White Hot Silence by Henry Porter

First published in Great Britain in 2019; published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on September 3, 2019

White Hot Silence is a sequel to Firefly. It might also be the second novel in a series (I hope so), but it is a true sequel in the sense that a reader should read Firefly to have a full understanding of the situation in which the characters find themselves.

Denis Hisami is concerned that TangKi, a company in which he has invested, may be engaged in money laundering. Its CEO, Adam Crane, has disappeared. As Hisami is raising his concerns with other investors, his wife Anastasia is kidnapped in Italy.

The agency that employs Paul Samson had been hired to investigate Crane, who appears to have rented a penthouse under the name Ray Shepherd. In the novel’s early pages, a body identified as Shepherd’s is found on the penthouse balcony, its face obliterated by large bullets. Whenever a face is missing, the reader will suspect that the body might have been misidentified.

Samson, Anastasia, and Hisami all met in Firefly. Samson fell in love with Anastasia before the novel’s end (rescuing a damsel in distress has that effect on fictional heroes). Now Anastasia is married to Hisami, who wants Samson to rescue Anastasia — again. The starting point in that endeavor is to understand why she was kidnapped. Samson works with (or against) the CIA and various other intelligence and law enforcement agencies, as well as some criminal organizations, as he searches for answers.

The premise is that American money is being used to influence European politics (a reverse of the traditional use of Russian money to influence American politics). The story’s political background is informed by Henry Porter’s experience editing and reporting news and opinion stories regarding European politics. The plot has an aura of authenticity that is too often missing from international thrillers.

The scheme that underlies the kidnapping involves the timely issue of European nationalism. The mysteries that Samson and his associates must unravel are complex but never confusing.

Porter mixes action scenes into a fast-moving plot. Some of the best scenes involve Anastasia, who proves to be a capable captive as she confounds her captors on a freighter bound for Russia and again in a Russian forest. Samson has his own share of the action, but no character is portrayed as a superhero, in the manner of too many “tough guy” action thrillers.

While the action is fun, some of the novel’s best scenes occur during Anastasia’s captivity, as she debates Russian and American literature (including the meaning of Huckleberry Finn) with her captor. I also enjoyed the return of Naji, who was a focal point in the first novel as a young teen. He enriches this story as a young adult by mixing political idealism with pragmatic strategy.

I thought Firefly was one of the best thrillers I read in 2018. White Hot Silence is nearly as good, placing it near the top of my 2019 list of favorites.

RECOMMENDED

Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh

First published in Great Britain in 2019; published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 10, 2019

Dinanath “Deen” Datta is a dealer in rare books and antiquities, a profession that does not help him attract the attention of women. He lives in Brooklyn but maintains a residence in Calcutta. When Deen was a student, he did doctoral research on Indian folklore, particularly the story of a conflict between a Merchant and Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes.

An elderly aunt who founded a charity asks to see Deen as he is nearing the end of a trip to Calcutta. A marine biologist named Piya helps the aunt when she is not living in Oregon. Deen is immediately attracted to Piya, but as his therapist has told him, the hope of romance impairs his judgment.

Deen’s aunt tells him a story of the Merchant as she heard it from the caretaker of a shrine to Manasa Devi that stands in the middle of the Sundarbans, a mangrove forest in the Bay of Bengal. Paralleling the ancient story of Manasa Devi’s wrath, the story tells how a Merchant took refuge in a place devoid of snakes known as Gun Island, was later captured by pirates, and struck a deal with Manasa Devi to save himself. In return for freedom and prosperity, the Merchant built the shrine to Manasa Devi.

When Deen visits the shrine, a boy named Rafi fills in more of the Merchant's story. Bad luck befalls Deen, Rafi, and a boy named Tipu during the visit. With the help of a knowledgeable acquaintance and having examined markings on the shrine, Deen later reinterprets the legends that surround Gun Island.

The heart of the story begins when Deen is asked to interpret for a filmmaker who is making a documentary about migrants in Venice. He is surprised to learn how many residents of the Venetian Ghetto speak Bangla. He is also surprised to find Rafi working in Venice. When Piya contacts him to report that Tipu has disappeared from the Sundarbans, Deen suspects that Rafi knows more about Tipu’s whereabouts than he is willing to admit.

Snakes, spiders and legends about Italian sea monsters and the possession of souls begin to trouble Deen during his Venetian adventure. Yet other monsters are a more immediate threat, including worms that are eating the wooden foundations upon which Venice is built, a threat directly rated to warming seas caused by climate change. The story also draws interesting parallels between dolphins, who are forced to search for new hunting grounds when pollutants create “dead zones” in oceans where no fish survive, and people who leave the Sundarbans because the sea no longer supports fishermen. “No one knows where they belong any more, neither humans nor animals.”

In addition to addressing the impact of climate change, the novel focuses on refugees who are trying to make their way to Italy by boat. They encounter resistance from Italian authorities. That story, like the harrowing journey that Rafi and Tipu take from India, smuggled into Iran and running from shots fired by Turkish border guards, is a timely reminder of the dangers faced by unwelcome migrants everywhere. How the developed world treats impoverished refugees is one of the novel’s key themes.

