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The Tzer Island book blog features book reviews written by TChris, the blog's founder.  I hope the blog will help readers discover good books and avoid bad books.  I am a reader, not a book publicist.  This blog does not exist to promote particular books, authors, or publishers.  I therefore do not participate in "virtual book tours" or conduct author interviews.  You will find no contests or giveaways here.

The blog's nonexclusive focus is on literary/mainstream fiction, thriller/crime/spy novels, and science fiction.  While the reviews cover books old and new, in and out of print, the blog does try to direct attention to books that have been recently published.  Reviews of new (or newly reprinted) books generally appear every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  Reviews of older books appear on occasional weekends.  Readers are invited and encouraged to comment.  See About Tzer Island for more information about this blog, its categorization of reviews, and its rating system.

Friday
Nov152019

Tiamat's Wrath by James S.A. Corey

Published by Orbit on March 26, 2019

Planning a story arc that unfolds over nine books is an impressive feat. Executing the plan with the skill displayed by the writers who call themselves James S.A. Corey is even more impressive. The Expanse is one of the finest accomplishments in the history of space opera.

You need to read the last seven books in this series, in order, to have a full appreciation of the background to this novel, the eighth. That’s a lot of reading. For those who have completed the assignment (and those who have watched enough of the excellent television series based on the novels to get the drift), here’s where things stand. None of this will make sense, by the way, if you aren’t familiar with the series.

The gatebuilders apparently left a massive construct in a dead system that might be their backup drive. Maybe book nine will finally resolve the mysterious rise and fall of the gatebuilders.

The Laconians are looking for a way to protect themselves from whatever destroyed the gatebuilders, although there is no evidence that Laconian civilization is actually threatened. To that end, they plan to launch a weapon that they hope will destroy or at least “send a message” to their perceived but unknown enemy. Like all authoritarians, the Laconians are sure that fear, terror and belligerence will help them get their way. A few Laconians, as well as science fiction fans and pretty much anyone who can spark a thought, know that chucking a bomb through a gate at beings who have the ability to bend reality is just a bad idea. Sadly, authoritarians think with their mighty weapons, not with their tiny brains.

Meanwhile, James Holden is being held on Laconia, where he is not exactly imprisoned but not free to leave. Teresa Duarte, the daughter of the High Counsel of Laconia, views Holden with some suspicion, perhaps with good reason, although her dog knows that Holden is a good guy. But Teresa, being an entitled teen, is also rebellious. She develops a secret friendship with a dude who has hidden himself in a cave. The identity of the friend, and the friend’s fate, will be important to fans of the series.

The Rocinante is in storage and Alex Kamal is now piloting the Gathering Storm, a stolen Laconian warship. Bobbie Draper is leading a secret military mission using that ship against Laconia. Naomi Nagata is argumentative, as always. In the end, the plot will seek a reunification of the original crew of the Rocinante, or at least those who survive.

A theme that consistently emerges from this series is that war is stupid and that leaders and pundits who push for avoidable wars are stupid. In that regard, the Laconian leadership is monstrously stupid, as any number of characters recognize, including Elvi Okoye, a biologist who has been conducting research for the Laconians and who had a firsthand view of the results of the Laconian attempt to fight aliens they know nothing about.

Another theme that is central to the series is self-sacrifice. Characters die for the greater good. Series fans have likely come to appreciate and admire one or two characters who do not survive to the end of this novel. At least one of them dies a good death, displaying the kind of heroism that fans of The Expanse expect.

Like all the books in the series, Tiamat’s Wrath is a strong mix of action, politics, and philosophy. At times, the story is genuinely touching. Characters in the series never stop growing although they have largely settled into their personalities. In this installment, at least one of the key characters has changed in ways at which the story only hints.

I recommend the novel, but only for readers who are willing to commit to the entire series, starting with Leviathan Wakes. It is worth the investment of time for science fiction fans, but anyone who enjoys an intelligent outgrowth of pulp fiction will likely find the series to be rewarding.

