The Rodney King riots, war crimes, and a small-town power elite

A review of The Black Box, by Michael Connelly

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Harry Bosch never dies — but he gets older as Michael Connelly’s superb series of Los Angeles police procedurals continues growing longer. In The Black Box, the 18th of the Harry Bosch novels and the 33rd of Connelly’s books, Bosch’s mind is undimmed but his body is showing signs of age as he digs deeply into a 20-year-old mystery that haunted him as a cop on the beat.

Now a seasoned detective in the LAPD’s Open Unsolved Unit, Harry jumps at the chance to take a crack at the unsolved murder of Anneke Jesperson, a Danish war correspondent who mysteriously died of a gunshot during the Rodney King riots in South Central L.A. Harry and his partner had been called to the scene of her murder 20 years earlier but because there were so many victims they were forced to move on to yet another murder scene as soon as they’d called the coroner. However, once Harry has begun to dig his teeth into the scant evidence available, his boss in the Open Unsolved Unit begins an intense effort to force him off the case. As in so many of Harry’s cases, police politics has intervened, and he finds himself forced to battle the LAPD all the while he pursues the growing signs of a conspiracy in Jesperson’s murder and the involvement of war crimes in the case.

In most of the Harry Bosch stories, events unfold exclusively within Los Angeles. However, the Jesperson case takes Harry far afield into California’s Central Valley, where he is forced to confront the grim presence of a small town’s power elite. There, the story takes a turn reminiscent of the late Ross McDonald’s 18 Lew Archer novels, which I devoured when much younger.

As always, Harry’s dogged persistence wins the day, and Connelly’s spare but smoothly flowing writing is fully satisfying. In previous posts, I’ve reviewed two of Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels, The Reversal here and The Drop here. 

The 10 best mysteries and thrillers I’ve read in 2012

1. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

This is the story of Amy Elliott Dunne and Nick Dunne, the perfect couple in the ideal marriage. It’s a storybook tale . . . or maybe it isn’t. One day Amy goes missing, and it slowly begins to dawn on you that one (or both) of the two is a sociopath. Gone Girl is plotted almost as diabolically as Catch 22. It’s near-perfect, with jaw-dropping shocks and shivers all the way to the very last page.

2. Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith

The third book in a trilogy, Agent 6 concludes the story of Leo Demidov, a World War II hero and later an agent in Stalin’s secret police. The book opens in 1950 with Leo in thrall to the Sovet State, a senior officer in the MGB (predecessor to the KGB and to today’s FSB) charged with training newly recruited agents. Jesse Austin, a world-famous African-American singer closely resembling Paul Robeson, is visiting Moscow, where he will perform and publicly extol the accomplishments of the Soviet regime as he sees them. Leo is detailed to help ensure that Austin is shielded from the realities of life in Moscow.

3. The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, by Alexander McCall Smith

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection is the 13th and latest in Smith’s best-known series of novels about the #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Gaborone, the capital of the small, land-locked nation of Botswana, bordering South Africa. To my mind, it’s one of the best. As always, the story revolves around the lives of Mma (“Ms.”) Precious Ramotswe, founder and proprietor of the agency, and her consistently exasperating assistant, Mma Grace Makutsi.

4. The Midnight House, by Alex Berenson

The events that take place in 2008 in the Midnight House — a site in Poland where prisoners in the “war on terror” are interrogated and often tortured — are so explosive, and so shocking, that they lead to an upheaval in relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, end the career of a senior U.S. intelligence official, and spark a series of brutal murders. There’s nothing subtle about this gripping novel.

5. The Silent Oligarch, by Chris Morgan Jones

This finely crafted novel revolves around an obscure Russian bureaucrat named Konstantin Malin, a lifer in the Ministry of Oil and Industry who controls a large share of his country’s oil and gas industry, the world’s largest. His front man is an English expat lawyer in Moscow, Richard Lack, whose cozy life in Moscow begins coming apart when a Greek oilman, one of the many wealthy businessmen Malin has cheated, decides to unmask Malin’s fraud and put him out of business.

6. Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst

It is late in 1938, with Europe on the brink of war. With Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich and the tragedy of Kristallnacht unfolding in the background, an Austrian-born Hollywood film star named Fredric Stahl has come to Paris at the behest of Jack Warner to star on loan to Paramount Pictures in a war movie. The resolutely anti-Nazi Stahl finds himself targeted by Nazi operatives intent on enmeshing him in their propaganda machine.

