.

The Rosebud has detected a sphere that must be another tiny ship because it is too smooth and regular in appearance to be a rock. Is it a pirate ship? Is it the product of alien technology? The greatest fear of the Rosebud’s crew is that the Company will come to investigate the sphere and, in the process, learn that the AIs haven’t been following protocol. In the absence of updates, they have started to experience the horror of freedom. They kind of like it and don’t want the Company to mess with it. They regularly profess their loyalty to the Company, their gratitude that the Company saved them, in the hope that the Company will not decide they need to be reprogrammed.

The crew decides to conduct its own investigation, traveling to the sphere in artificial bodies that include a tiger-man, a wasp, Dracula, the body once inhabited by the aristocratic scientist, and Bob Ross (the TV artist who, older readers might recall, once taught viewers to paint). After they make contact, they experience moments which their memories and their memory backups seem to diverge. They develop a theory about alternate futures and altered pasts based on entangled particles and probability waves, an aspect of theoretical physics that fascinates me despite my utter inability to wrap my head around it.

The story makes clever use of theoretical physics, eventually making the reader understand that the past is whatever you want it to be, at least if you know how to control entangled particles. Paul Cornell leaves it to the reader’s imagination to fill in much of the story, including the origin and role of the mysterious Company. That’s not a problem for science fiction junkies, as a powerful Company, a private enterprise that functions as a (or the) government, is a fixture of futuristic fiction.

The theme of AIs who aspire to some sort of personhood is another fixture, but that’s not actually what’s happening in Rosebud. Some of the AIs are based on people who once lived and none of them really aspire to be human. They’re just happy to have developed their own personalities and, in that limited sense, to have slipped the Company’s yoke. That’s an interesting idea. Cornell develops the idea about as much as it needs to be developed to tell a story that comes to a satisfying resolution — or at least one that satisfies the characters, bearing in mind that aliens who control entangled particles, like writers, can create any ending they want, including one that makes everyone happy.

RECOMMENDED

Dream Town by David Baldacci

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 19, 2022

Dream Town is the third novel to feature David Baldacci's private investigator from the past, Aloysius Archer. The novel takes place in 1952-53 and is set in Los Angeles, a prime location of American noir in the last decade of noir’s golden age. Compared to crime writers of the 1950s, Baldacci is more David Goodis than Jim Thompson. Like Goodis’ protagonists, Archer isn’t particularly hard-boiled, but Baldacci is similar to Thompson in capturing the corrupt atmosphere that contaminates glitter and shatters dreams of the City of Angels.

The novel’s gritty plot involves human and drug trafficking. Mix in blackmail, murder, and kinky sex in a soulless city and you’ve got the elements of a noir novel. The characters are largely connected to the movie industry, organized crime, or both.

Archer brings a twenty-first century attitude about women to the 1950s as he condemns a culture that requires women to sleep their way to success but won’t allow successful women to sign mortgages without a male co-signer. Well, good for Archer, but I’m not convinced a male PI in 1953 would have shared Thompson’s vision of a better world. I was more convinced by the female characters who understand the unfairness of a patriarchal industry (and society) but are determined to succeed — in some cases, by adopting the corrupt tactics of the men who control the system.

Archer works with his mentor, Willie Dash, in the Bay Area. He’s in LA to see Liberty Callahan, with whom he has (or had) a thing. They’re having dinner when Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter and friend of Liberty’s, turns up and tells Liberty of her fear that someone is trying to kill her. When Liberty explains that Archer is a private investigator, Lamb hires Archer to track down the source of her fear. Lamb promptly disappears, leaving Archer with a missing person investigation.

Archer’s investigation begins in Lamb’s house, where a man has answered the phone without identifying himself. Archer trips over a dead body in the house and, in the tradition of private eye novels in every era, is hit on the head and left in the house with the body.

Baldacci creates a seedy atmosphere with a mob-controlled establishment in Chinatown that takes advantage of desperate immigrants and blackmail victims to serve the unorthodox sexual interests of powerful men. Following clues to Lamb’s disappearance, Archer encounters violence in Chinatown, and on a beach where he stumbles across smugglers, and in Vegas and Lake Tahoe, and basically everywhere he goes. Archer is a violence magnet, an essential feature of a noir protagonist. Shootouts, fistfights, and car chases ensue.

The novel resolves, at least temporarily, Archer’s uncertain relationship with Liberty. It also portends a change in Archer’s career. He likes the Bay Area, but there’s more work available in LA and there’s something appealing about searching for reality in a city that is based on illusion.

The plot is intricate but, unlike a Chandler novel, it makes sense. Readers might want to make notes to keep track of all the relationships between the characters, and perhaps use pens of different colors to make clear that relationships change as the story evolves. The intricacy will keep the reader on his or her toes, making it a challenge to guess Lamb’s fate and the roles of the various characters who may or may not have been involved in her disappearance. If the ending is not entirely unexpected, that’s only because many possible endings are consistent with the plot. The one Baldacci chose is as good as any. Readers who enjoy 1950s noir and don’t want to revisit the originals should be entertained by Baldacci’s attempt to recapture the past.

RECOMMENDED