The Blaze by Chad Dundas

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on January 21, 2020

The lost memory plot has been done so often that writers rarely find a way to make it fresh. Setting aside the story’s familiarity, The Blaze generates enough suspense and sets up sufficient drama in the lives of likable characters to earn a recommendation.

Matthew Rose comes home from Iraq with a brain injury. He doesn’t remember his past, which might be for the best. He doesn’t recognize his mother in Florida. When he attempts to contact his estranged father in his hometown of Missoula, he learns that his father has just committed suicide. He travels to Montana to handle the probate and to see if the trip jars any memories.

Matthew learns that he was even more of an asshole during his teen years than are most teens. He was a popular kid until he turned twelve. Then he quit the swimming team, estranged himself from his close friends Scott Dorne and Georgie Porter, and started using drugs. His life was a mess until, at 23, he abruptly joined the army.

Back in Missoula, Matthew reconnects with Georgie, who is now a journalist. He learns that Scott’s father, Chris Dorne, went on to become something of an activist in elective office, exploiting the apparent murder of a boy named Carson Ward as the springboard to a career in local politics. Chris Dorne and Matthew’s father were good friends, but Matthew’s father began a downhill slide just as Chris was getting his life on track. Matthew recalls none of that, but looking at a picture of an old candy store, Matthew has a vague memory of the store in flames. Did Matthew have something to do with the fire?

Matthew happens to stumble upon a burning house and, fixated on the flames, snaps some pictures. The next day he learns that a grad student named Abbie Greene died in the fire. The home that burned down was owned by a lesbian couple, prompting concern that the fire stemmed from a hate crime. A cop’s murder adds to the body count, and a fire at Georgie’s place leaves the reader wondering why Matthew is at the center of so many blazes.

The plot methodically develops connections among characters and events, allowing the reader to piece together clues, some of which misdirect, making it difficult to guess where the plot might be going. We learn its destination when Matthew rather improbably recovers his memory, followed by an information dump that a key character helpfully provides. The plot elements weave together nicely, leaving no threads dangling. The story is ultimately a whodunit, and it succeeds both in concealing the answer and in giving the perpetrator a convincing motive.

The Blaze tells a tight story that creates a moderate degree of suspense. The explanation for Matthew’s youthful change of personality, bursting out in the late information dump, makes it possible to sympathize with him, particularly since he’s a nice enough guy after his head injury. Unlike many thriller writers, Chad Dundas thankfully resists making Matthew a superhero by virtue of his military service. Matthew doesn’t fight much during the novel and when he does fight or chase someone, he isn’t terribly successful. I appreciated that. The characters lack ambiguity — the reader is supposed to like them or not — but that’s true of most thrillers. The self-aggrandizing personality of the novel’s key bad guy makes him easy to dislike. And since the story never pushes the boundaries of credibility too far, it is easy to invest in Matthew’s quest to understand his troubled past.

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House on Fire by Joseph Finder

Published by Dutton on January 21, 2020

House on Fire imagines a pharmaceutical company that bears a close resemblance to Perdue Pharma. The family that controls it bears a close resemblance to the Sackler family. The company manufactures a drug called Oxydone, a drug that bears a close resemblance to OxyContin, except it is delivered through an inhaler. Like the Sacklers, the Kimball family promoted the drug aggressively to doctors, assuring them that the potential for patient addiction was low, and in the process made a fortune while creating a public health crisis. The Kimballs, like the Sacklers, have also squirreled money away in a variety of shell companies so that the family fortune will remain intact when their company inevitably goes bankrupt to avoid liability for all the lawsuits the family’s nefarious scheme has spawned.

In his Acknowledgements, Joseph Finder says the Kimball family isn’t based on any real-life family. Har har har. Okay, Finder and his publisher don’t want to be sued, so you can’t blame him for saying that. You’d also have to be blind to ignore the obvious parallels between the Sacklers and the Kimballs.

Putting aside the background, the plot departs (presumably) from reality; this is fiction, after all. It is difficult to prosecute families for the crimes committed by the corporations they control, but Conrad Kimball not only buried a study that revealed the addictive properties of Oxydone (the corporate crime of defrauding the government), he orchestrated some murders to keep the truth hidden (the very personal crime of homicide). It is up to Finder’s hero, Nick Heller, to expose Conrad’s evil deeds. Initially, he is hired by Conrad’s daughter Susan to locate a copy of the study. A friend of his, Maggie Benson, tells Nick she has been hired by a different daughter to find Conrad’s estate plan. Nick and Maggie both discover that it is dangerous to snoop into the business of a ruthless family. The novel’s second half is largely devoted to Nick’s exploits as he fights, jumps, shoots, rappels, and otherwise proves himself to be an action hero in his quest to bring Conrad to justice.