The story’s weakness is its attempt to make events in Italy echo the legend of the Merchant, including creatures converging on the refugees from the sea and air. I won’t give away the ending, but it the kind of moral climax that might be found in a parable. Gun Island is too complex to classify as a parable, but it strains to combine elements of legend with the realities of the modern world. Still, Amitav Ghosh tells a moving story in graceful prose, making it easy for readers to sympathize with unfortunate characters and to admire characters who behave decently despite their financial success.

Transplanting symbols of the legend into Deen’s life is a clever concept that doesn’t quite work. I find it difficult to invest in stories that depend on elements of fantasy while making clear that the narrative is not a fantasy. Perhaps readers who are more willing to accept the miraculous will have a different opinion. Nevertheless, for its well-developed characters and its juxtaposition of the two most pressing social problems in the modern world (global warming and hostility to migrants), Gun Island is an important and intriguing novel.

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Tinfoil Butterfly by Rachel Eve Moulton

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on Sept. 10, 2019

Tinfoil Butterfly is a disturbing novel about a young woman and a child, damaged in different ways, who share a harrowing experience. The story is simple — only four characters play a significant role — but simplicity amplifies the novel’s power.

Emma Powers flees from a hospital and gets a ride with a creep who doesn’t want to let her out of his van. Emma’s goal is to get to the Badlands. The creep has seen newspaper stories about Emma and Raymond, her stepbrother. The creep eventually regrets meeting her.

Emma is messed up. She narrates the story in the first person, eventually explaining why she is messed up and why she and Raymond made it into the newspaper.

Emma meets a kid named Earl after taking the creep’s van and running out of gas at an abandoned diner. Earl is also creepy, an imaginative child who has an unhealthy obsession with death. At the same time, Earl’s talent for creating creatures from tinfoil and seemingly bringing them to life suggests that life and death are struggling for dominance in Earl’s persona. Like Emma, Earl has secrets that the reader eventually discovers, one of which alters the reader’s fundamental understanding of the character.

Earl lives with an older fellow named George, a man whose health appears to be failing. George might be the creepiest of all the characters who enter Emma’s life.

Earl and George live in a deserted house in a ghost town. It’s the kind of house where no sensible person would want to visit the cellar. So, of course, Emma explores the cellar. She doesn’t like what she finds. Events in her life roll downhill from there.

Despite the visit to the cellar, Tinfoil Butterfly isn’t a traditional horror novel, although it is marketed in that genre. The novel’s true horror is not the fear of crazed killers in remote areas (although that fear is part of the story), but the horror of living a tragic life — a broken home, an abusive parent, drug addiction, unhealthy relationships. Ordinary horrors can lead to extraordinary evil, the novel seems to say.

Yet the story is not without hope. Emma is messed up, but she does not have an evil heart. The opportunity to bring some good into another person’s life might be her path to redemption. Rachel Eve Moulton conveys the immediacy of Emma’s conflicting emotions, creating empathy for a broken woman who deserves a second chance.

The story moves quickly and creates genuine anxiety, although the ending is one a reader might predict. Conflicts essential to the plot are resolved, but what will become of Emma after the story ends is unclear. Happy endings, Moulton implies, are too much to expect. The opportunity for a new beginning might be the best anyone with a difficult life can hope to find. What the novel’s surviving characters will make of that opportunity is a story waiting to be told.

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If, Then by Kate Hope Day

Published by Random House on March 12, 2019

If, Then is populated by an ensemble cast of people who want to change their lives. The title suggests possibilities: if this happens, then that will happen. Bu it also suggests the counterfactual: if this had not happened, then other things might have happened instead of the things that did happen. If Cass had not forgotten her birth control pills on a camping weekend, then she would be finishing her dissertation instead of changing diapers. Our lives are filled with might be and what might have been, as the residents of a neighborhood discover.

Dr. Ginny McDonnell is married to Mark, a biologist with Fish and Wildlife. They have a young son named Noah. Ginny might be losing interest in Mark, or she might be gaining an interest in a female co-worker. Her confusion does not stop her from exploring the possibility of a physical relationship with another woman. Might that be what she needs, instead of (or in addition to) Mark?

Mark is a researcher who believes frog behavior can predict volcanic eruptions. Research for his funding is likely to be discontinued. He has been behaving strangely since he thought he saw himself, but older, in the woods (perhaps the self he might become?). Mark has taken it into his head to build a bunker, something like a fallout shelter, to protect his family from harm, including an unlikely volcanic eruption. Unsurprisingly, he causes harm in his desire to prevent it.

Samara has moved from Seattle to take up temporary residence in Ginny’s neighborhood. She has been helping with her mother’s real estate business since her mother died on Ginny’s operating table. Samara blames Ginny for the death, unfairly in the view of Samara’s father, who surprises Samara with news about his plans that his mother made and that he intends to execute. Her father’s plan leaves Samara with a choice about her future.