RECOMMENDED

Wednesday
Nov132019

The Pelican by Martin Michael Driessen

Published in the Netherlands in 2017; published in translation by Amazon Crossing on November 12, 2019

A brief section of The Pelican relates a character’s memory of friendships based on sacrifice in World War II. The last section takes place in Germany fifteen years after the main story. The bulk of the story is set in a small town on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia at the end of the 1980s, shortly before the onset of the Yugoslav Wars.

One of the charms of the village is that nothing ever happens there. The place has been unchanged for generations. Its historic buildings and its clock museum cannot compete with livelier tourist destinations. It has no industry or commerce and “the coastal region was, agriculturally speaking, of little consequence.” Yet Martin Michael Driessen populates the village with characters both ordinary and eccentric, the kind of people who make the best of their lives without worrying too much about politics or the outside world.

The village postman, a man named Andrej, steams open letters for lack of anything better to do with his life. Thus he learns that Josip, a war hero with a pension who now operates the funicular, is having an affair with a woman in Zagreb. Andrej decides to blackmail Josip, in part from a sense of entitlement (the world has been unkind to Andrej and he believes he is owed better). He uses the proceeds to gamble unsuccessfully but also to purchase an unhappy racing greyhound that would otherwise be put to death. The greyhound’s new circumstances do not make him a happier dog.

The story takes a comedic twist when the blackmailer is blackmailed. The comedy has a Shakespearean flavor that depends on the improbable concealment of identities. Josip and Andrej are stumped in their efforts to unmask their blackmailers, although they tend to suspect everyone. One of the blackmailers justifies his crimes with the thought that corruption has a good side — it “at least gave the unfairness of existence a somewhat more human face.”

The two blackmailers develop an unexpected friendship that leads to unexpected bouts of shame. But is a guilty conscience a sufficient motivation to change one’s behavior?

While a subtitle bills the novel as a comedy, it might be better described as a tragicomedy. It is, at least, a dark comedy of errors into which conflict and bitterness intrude. War is coming. Everyone knows it, although the villagers do their best to ignore the inevitable. After generations of stability, the village and its people are destined for disruption.

While the residents are primarily Croatian, they live in relative harmony with residents who are Serbs. An anti-Semitic character named Schmitz, who engages in spirited rants at the local café, is opposed by more enlightened characters who understand that “if Croatia wanted to be recognized as a nation, and even dreamt of future membership in the European Community, where even chickens are protected, then there was no place for this kind of talk.” Another character emphasizes the essential humanity of all people with the phrase “pumpkins are just pumpkins,” a “people are just people” philosophy that has allowed Croats to survive all “the doges and the sultans and the emperors and the dictators” who eventually bit the dust. Pumpkins, after all, thrive and reproduce without regard to political subdivisions and ethnic groups.

It is only a matter of time, however, before nationalism trumps tolerance, before artillery changes everything. As Josip realizes, years later, much of his own history as well as the region’s history was based on pettiness. Regret changes nothing while understanding one’s mistakes, even late in life, at least has personal value.

The Pelican tells a story from the perspectives of characters who balance corruption with kindness. The ending is fitting. This is a book that might leave the reader feeling happy or sad, but either way, the novel encourages a better understanding of the happy and sad aspects of human nature.

RECOMMENDED

Monday
Nov112019

The Innocents by Michael Crummey

Published by Doubleday on November 12, 2019

The Innocents tells a powerful story of a brother and sister, orphaned and young, alone together, who withstand the threats of nature while trying to make sense of a world they are ill-prepared to understand. The man-against-nature theme is coupled with the theme of innocence and the potential misfortune that accompanies ignorance.

A boy named Evered Best, his sister Ada, and their parents live alone on the Newfoundland coast. They capture seals and catch fish, trading their catch for supplies that are delivered by a ship that only appears once a year. Illness takes the mother one winter and the father soon follows, leaving the children alone in the world. They have rarely met another person. Mary Owen in Mockbeggar, a day away by rowboat, helped their mother deliver a baby named Martha who died in infancy. She was their only point of contact with the outside world.