Finder’s specialty is corporate and financial crime. Given its prevalence, his novels are usually timely. This one offers reasonable insights into wealth crime: profiting from human weakness “is the greatest business opportunity there ever was”; the wealthy view bankruptcies as sinful when poor people use them to avoid debt but as a legitimate business tool for corporations that want to jettison the consequences of poor decisions; wealthy families market themselves by giving money to museums and hospitals and universities, where their names will be etched in stone, washing the filth from the money they made.

Heller is an interesting character. His father is in prison, a successful white-collar criminal until he got caught. Heller’s friendship with Maggie was derailed seven years earlier because he tried to seek justice for a military rape that Maggie endured, never thinking about whether Maggie would approve of his actions. With that background, Heller engages in more self-reflection than is typical of a thriller hero.

On the other hand, life might be a bit too easy for Heller. He outshoots multiple armed opponents and despite bringing his fists to a knife fight, dispatches his adversary with relative ease. Things need to go Heller’s way to keep the plot moving, so a password is guessed, a door is conveniently left unlocked, a desk clerk hands over a room key without checking ID, and a character confesses at the end when silence would be a more prudent option. Still, credibility issues are common in modern thrillers, and the ending features a surprise or two. While the novel’s action tends to overshadow its suspense, Finder knows how to hold a thriller fan’s attention. If for no other reason, the novel is fun because corporate outlaws face the kind of justice that only happens in fiction.

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The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer

First published in 2010; reissued by Minotaur Books on February 4, 2020

The Nearest Exit is the second novel in Olen Steinhauer’s Milo Weaver trilogy. The trilogy was recently reissued because a fourth novel will soon be added to the series.

As we learned in The Tourist, Milo does nasty work for a branch of the CIA that few people know exist. Together with the Tourist Agents who research and support their missions, Tourists travel around the world imposing America’s will on foreign entities, usually by killing people the Tourist masterminds have come to dislike.

Milo didn’t seem to have or want much of a future as a Tourist by the time the first novel ended. He wanted to devote himself to his wife and daughter, not to the whims of his agency. When the new boss wants Milo to return, Milo finds he has little choice. Milo begins with some baby assignments but is eventually charged with killing a 15-year-old girl named Adriana Stanescu. Milo wonders if he is being asked to kill a child to prove his loyalty, but having a daughter of his own, he finds a way to circumvent the mission without jeopardizing his career. To achieve that goal, he enlists the help of his father, who is running a little spy operation of his own for the UN, unbeknownst to pretty much everyone except Milo.

Adriana’s eventual fate pits Milo against his boss, his father, and a highly placed German law enforcement agent named Erika Schwartz. Erika is morbidly obese and a serious alcoholic, although she reserves her heaviest drinking for the end of the workday. She’s also astonishingly good at her job, making her the most intriguing supporting character in the book.

Erika has a video of Milo kidnapping Adriana, which turns her into one of Milo’s many adversaries. Adriana’s father is another. But the most formidable of the group is a Chinese spymaster who may or may not have planted a mole among the Tourists — or perhaps among the few Senate aides who are cleared to know about the Tourist program.

The plot combines traditional themes of betrayal with a clever Chinese scheme that has Milo more than once changing his mind about the existence of a mole. By the time the action winds down, things are not looking good for the Tourists. Milo’s future seems particularly bleak, as does his marriage, which has not benefitted from his employer-imposed secretiveness or from his absences from the family as he charges off to make the world safer. Even the CIA-approved marriage counselor has some doubts about Milo’s ability to focus on his family.

Unlike the first novel, the story ends on something of a cliffhanger. That’s not unexpected in a trilogy and, having read the first two, I can’t imagine that any spy fiction fan would forego the pleasure of reading the third installment. The combination of strong plotting, international intrigue, and sharp characterizations enshrine Steinhauer in the top echelon of American spy novelists.

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The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde

First published in Norway in 2017; published in translation by HarperVia on January 14, 2020

The End of the Ocean is told from two perspectives in alternating chapters. Signe’s story begins in the present. David’s begins about 20 years later, when a drought is threatening his life and that of his daughter Lou.

David, with his son, daughter, and wife Anna, left southern France to make his way to a camp. In light of the water shortage, David felt a responsibility to stay at the desalination plant where he worked, but the electricity upon which the plant depends is no longer reliable. It is ironic, he thinks, that coal-fired power plants contributed to global warming and thus to the water shortage, yet producing more fresh water depends on those same power plants. Seeing no end to the vicious cycle, Anna insists that they try their luck at a camp where they might at least be able to find food. A raging fire leaves them with little choice.

Before David’s story begins, David and Lou are separated from Anna and his son. David arrives at the camp and waits for his wife to appear. His story describes his tormented wait as the camp’s food and water supplies dwindle. His relationships with Lou and with a damaged woman named Marguerite who befriends Lou in the camp grow more difficult every day. Eventually their survival may depend on whether it rains again, filling a channel that will allow them to travel to the ocean, where David can use his expertise in desalination to provide them with water for the rest of their lives.