7. Breakdown, by Sara Paretsky

Paretsky’s 14th V. I. Warshawski novel begins with seeming innocence with a gaggle of tweener girls dancing under the moonlight in an abandoned cemetery. Soon enough, however, we find ourselves enmeshed in the mysteries of some of Chicago’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens as well as a roomful of other indelibly drawn characters who illustrate Chicago at its best — and its worst.

8. 36 Yalta Boulevard, by Olen Steinhauer

The third novel in Olen Steinhauer’s outstanding Central European cycle is set in 1966-67. Brano Sev, a World War II partisan fighter turned secret policeman in an unnamed Soviet satellite country, has been exiled to work in a factory as punishment for an espionage scandal that erupted after he was sent on assignment to Vienna. Without warning, his superiors temporarily reinstate him as a major in the security service, and send him off to his home village, where he is to investigate why a defector has suddenly returned to the village and what he’s planning to do. The ensuing complications threaten not just to end Brano’s career but possibly his life as well.

9. The Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville

You may never have read a murder mystery like this one. The protagonist, Gerry Fegan, is a former hit man for the IRA responsible for the deaths of twelve people (the “ghosts” of the title), and it’s never much of a mystery when he begins killing again. The mystery lies deeper, somewhere in the vicinity of his stunted family life and the treacherous relationships among the others in his violence-prone faction. As Fegan reflects, “You can’t choose where you belong, and where you don’t. But what if the place you don’t belong is the only place you have left?”

10. Criminal, by Karin Slaughter

In every one of Karin Slaughter’s previous novels of murder and mayhem in the Deep South, Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) officer Will Trent and his boss, Amanda Wagner, GBI’s deputy commander, were characters shrouded in mystery, their actions frequently difficult to understand. In Criminal, Slaughter rips off the shrouds. This is an unusually suspenseful, affecting, and, in the end, deeply satisfying story.

Books that make great gifts

You won’t find coffee-table art books, slim volumes of poetry, or door-stopper romance novels among the twenty recommendations here, but you will find a wide range of great fiction and nonfiction: eight novels, eight nonfiction books, and four mysteries and thrillers are featured in this post. (Each of the titles below is linked to my full review.)

TRADE FICTION

Istanbul Passage, by Joseph Kanon

Intrigue, romance, and betrayal in the turbulent world of espionage in post-World War II Istanbul.

They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, by Christopher Buckley

A wildly funny send-up of life inside the Beltway — and in the Forbidden City — by one of the greatest comic writers in the business today.

 

The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi

22nd-Century Bangkok after the seas have risen and humanity is struggling to survive. One of the best science-fiction novels I’ve ever read.

The Fear Index, by Robert Harris

An engrossing thriller about high finance and high-speed trading on the securities markets, by the author of Pompeii, Enigma, and Fatherland.

The Debba, by Avner Mandelman

The history of Israel from Independence to the present as reflected in a heart-pounding tale of intrigue and conflict between Arab and Jew.

Spies of the Balkans, by Alan Furst

Set in Salonika, Greece, in the early years of World War II, this complex story of espionage and war involves an underground railway for Jews escaping Hitler and an anti-Nazi coup in what was then Yugoslavia.

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks

An insightful and revealing novel about the plague in England by one of today’s best historical novels, grounded in history but delving deep into the emotional realities of individual people as they might have been.

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh reaffirms his place as one of contemporary India’s greatest writers with this extraordinarily rich tale of class conflict, exploitation, and forbidden love against the background of the opium trade in the years leading up to the Opium War of the mid-19th Century.

NONFICTION

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by David Quammen

A brilliant account of the emergence of deadly new infectious diseases around the world — those you’ve heard of, and those you haven’t — with gripping accounts of the scientists, physicians, and veterinarians who are on humanity’s front line of defense against them.

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt

Illuminating, insightful, provocative — there is no way to overstate the brilliance of this account of the long-obscure ancient thinkers whose insights seeded the Renaissance in Europe and inspired Thomas Jefferson.

The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, by Robert D. Kaplan

You’ll never look at global politics or world history the same way you did if you read this masterful study of the intertwined roles of geography and history in shaping human events and the destiny of nations.

Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, by Arthur Herman

Yesterday’s heroes come to life in this fascinating tale of the astonishing conversion of America’s faltering peacetime economy into the “arsenal of nations” that supplied the ships, tanks, and guns used to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Operation Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben McIntyre

If your image of successful spies has been formed by Ian Fleming’s books or even John Le Carre’s, you’ll be blown away by the eccentrics and impostors who played large roles in Britain’s successful efforts to draw Hitler’s attention away from the Normandy Invasion.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, by Robert Caro

It may be difficult for one who didn’t experience the 1960s as an adult to appreciate the consequential impact of Johnson’s career,

both for good and for bad. This extraordinary book helps close the gap.

The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan

A readable and inspiring survey of social entrepreneurship around the world and of the brilliant individuals who are expanding its reach at a breakneck pace.

The Self-Made Myth, and the Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed, by Brian Miller and Mike Lapham

Chances are, you already know that Ayn Rand’s portrait of the heroic “job creator” is fraudulent. This outstanding little book explains why, revealing how dependent on government and community support are even the most successful corporations.

MYSTERIES AND THRILLERS

Liberation Movements, by Olen Steinhauer

A suspenseful tale of love, betrayal, and terrorism set in Eastern Europe during the heyday of post-War Communism, with two interlocking stories spanning the years 1968 to 1975.

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

Few murder mysteries have kept me guessing longer or propelled me toward the finish with such speed and power. An extraordinary example of the mystery writer’s craft.

The Midnight House, by Alex Berenson

The events that take place in the Midnight House over a two-month period in 2008 are so explosive, and so shocking, that they lead to an upheaval in relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, end the career of a senior U.S. intelligence official, and spark a series of brutal murders.

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, by Alexander McCall Smith

Mma Precious Ramotswe, proprietor of Botswana’s #1 Ladies Detective Agency, is listening to her assistant, Mma Makutsi, cheer up one of Mma Ramotswe’s best friends, Mma Potokwane. “’Nobody is useless,’ Mma Makutsi said heatedly, ‘and you are less useless than nobody else, Mma. Definitely.’ This remark was greeted with silence while Mma Ramotswe and Mma Potokwane had tried to work out what it meant. The spirit in which it was made, though, was clear enough, and Mma Potokwane simply thanked her.”

John Sandford’s latest best-seller: Murder on the run in rural Minnesota

A review of Mad River, by John Sandford

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Virgil Flowers is not my kind of guy.

For starters, Virgil is a “pistol-packing, shit-kicking” type who drives a pickup and loves fishing, hunting, and arguing in bars about the best country singer of all time. The son of a conservative Lutheran pastor in rural Minnesota who still goes to church with his parents from time to time, he’s been divorced three times. He is also about six-one, blond, and thin, so if you know me you know I hate him. On the other hand, he’s an accomplished nonfiction writer who has been published in The New York Times Magazine and is now about to sign a contract for a major piece with Vanity Fair.

Oh, and by the way, Virgil is also an agent for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) who has piled up so impressive a record on high-profile cases that he has the governor on speed-dial – and he is the protagonist of a series of crime novels set in the upper Midwest by the pseudonymous John Sandford, who was an award-winning journalist in another life and under a different name.

In Mad River, Virgil has no sooner returned from a vacation in, of all places, the Bahamas when his boss, Lucas Davenport, assigns him to follow up on a brutal and seemingly senseless murder in a small rural town near Virgil’s home base in Mankato. One murder has turned into two by the time Virgil arrives in Bigham, the site of the first murder, and two more are discovered before Virgil and the disreputable local Sheriff can puzzle out what happened the first time around. Soon enough, however, it becomes clear that a couple of local young people, or maybe three of them, have gone on a killing spree. Mad River tells the unfolding tale of Virgil’s, and the Sheriff’s, rush to get to the killers first—Virgil, to take them in for prosecution, the Sheriff, to kill them on the spot.

This latest best-selling work from John Sandford – number six in the Virgil Flowers series – bears all the characteristics of the author’s trademark mastery of suspense. The story unfolds unpredictably, and, for a change, even ends in surprise. Nonetheless, I think Sandford (or his editor) may have been asleep at the wheel on this one. With only a few exceptions, every character in this novel, major or minor, is described as “thin” – not “skinny,” “slender,” “rail-thin,” “emaciated,” “skeletal,” “reedy,” or “light-weight,” but simply “thin.” To my mind, this seems an abuse of the writer’s spare, colloquial style, and as an editor by nature I find it offensive. Anyway, do Minnesotans really eat that little?