When spring comes, their supplies are nearly gone and the children are not sure how to go about assuring their survival. They have never left home and have nothing but each other to rely upon. Evered wasn’t old enough to visit the supply ship so he doesn’t know what to expect when it next appears. The ship’s captain is a former church official who might be cheating the Bests — he claims they never trade enough fish to pay the debt they owe for supplies — but he doesn’t seem like a ruthless man. Yet Evered is “just a youngster playing at being a man” who fears that he might not have what it takes to follow in his father’s footsteps, even if the captain is generous in his extension of credit.

While all of the novel’s characters live the hard lives of workers who scrape out an existence, they are all fundamentally decent. The captain wants the children to survive, as do a couple of other helpful people who encounter the children during the course of the story. One of those is a traveler named John Warren, who shows kindness to both Evered and Ada, although Evered isn’t sure that Warren can be trusted with Ada. At the same time, he isn’t sure what not trusting a man with a woman might entail.

The story is one of hardship and hard work that children should scarcely be able to endure. Their discovery of a shipwreck and the horrors it contains frightens them even more than Ada’s first menstruation. A story that a sailor tells about an evil deed done by a man Evered suspects was his father introduces another element of uncertainty into their shifting world.

The story bases much of its drama on the innocence of the two children as they move from preteens to their teen years without learning anything about life beyond survival skills. As they huddle together for warmth at night in their unheated cabin, Evered and Ada both feel the unspoken shame of Evered’s erection. “Shame and pleasure,” Ada thinks, “were the world’s currencies.” They don’t understand the urges they feel — they have no concept of how babies are made — and the reader fears the potential consequences of their innocent ignorance.

The brother and sister would die for each other, yet they hardly know how to confide their fears. Evered’s suspicions about Warren seem to change him, Ada thinks; “she was beginning to suspect a person might not be one simple thing, uniform and constant.” Perhaps they are not enough for each other. “They had all their lives been the one thing the other looked to first and last, the one article needed to feel complete whatever else was taken from them or mislaid in the dark.” One of the key dramatic questions is whether they brother and sister will spend their entire lives together in their isolated cabin, or whether they might look for something more, perhaps in Mockbeggar or even the more distant places that they cannot begin to imagine.

Apart from the intensity of its characterizations, The Innocents is remarkable for its creation of a sense of place. The dangers of isolated living — the threat posed by bears, steel traps capable of breaking a hunter’s leg, unexpected storms that could sink a rowboat, ice that might give way while hunting seal — are illustrated in vivid detail. There is always some vague horror lurking on the horizon, but the greatest horror comes from what Evered and Ada, in their innocence, might do to each other. In that regard, The Innocents combines all the hallmarks of a literary novel with the tension that accompanies a thriller.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Friday
Nov082019

The Hard Stuff by David Gordon

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on July 2, 2019

This is the second book to feature Joe Brody, following The Bouncer. The story begins with Joe helping his boss, Gio Caprisi, clean up a loose ends from the first novel, a cleaning job that leaves a trail of dead bodies (not Joe’s fault, really). That chapter recaps the first novel so The Hard Stuff can easily be read as a standalone. I nevertheless recommend reading The Bouncer first, because it is — like The Hard Stuff — a fun book.

Joe’s efforts in the early pages invite the attention of an attractive FBI agent named Donna, who can’t decide whether to arrest Joe or take him to bed. She was in the same quandary by the end of The Bouncer. Joe knows what he wants to do, but since a hookup seems unlikely, he instead goes to bed with his Russian friend Yalena, another returning character from the first book. Yalena cracks safes and, like Joe, has a talent for killing people. Odd, then, that they are both such likable characters.

The plot, as in the first novel, has Joe thwarting terrorists. He has to do something redemptive, after all, or readers might not want to give him their time. The terrorists have come to the US to sell a large quantity of drugs that they stole overseas. They want to be paid in diamonds. That doesn’t make much sense, but never mind. The book is fun; it doesn’t need to make sense.

Joe’s mission is to steal a bunch of diamonds, use them to buy the drugs, then steal back the diamonds, all to thwart the terrorists. It might be easier just to steal the drugs and/or kill the terrorists, but that wouldn’t be as entertaining.

