Liars' Legacy by Taylor Stevens

Published by Kensington on December 31, 2019

The Russians are up to no good in Liars' Legacy, the second novel in Taylor Stevens’ Jack and Jill series. An American intelligence bureaucrat named Hayes is also up to no good, in the sense that he wants to further his own interests rather than the country’s.

The plot involves “a son trying to escape his mother’s past and hoping to find a father.” The father is Dimitri Vasiliev, a KGB officer, and the mother is Clare, who at the time of her pregnancy was an American agent in Moscow. Jack and Jill have been shaped by Clare to be world-class assassins. As one might expect, they didn’t receive the kind of nurturing from Clare that children crave, but like Johnny Cash’s legendary Boy Named Sue, adversity imposed by a parent teaches them to survive. That talent comes in handy, given the number of killers who try to take them out as the story unfolds.

Other key characters are also in the killing business. Kara works for a nebulous government agency that has decided to kill the assassins on the Broker’s list, a list that includes Chris Holden. Kara is an analyst rather than a trigger puller, but events force her into the field when she is assigned to a tactical team that chases a dangerous target — until the target starts chasing her team. Up the chain of command from Kara is Liv Wilson, “a politics-playing, ass kissing ladder climber,” a “woman who saw competence in other women as a threat to her own position and who’d sabotage in a hundred petty ways."

The story begins in the aftermath of the Broker’s death, the Broker having been established in Liar’s Paradox as “the man who played king against king and bartered souls for national secrets, who’d negotiated hits between buyers and assassins, and who’d forced order onto lawless chaos.” A couple of hit squads seem to be following Holden on a flight from Dallas to Frankfurt, but maybe things are not as they seem. Holden is following Jack and Jill, Jack’s ticket having been purchased by someone who claimed the ability to connect him with Dimitri, the father that the twins have never met. Jill is along for the ride to watch Jack’s back, although she hopes that the search for Dimitry will “put meaning to their mother’s past and make some sense of an upturned childhood.” Jack’s feelings about Clare are less complex; he hates her for forcing him to live a life of lies, always looking over his shoulder for real or imagined threats.

Frankfurt is a step on a journey to Berlin, where the players converge. The twins are tracking their father while the Russians, the Americans, and Holden are tracking the twins. Later destinations in the journey include Prague and the United States, where events transpire that include a Russian plan to sow chaos by assassinating one or more American politicians. Jack might be tasked with one of those killings in a twisty plot that always has the reader wondering whether Jack, Jill, Holden, and Kara will eventually succeed in killing each other as well as their targets or pursuers.

Stevens manages to keep the story moving at a steady pace without dumbing down the plot. She writes action scenes that compare favorably with the best action-thriller writers. Characterization is nevertheless her strength. Holden thinks Jill is “a few sane days shy of crazy,” an apt observation given her love-hate relationship with Jack, Clare, and the world. Holden, who was “delivered as a trophy” to the man who ordered his mother’s death, is nearly as complex as the twins. Yet while none of the characters act out of high moral purpose, save possibly for Kara, they are all capable of kindness and empathy.

Taylor Stevens has earned critical acclaim as a thriller writer, but I’m not sure she has the same following as lesser writers who churn out books that readers might find more comforting. Her childhood history is a compelling story and her experience overcoming adversity plainly informs her writing. I enjoyed her Vanessa Michael Munroe series and I’m now an equal fan of Jack and Jill.

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Happy New Year!

A Small Town by Thomas Perry

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on December 17, 2019

A Small Town is a vigilante story. To make vigilantism seem justified, thriller writers concoct dastardly crimes committed by evil villains so that readers will root for the vigilantes. In the logic of thrillerworld, if bad guys are bad enough, it’s okay for good guys to murder them. It isn’t surprising that Thomas Perry made one of the killers a psychotic racist cult leader because even liberals would agree that it is morally correct to murder a racist, right? Wrong. The protagonist’s stunning hypocrisy might make her an interesting character if her character flaws were recognized and explored, but Perry wants the reader to cheer on a serial killer who never pauses to consider whether being a serial killer might be morally blameworthy. I just can't root for shallow protagonists.

The bad guys in this story are federal prisoners who commit an improbable escape, killing a bunch of corrections officers and arming themselves in the process. Mind you, this is a minimum-to-medium security prison, the kind that houses tax evaders and people who commit credit card fraud, but we’re told that hardcore criminals were transferred there because more secure prisons were overcrowded. It isn’t clear that the hardcore criminals even committed federal crimes (murder is usually a state crime), but put that aside. Violent criminals with years left to serve don’t get sent to a federal prison with a low security level, even at the request of a blackmailed Bureau of Prisons bureaucrat, making the premise hard to swallow. But the setup isn’t nearly as difficult to buy into as the plot that follows.

In the two years since the prison break, the FBI hasn’t managed to find any of the twelve worst bad guys (perhaps not surprising since that duty would primarily fall upon the U.S. Marshals). Our hero, a detective named Kate, decides to resign from her small-town cop job so she can track down the twelve escapees and go full vigilante on them. Can this plucky small-town cop succeed where federal agents cannot? You know that answer to that question. In fact, she manages to find them rather easily and dispatches them without working up a sweat. The feds were apparently too dim to consider some of the obvious steps she takes to find the killers.