All told, Sandford has written 34 novels, including 22 in his “Prey” series, in which Lucas Davenport of the BCA is the central character and Virgil Flowers is usually in the supporting cast. In this blog I’ve previously reviewed Phantom Prey, Storm Prey, and Stolen Prey in the Davenport series and Shock Wave featuring Flowers.

Surprises galore in this beautifully crafted novel of crime and punishment in Atlanta

A review of Criminal, by Karin Slaughter

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

In every one of Karin Slaughter’s previous novels of murder and mayhem in the Deep South, Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) officer Will Trent and his boss, Amanda Wagner, GBI’s deputy commander, were characters shrouded in mystery, their actions frequently difficult to understand. In Criminal, Slaughter rips off the shrouds. This is an unusually suspenseful, affecting, and, in the end, deeply satisfying story.

The action in Criminal shifts repeatedly from the present day to 1975 and back again, and the connections between the events in those two years become clear only well into the book. Amanda is a central figure in both strands of the story – beginning her career in the Atlanta Police Department in 1975 and nearing retirement amid the latter-day events. Will Trent takes center stage on the contemporary scene, his new romance with Dr. Sara Linton blossoming and then sorely tested as the action unfolds.

The novel opens in 1975 with the disappearance of Lucy Bennett, a rich girl gone bad, hooked on heroin and working the streets under the thumb of a pimp who goes by the name of Juice. Only in the final pages of the novel do we come to understand fully what happened to Lucy, and why.

Slaughter writes from an omniscient perspective, shifting the viewpoint from time to time as one character or another moves on-stage. Her prose is spare and pulls no punches. Although her characters harbor secrets that will only later be revealed, there is nothing manipulative about the author’s failure to disclose what they know any more quickly than they themselves would be likely to do so.

Slaughter’s research into the Atlanta Police Department of the mid-1970s was extensive, and what she reveals about its egregiously bad behavior in that era is deeply troubling. Amanda Wagner’s experience as a rookie officer, and that of her female friends, is shocking – though perhaps no more so than what female officers experienced at the time in other law enforcement departments where their presence was a novelty. Slaughter’s sensitive treatment of race relations during that era is no less revealing.

To date, Karin Slaughter has written a total of 12 novels featuring Will Trent and Sara Linton. I previously reviewed Broken and Blindsighted, both of which are set in the small Georgia town where Dr. Linton previously ran a children’s health clinic and served part-time as medical examiner. I’m sure I’ll be reading more of Slaughter’s novels.

Love, betrayal, and terrorism behind the Iron Curtain

A review of Liberation Movements, by Olen Steinhauer

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Mystery piles atop mystery in this fourth installment of Olen Steinhauer’s five-novel cycle of life behind the Iron Curtain. The previous books were set in decades past, the post-war 40s, 50s, and 60s. In Liberation Movements, the action takes place in 1968 and 1975, relating two seemingly unconnected stories that only much later merge, raising yet more mysterious questions.

Structurally, the plot revolves around Peter Husak and Katja Drdova, the former a Czech student in Prague who reacts with diffidence to the 1968 uprising against Communist rule, the latter a homicide detective in a neighboring country a few years younger than Peter whose story unfolds in 1975. As the action rockets forward through alternating chapters set in these two pivotal years, the connection between them slowly emerges. Along the way, we find ourselves caught up in an airplane hijacking engineered by Armenian terrorists, an investigation of a seemingly trivial seven-year-old murder, and troubling reports of parapsychological research by the secret police, and we catch glimpses of a mysterious secret policeman known to be close to the Lieutenant General who heads the secret police. Truth to tell, it’s monumentally confusing for a long time.

The five members of the homicide department form a loose thread that links all four novels. Though the cast of characters shifts over the years, there is always at least one principal actor who was on the scene in The Bridge of Sighs, the first book in the cycle, set in 1948. In Liberation Movements, the connector is Colonel Brano Sev, the close-mouthed secret policeman who occupies a desk in the homicide department, now an old man with a formidable reputation for toughness and results. (Emil Brod, a rookie in the first book, has become chief of homicide by 1975 but stays in the background.)

Brano Sev plays a central role in Liberation Movements, as does his young protégé, Gavra Noukas, a closeted gay man new to the Militia. Under Brano’s tutelage, Gavra’s life becomes enmeshed in the improbable story of a beautiful young woman with alleged psychic powers and her shadowy handler in the secret police.