The present from which the elderly Signe narrates her story is lived on a boat that she sails from Norway to France. She plans to make a grand gesture with a load of glacier ice that, before she stole it, was intended for sale to the wealthy.

Much of Signe’s story is told in memory, adding a third time frame to the story. Signe grew up in a Norwegian village but made her life in Bergen. A company purchased water rights to the Sister Falls. It intended to divert the water to a power plant, destroying Norway’s most scenic waterfalls. Signe’s mother owns a significant share of the company. The plan will make her wealthy. Signe’s mother has already argued with her father about an earlier plan to divert the waters of a river, a plan that destroyed local agriculture.

Signe lived with Magnus, whose family lost its farm after the river ran dry. Magnus was an engineer who viewed the destruction of nature as inevitable, a sign of human grandeur. The rift between Signe’s parents will eventually replicate in Signe’s relationship with Magnus, as Signe’s long-term concern with the environment clashes with Magnus’ short-term desire to accumulate wealth. Signe’s protest against delivering pure glacier water to the wealthy when climate change threatens the availability of water for everyone begins the novel and plays a central role in its ending.

The End of the Ocean is a cautionary story of environmental destruction, but emotional honesty is the novel’s strength. The novel imagines good people making hard choices, compelling the reader to share each character’s agony. Can Signe bear to give birth to Magnus’ baby? Can David allow Marguerite into his life if sharing a dwindling water supply with her will threaten Lou’s survival? If short-term survival is a fundamentally selfish act, is it better not to prolong one’s life?

The reader will spot the ending that ties the two stories together long before it arrives, but it is the ending that the reader will want. The novel builds suspense in both timelines while raising the kind of serious ethical questions that book club members might enjoy debating.

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The Secret Guests by Benjamin Black

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on January 14, 2020

It isn’t easy to come up with a new plot for a suspense novel. John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, reimagines the history of England and Ireland during World War II in a thriller that blends politics with personalities. The royal family, worried about the safety of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose during the London Blitz, make a deal with the Irish government, with has remained neutral. The two princesses are taken to the Duke of Edenmore, a distant relative who has an estate in Tipperary, for safekeeping. The connection of the two girls to the royal family is supposed to be a closely guarded secret, but no secrets about the English are kept in Ireland.

The publisher’s blurb suggests that Black “has good information that the princesses were indeed in Ireland for a time during the Blitz.” Apparently, taking the princesses abroad was a contingency plan during the war, but at least officially, the plan was never implemented. The Secret Guests is a work of fiction so whether Black’s “good information” is accurate doesn’t really matter.

The girls, ages 14 and 10, are given new identities and a cover story to explain their sudden appearance at the Duke’s estate. The two princesses feel sisterly contempt for each other, but they have even less regard for Celia Nashe, an MI5 officer whose gender accounts for her assignment to babysit “a couple of girls.” Ireland’s contribution to the security team is Detective Garda Strafford, an uncomfortable Protestant whose religion seems to be his primary qualification for the job. Longing for a hero she can love, Margaret eventually turns her starry eyes to Stafford, but only after her early fixation on Billy Denton, a shabby groundskeeper who doubles as the Duke’s steward.

Denton is crucial to the novel’s political background. His mother was shot during the Irish War of Independence, although by which side is a matter of speculation. Strafford is worried that Denton may be sympathetic to the IRA, although Strafford, “as a descendant of the land grabbers who had flooded over from England three centuries before,” feels “suspended between two worlds, two sets of sensibilities, two impossible choices. Poor Ireland; poor divided little country, gnawing away at immemorial grievances, like a fox caught in a snare trying to bite off its trapped leg.”

The English are concerned that kidnapping a couple of princesses might be beneficial to the IRA. The fear is the IRA will trade the princesses to Hitler, who will hold them as hostages to destroy British morale, in exchange for allowing the IRA to rule Ireland as a puppet government. The local faction of the IRA, led by Boss Clancy, is generally regarded as harmless. Clancy lacks the resources to kidnap two girls from an estate that is loosely guarded by soldiers. But he does have contacts, and Belfast eventually supplies a couple of tough men who know to get things done.

As background to the political intrigue, various characters either backbite or sleep with each other. Sexual liaisons compete with the political undercurrent of a divided Ireland to hold the reader’s attention until action scenes drive the story to its ending. Black’s dependence on complex characters rather than chase scenes to carry the story gives The Secret Guests credibility that modern thrillers too often lack. As always, Black writes with graceful muscularity. With a good plot, strong characters, and a fascinating historical background, The Secret Guests pushes all the right buttons.

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