One of Samara’s listings is the home of Robby Kells, on whom Ginny performs life-saving surgery after he drank himself into a coma. Cass is the new neighbor of Ginny and Samara. She’s caring for a newborn while her husband Amar is on a research trip. Cass is writing a dissertation on counterfactual (if, then) statements. Kells is an authority on counterfactuals and served as Cass’ advisor before he ended up in the hospital. Kells thought Cass had the potential to be a gifted philosopher. Can she get that back? Cass believes her skill at abstract thinking vanished with childbirth, replaced by the endless distractions of breastfeeding, diapers, and baby monitors.

So where’s the plot in all this? Some of the story borders on the supernatural. Mark sees himself more than once. Samsara thinks she sees her mother in the front yard, but younger and not dead. And then there’s the mystery of the house that Samsara’s mother purchased without telling Samsara.

Most of the plot, however, consists of related domestic drama. The story is about connections: what we know and don’t know about our neighbors and family members. And obviously, the story is about choices, options pursued and options foregone. The story challenges the reader to look at life as a series of choices: If I do this, then I can’t do that, but maybe I can do that later. We cannot plan everything that will happen in our lives because life is too complex, too full of variables we cannot anticipate. Feelings change. People die. Shit happens. All we can know with certainty is that the future is uncertain. Possibilities, which perhaps can only be understood through counterfactuals, are infinite. Maybe they all exist in an unseen multiverse, but the possibilities that matter are those that we experience, possibilities that become fact.

While some aspects of the story are interesting, others are puzzling. Is Mark’s obsession with shelter construction evidence of precognition? Unexplained ghosts/duplicate people/time shifts appear throughout the story for no reason that I could discern. The most plausible theory, a cross-over of our perceived universe with some part of the multiverse that we don’t usually perceive, is too contrived to be convincing. Even some parts of the story that correspond to reality struck me as problematic. Are we supposed to agree with Ginny when she suspects she made a mistake by pursuing a career as a surgeon instead of staying home with her kid? Are we supposed to think that fathers should not play a primary parenting role because Mark is reckless and unbalanced? People must make choices in their lives but so must authors, and I didn't understand some of the choices that Kate Hope Day made.

It is difficult to care about the characters, except for Kells, who makes only brief appearances. The characters are largely whiny and self-absorbed. While that might be an accurate portrayal of most people, Day gave me too little reason to want to read about them.

Still, the novel held my interest, even if building a novel around the counterfactual is more interesting in concept than in execution. Day is a capable prose stylist. I didn’t dislike If, Then, but I didn’t like it well enough to give it an unqualified recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Nothing Ventured by Jeffrey Archer

Published by St. Martin's Press on September 3, 2019

Nothing Ventured is a very British novel. Etiquette are good taste are paramount, upper lips are resolvedly stiff, young men are exceedingly proper in their courtship of young women (unless an older woman sneaks into their bed at night). The novel’s protagonist, William Warwick, is the fictional creation of Harry Clifton, a fictional author in Jeffrey Archer’s Clifton Chronicles. Archer is now giving Warwick his own series, beginning with Nothing Ventured.

William Warwick’s father, Sir Julian, is a barrister who has made a successful career of defending the accused. William rebels, refusing his father’s demand that he read law at Oxford. William wants to be the accuser so he can lock up all the villains his father has freed. They compromise on an art history education, followed by police school.

The meat of the story begins with a two–year probationary period, during which William bonds with an old constable who teaches him the lore of a beat cop. Thanks to his art history education, Warwick soon becomes a Detective Constable assigned to Scotland Yard’s Arts and Antiquities division, where he takes on two crimes.

William's initial investigation involves forged signatures on first editions, an offense that Warwick solves with legwork and ingenuity. The second, more complex plot thread involves the theft of a Rembrandt. The latter crime leads Warwick to investigate an underhanded art collector with the eventual help of the collector’s unhappy and conniving wife. Along the way, Warwick falls in love with an employee of the museum that lost the Rembrandt.

The museum employee’s father was unjustly convicted of murder, leading to the plot’s third thread. Warwick enlists his father, who enlists William’s sister, to prove his future father-in-law’s innocence. The alleged murderer has long maintained that the arresting officer removed the middle page of his three-page statement to make the statement appear to be a confession. That is only possible because the first page (which ends mid-sentence) merges seamlessly with the mid-sentence beginning of the third page. The plot thread therefore rests on an unlikely contrivance that I could not convince myself to accept.

The art theft is a more plausible tale, although the last paragraph has the villain making an incriminating statement that seems remarkably stupid. Trial scenes are interesting but undramatic. Warwick doesn't testify in the art theft trial, robbing it of any hope of exceitement, while Warwick’s father, handling the proceeding for William's girlfriend's father, lacks the flair and fire of an in-the-trenches barrister (read a Rumpole novel if you want to be entertained by a British barrister).

Although the plot generates little tension, the story is pleasant. Archer always writes with grace. Warwick and his father are a bit stiff, but Warwick does indulge in a brief episode of naughtiness that suggests a real human being lurking somewhere beneath his veneer of resolute propriety. Nothing Ventured is nothing special, but it is a quick and easy read.

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