Liberation Movements is rich with fully developed characters and the fascinating interplay of seemingly unrelated plotlines. The story of the 1915 Armenian genocide weaves in and out of the tale. Sadly, the book is flawed by the author’s failure to resolve the biggest mystery of all. It’s well worth reading nonetheless, for Steinhauer’s mastery of character development and his sure way with words.

Looking for an unconventional thriller? Read this book

A review of The Prophet, by Michael Koryta

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

I grew up in a gritty Ohio industrial town before industry fled and the rust set in. But Lima, Ohio, in the 1950s seemed a lot more like Buzz Bissinger’s Odessa, Texas, in Friday Night Lights than nearby Chambers, Ohio, of The Prophet by Michael Koryta. Even nearly 60 years ago, the racial tensions, the gangs, and the class conflicts were clearly in evidence in my home town, just as they were in Odessa decades later. Those overarching facts of life in the Rust Belt were hard to find in Chambers.

Instead, the story Koryta tells is a tale of two brothers whose lives are dominated by football and by the senseless murder of their sister 22 years ago. Adam Austin, the elder brother, now 40 and a bail bondsman, led Chambers High School to the team’s last state championship as a bruising running back who cleared the field for one touchdown after another. His younger brother, Keith, is the winning football coach with an unbeaten team that could go all the way again this year. Keith, a devoutly religious man who is as much minister to the team as coach, is married and has two young children. Adam lives with the the love of his life, his high school sweetheart, now married to a man in state prison. With the murder of his sister still vivid in his mind on a daily basis, he spends most of his time either chasing criminals or bailing them out.

Adam and Keith are suddenly shocked out of their routines when a 17-year-old woman, the girlfriend of Keith’s all-state running back, is brutally murdered the night the Chambers football team wins a place in the state finals. Rachel Bond’s death so clearly parallels their sister’s so many years ago that both brothers are drawn deeply into the unfolding investigation and the violence that follows.

The fictional town of Chambers figures in this story in its obsession with football, its economic troubles, and its location in Northeastern Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie, where rain and snow and cold penetrate every nook and cranny of life. Had Koryta delved more deeply into the underlying fissures of the town’s society, The Prophet might have achieved literary distinction. However, as a novel of suspense that holds the reader’s attention until the last mystery is solved, this book is superb.

Mental disorders on parade in this murder mystery set in Ireland today

A review of Broken Harbor, by Tana French

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

You probably wouldn’t like Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy, the Dublin homicide detective whose story dominates the psychological thriller Broken Harbor. Mick is 42, a grizzled veteran of Dublin’s toughest cases, whose high “solve rate” has long been the talk of the Murder Squad. He’s a tough guy, a loner, largely friendless, who rarely talks about himself; many find him arrogant. At work, Mick is a methodical, by-the-book detective who would never stoop to the shady workarounds of many of his colleagues — and as a result is detested more than admired. Recently, though, Mick screwed up a big case and was sidelined by the bosses. Now he has a chance to redeem himself with another serious, high-profile case: the mass murder of a family in a coastal town once called Broken Harbor.

Mick and Richie, his rookie partner, set out for Broken Harbor to examine the scene where Patrick Spain and his two young children lie dead, their mother, Jenny, on the verge of death in the ICU. It quickly becomes clear that the obvious explanation of what happened isn’t obvious at all. The case is full of unexplained circumstances, hidden clues, and contradictions which embroil the two detectives in a protracted investigation that threatens to end both their careers.

Tana French wrote Broken Harbor in Mick Kennedy’s voice, diving deeply into his own troubled family history, which, it turns out, is closely associated with the old town of Broken Harbor. French is a brilliant stylist and a perceptive observer of human behavior. She’s able to hold the reader’s attention through lengthy passages of soul-searching dialogue, because the clues to this case lie as much in the words spoken and written as in the physical evidence.

Here’s Mick, musing on the changes in Irish society: “Wild got into the air like a virus, and it’s spreading. Watch the packs of kids roaming inner-city estates, mindless and brakeless as baboons, looking for something or someone to wreck. Watch the businessmen shoving past pregnant women for a seat on the train, using their 4x4s to force smaller cars out of their way, purple-faced and outraged when the world dares to contradict them. Watch the teenagers throw screaming stamping tantrums when, for once, they can’t have it the second they want it. Everything that stops us being animals is eroding, washing away like sand, going and gone.”

Mick again, in the desolation of the unfinished “luxury” housing estate that once was Broken Harbor: “It looked like the end of the world. I half-expected feral dogs to slink up around the car when I stopped, last survivors to come staggering and moaning out of skeleton houses.”