Kate takes the crime spree personally because her lover (married to a woman with MS so we’re supposed to forgive him for having an affair) was a casualty of the bad guys. That’s one of many contrivances designed to manipulate the reader into cheering for Kate despite her decision to betray everything a law enforcement officer should believe in by becoming a serial killer. I didn’t find either her cause or her character to be noble.

Apart from being a serial killer, Kate carries an illegal “numberless Glock” with an illegal “silencer screwed on.” Where does she get her illegal weaponry? More importantly, why does a police officer who should be dedicated to arresting people who violate firearms laws feel no qualms about violating them herself? The moral seems to be that if you think you have a good justification to break the law, it’s just fine to do so. The prisoners probably felt justified in escaping, but Kate believes her justification is superior to theirs. The prisoners and Kate are both wrong. We are a country of laws precisely to prevent people like Kate from becoming their own law.

Even less believable is that Kate’s quest is funded by the mayor and city council members who redirect a crime fighting grant to her personal use. I found it hard to swallow that so many people, even in a small town where leaders tend to be like-minded, would willingly conspire to commit federal and state felonies by misusing a federal grant to fund a contract killer. The mind simply boggles.

A vigilante novel needs to do something special to earn my recommendation. Perry has never been a gifted wordsmith, although he sometimes tells a good story. A Small Town does nothing to overcome its shallow premise. The narrative suffers from redundancy, as the reader is frequently reminded just how awful the criminals are, how much they deserve to die, and how the small town suffered in the aftermath of the violent prison break. The sentences devoted to those topics are an exercise in tedium. A good bit of the novel reads like padding, as Perry supplies mundane details that do nothing to create atmosphere or advance the plot.

I was amused by some of the novel’s observations, including a character’s realization after dedicating eight years to a religious cult that all he had to show for it was “a marginal life in the woods.” But the novel’s few moments of entertainment fail to offset a dull and predictable story about a remarkably hypocritical character.

NOT RECOMMENDED

An Orc on the Wild Side by Tom Holt

Published by Orbit on September 10, 2019

An Orc on the Wild Side is a sequel to, or at least set in the same multiverse as, Doughnut and When It’s a Jar. Utilizing the pathway to the multiverse that was discovered in Doughnut, an entrepreneur sells real estate in the Hidden Realms to snooty Brits who can no longer afford to buy vacation properties in the south of France. The Hidden Realms have a primitive human population, but the more interesting residents are goblins, Elves, dwarves, halflings, trolls, and wraiths. Not to mention the Eye.

King Mordak is the new ruler of the goblins. His New Evil platform of reform has met with resistance, but liberal change is always resisted by traditionalists. Mordak understands that Evil always loses and, in fact, that is Evil’s fate in the long run, so maybe a new game plan is in order. Mordak’s latest problem is his successful attempt to create a female goblin. There has never been one before, and since females are stronger and better problem solvers than males, the goblins aren’t sure they are ready for one.

The strongest of the seven dwarf-lords is King Drain. He is preoccupied, however, by the discovery of eggbeaters and can openers, contraptions (he is told) that are made in a place called China. The gadgets speak to a sophisticated level of machining that dwarves have never managed. While Drain is worried that cheap Chinese goods will put dwarves out of work (at least if this place called China decides to market its wares in the Hidden Realms), a human who calls herself Snow White sees the opportunity to make some cash — the very reason she traveled to the Hidden Realms.

Other complications arise when the humans back in our universe vote in favor of Rexit, a reality exit referendum to seal off our universe from the rest of the multiverse for fear that immigrants from other universes will come to ours and take our jobs. That’s the kind of priceless humor that Tom Holt serves in abundance. I also appreciated the Eye’s definition of authority as “there’s more of us and we have all the weapons, so we can do what we like to you.”

Even with the reforms inspired by the New Evil, goblins are pretty awful, as are the other dwellers in the Hidden Realms, especially wraiths. ‘The wraith who’s tired of killing is tired of life.” But are humans really any better? Goblins and dwarves are at least honest about their nature. “Humans, alone of the Races, have a unique ability to believe things that are patently untrue, even when the facts are pulling their heads back by the hair and yelling in their faces.”

The humans in the story include Snow White, a lawyer (but not a very good one) who tires of serving Elves, the property owners who are having buyer’s regret, and Theo Bernstein, the fellow in an earlier novel who blew up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider. They all illustrate the folly of being human.

I’m not usually a big fan of fantasy, but the multiverse theory holds that everything is happening somewhere, blurring the distinction between fantasy and reality-based fiction. I am a big fan of Tom Holt. I grin my way through his novels and frequently laugh out loud. I love the way he mixes imagined absurdity with the absurdity of the world we inhabit. An Orc on the Wild Side is perfect for readers who don’t take fantasy, or for that matter humanity, too seriously. "It's better to laugh than to cry" is the message I take from Holt's inventive books.

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Merry Christmas!