Crime fans always enjoy a well-planned jewel heist. That caper is followed by various armed confrontations, chase scenes, fights, and light-hearted mayhem. Joe’s relationships with Yalena and Donna add a touch of sex and potential romance, while action and snappy dialog keep the story moving at a suitable pace. Collateral characters, including Joe’s mobbed-up mom and his cross-dressing boss, contribute to the fun. The two novels in this series push all the right buttons for crime fiction fans, making The Hard Stuff easy to recommend.

RECOMMENDED

Wednesday
Nov062019

The Accomplice by Joseph Kanon

Published by Atria Books on November 5, 2019

The first two-thirds of The Accomplice seems like a well-written story with a mediocre plot. Then the plot takes off, producing the kind of tension and moral quandaries that are the strength of spy fiction.

The novel is set in 1962. Aaron Wiley is an American. His uncle is Max Weill. Max is an Auschwitz survivor. He lives in Hamburg, a location he uses as a base for tracking down Nazi war criminals. Max wants Aaron to take over the cause, but Aaron professes to be content with his work in America as an intelligence analyst.

While Max is pleading his case to Aaron in Hamburg, Max thinks he sees Otto Schramm and promptly has a heart attack. But everyone knows that Schramm died in Argentina. Maybe Max is getting old. And he doesn’t claim to recognize the face. It is the way the man was walking that convinced Max he was looking at Schramm. Max was a young doctor during the war. Schramm let him live, but Max will never forget the things that Schramm made him do at Auschwitz. He is confident that he will never forget Schramm's swagger.

Schramm’s body was identified by a person and by dental records, but all of that might have been faked. Perhaps Schramm felt the need to disappear (again) after Israeli agents kidnapped Eichmann from a street in Buenos Aires. But why would he risk a return to Hamburg? With the help of one of Max’s friends, Aaron discovers a possible answer.

The story takes Aaron to Buenos Aires, where Schramm’s daughter lives. Predictably, Aaron finds himself in a steamy relationship with the daughter, because the protagonist’s inability to keep it in his pants is nearly inevitable in a spy novel. He also meets anti-Semitic priests and diplomats who are well positioned in Argentina, the kind of people who might help Schramm begin his third life.

The plot seems like a mundane Nazi-hunter story until it takes an unexpected twist. At that point, Aaron must confront difficult moral questions. If Schramm is indeed hiding in Argentina, what should be done about it? Israel kidnapped Eichmann so that he could be tried and executed. Is it justifiable to violate international law and national sovereignty to capture a war criminal? If Schramm cannot be kidnapped and spirited out of Argentina  for a trial (a second offense that might not reflect well on Israel), is it morally acceptable to kill him? Is murder justice or vengeance? Does the fact that Schramm is a Nazi war criminal make a difference in how that question is answered? Does it matter that some of the people who directed Schramm's actions are still in Germany and are to powerful ever to answer for their crimes?

One of the characters asks whether a trial would make Israel any safer than a publicized killing. Another suggests that without a trial, the only definition of justice is: “Who has the gun?”  On the other hand, is there a moral distinction between a trial with a preordained outcome and a murder? Perhaps a trial in Germany rather than Israel might be perceived as more just (Schramm, after all, committed no crime in Israel), although the judicial bias in Germany might simply run in a different direction.

Does it matter that any action taken against Schramm will have a profound effect on his innocent daughter? Eichmann was displayed in a glass cage during his trial, a humiliation that Schramm’s daughter would feel deeply if Schramm meets the same fate.

And what if some other use might be made of Schramm? The US has a history of cozying up with notorious killers, including Klaus Barbie, if it serves someone’s concept of national security. Does justice always require death or imprisonment, or might it be better to find a use for a war criminal?

Joseph Kanon gives the reader a good bit to think about while telling a story that, by the end, has enough action and suspense to entertain readers who don’t care about the questions it inspires. Because Aaron struggles to do what he deems morally right, even if it means defying his employer, he is the kind of principled character who is easy to like — whether or not the reader agrees with his moral choices. The winning combination of action, characterization, and close examination of moral issues makes The Accomplice one of the year’s smartest thrillers.

RECOMMENDED