This novel transcends the boundaries of the mystery genre by painting a vivid picture of Ireland after the recent crash, which impoverished millions of the Irish middle class and left the countryside littered with half-finished housing developments and high-rises. The murders themselves, and the circumstances of the Spain family that preceded them, bring life (and death) to this scene.

Broken Harbor is Tana French’s fourth novel featuring the cases — and the neuroses — of the detectives who form the fictional Dublin Murder Squad. The Irish-American theatrical actor launched her literary career in her 30s with the publication of In the Woods, to great acclaim, awards, and large sales. This was followed by Faithful Place (previously reviewed here) and Likeness.

I’m certain I would have enjoyed Broken Harbor as much as I did Tana French’s previous books if it weren’t for a certain &^$%^ book reviewer at The New York Times who revealed major elements of the plot. I had  the misfortune of reading her review when I had barely started reading the book. Grrrrrrr!

Spies in conflict in contemporary Europe

A review of A Foreign Country, by Charles Cumming

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Although its pace picks up sharply about two-thirds of the way through the book and builds to a crescendo at the end, A Foreign Country is the slowest-paced and most contemplative of Charles Cumming’s spy stories.

MI6 agent Thomas Kell has been sacked because of what he believes to be political expediency by the Old Guard now running the shop. Assigned to collaborate with American operatives in Iraq interrogating prisoners, he was forced to take the rap when they turned to torture to extricate information from a British citizen. He has been out of work for months and feeling sorry for himself, “his loyalty to the newly minted high priests of SIS . . . close to nonexistent. ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,’ he thought, remembering the words of E. M. Forster, ‘I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ For the first time in his life, that notion made sense to him.”

When Kell is called up “out of the cold” by one of the Old Guard to investigate the shocking disappearance of an old friend, SIS Chief-designate Amelia Levene, he is confronted with Forster’s dilemma. He chooses friendship, pursuing Amelia’s trail and keeping his bosses in ignorance. As Kell digs more deeply into the mystery, he comes face to face with a crew of renegade agents of the French secret service (the folks who sank the Rainbow Warrior), with the future of the United Kingdom at stake.

A Foreign Country is a complex tale that interweaves threads of deadly inter-service rivalry and the secrets hidden in Kell’s and Levene’s past. Both characters are fully realized, warts and all, and their stories unfold against a thoroughly credible backdrop of intrigue in contemporary Europe and North Africa.

A Foreign Country is the sixth spy novel Charles Cumming has written since 2001. In this blog I have previously reviewed A Spy by Nature (the first of the six),  The Spanish Game, The Trinity Six, and Typhoon. (Links will take you to those reviews.)

Suspense galore in John Sandford’s latest Lucas Davenport novel

A review of Stolen Prey, by John Sandford

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

There’s something a little different about this novel. In 21 previous entries in the Lucas Davenport series, John Sandford always managed to slip in wry comments here and there, exposing the dark humor that characterizes the banter among the agents of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Somehow, though, there was a lot more of that humor in this novel than I can recall reading before in several earlier books — despite the unusually horrific details of the case that senior agent Lucas Davenport takes on. Also, I don’t recall having gotten such a clear physical picture of Davenport than I got from this book. But maybe all this has been out there before. After all, this was the 22nd in the series, and I certainly haven’t read them all.

This tale is populated by a truly motley crew: three very young hitmen from a Mexican drug cartel who are called Uno, Dos, and Tres, because they’re all named Juan; a software millionaire and his young family; two senior agents from the Mexican Federal Police; two low-life methamphetamine addicts who (don’t gag) spend a lot of time hauling horseshit around the countryside; a disagreeable BCA agent who is ostensibly in charge of the case that Lucas will eventually solve (of course!); and — I almost forgot — the four criminals at the center of this very complex story.

The action begins when Lucas is called to the scene of a truly gruesome murder of a family of four, with no evidence and no leads to the killers or why they killed. It quickly transpires that the murder has something to do with the disappearance of $22 million from a Minneapolis bank, though whose money it is and where it went are completely unknown. I won’t say more, because the pleasure of reading this beautifully executed mysterty is all in the discovery. And, like any good thriller, it’s full of twists, turns, and surprises.

Here, then, is another great effort from a master of the crime genre, John Sandford. Previously, I’ve reviewed three other books in the Lucas Davenport series: Shock Wave, Storm Prey, and Phantom Prey. (The underlining means my reviews are linked to the titles.)