Untouchable by Mike Lawson

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on February 25, 2025

The Joe Demarco series follows but sometimes lags behind the current political world, particularly when elections change the party that controls the House. Whether series regular John Mahoney, the Democratic leader, holds the position of Speaker depends on the result of the most recent election. Mahoney is the minority leader in Untouchable and would have been even if the novel took place after the most recent election because Republican control of the House didn’t change. Mahoney would like to be Speaker again because, like nearly all political leaders, he craves power. His fixer, series protagonist Joe DeMarco, doesn’t care which party controls the House. He’d rather be golfing than working.

Untouchable imagines a wealthy friend of politicians and celebrities who has been indicted for sex trafficking a minor. A 15-year-old girl accused Brandon Cartwright of throwing sex parties and hiring young prostitutes to hook up with guests. Cartwright is plainly based on Jeffrey Epstein, while Maxine Barkley, the woman who procures underage prostitutes for Cartwright’s parties, is the fictional analog of Ghislaine Maxwell.

The novel opens with two men, Shaw and Burkhardt, breaking into Cartwright’s home and killing him. They also shoot Cartwright's lover. The men steal every document they can find but leave valuables and the two bodies behind.

The president has a hobby of doodling during meetings, often without realizing he’s taking notes. On the back of a speech, he wrote “Cartwright a-hole!!! Pardon? No f-ing way!!! Pay? Too rich $$$. Doyle’s way? Only way.” The draft speech made its way to National Archives but it took months for the cryptic note to come to the Archivist's attention. He interpreted the note to mean that Cartwright asked the president for a pardon that the president refused. The president countered with a payoff that Cartwright refused because he didn’t need the money. From this, the archivist concluded that Cartwright was trying to blackmail the president to obtain the pardon. “Doyle’s way” is an expression used by pundits to refer to the national security advisor, who routinely ordered the assassination of terrorists and others he considered to be a threat to the country without regard to the collateral damage a missile or bomb might cause. The implication is that Doyle had Cartwright killed to protect the president.

The archivist shows the note to Mahoney but won’t let him keep a copy. Her hope is that Mahoney will take some action that will bring the president to justice. He won’t go to the press or the FBI himself because he’s breaking the law by sharing the president’s document and doing so publicly would destroy the integrity of the National Archives.

Mahoney assigns Demarco to search for evidence that the president was being blackmailed. Being the person he is, Mahoney is less interested in bringing the president to justice than in gaining leverage over him.

The story follows Demarco’s investigation. He quickly realizes that the FBI slow-walked its investigation of Cartwright’s sex trafficking and refused to investigate his death. The DC police chalked up the death to a robbery but a young, disgruntled detective tells Demarco that her boss refused to allow her to conduct a real investigation. Demarco interviews the 15-year-old (who is now a chubby adult alcoholic), tracks down Barkley (who is too frightened to confirm that Cartwright was blackmailing the president), discovers the president’s indiscretions that fueled Cartwright’s blackmail attempt, and tries to find witnesses who can confirm Cartwright’s relationship to the president.

Doyle has Shaw and Burkhardt follow Demarco. More people die at their hands as Doyle tries to puzzle out the source of Demarco’s knowledge of the blackmail attempt. Demarco enlists the help of the mysterious Emma, a former NSA official who is now a series regular. Shaw and Burkhardt will try to kill them both before the story ends. Will they succeed? Will Demarco get the goods on the untouchable president? Will Doyle get away with his crimes? The novel takes a suitably cynical view of power-mad politicians and the political appointees who enable them.

While some Demarco novels are more engaging than others, this one captivates. The story moves quickly and gains credibility by drawing on real-world events that would be difficult to believe if they weren't so well documented. Mike Lawson writes these novels in a breezy style, but the style doesn't detract from his ability to build tension as Demarco follows clues that lead to danger.

Although Demarco has a well-established personality, he gains a bit of darkness by the novel’s end. Demarco has always had conflicted feelings about his father, a contract killer for the Mafia who nevertheless lived by a moral code that prevented him from killing the innocent. The key question at the novel’s end is whether Demarco is also willing to kill someone who, in his moral judgment, is likely to escape justice and deserves to die for his sins. The answer is surprising. It also sets up the next novel in the series. As always, I look forward to reading it.

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Midnight Black by Mark Greaney

Published by ‎ Berkley on February 18, 2025

Readers who have followed the Courtland Gentry novels know that Gentry was a CIA assassin before he became an independent contractor. Since then, when the CIA isn’t trying to kill Gentry, it sometimes hires him to do a job.

At the end of the last novel, Gentry’s lover was captured by Chinese agents. Zoya Zakharova was a Russian agent before she defected and starting shagging Gentry. China barters her to Russia, where she spends some time in a Moscow prison before being transferred to an isolated woman’s labor camp in Mordovia. Also housed in that camp is Nadia Yarovaya, the wife of Natan Yarovoy, who is housed in a men’s prison a few kilometers down the road. Yarovoy is a surrogate for Alexei Navalny, a popular dissident who might threaten the Russian president’s tenure if he were to run in an election. The president is Vitaly Peskov, a surrogate of Vladimir Putin.

The CIA is confident that Zoya was executed, but Gentry believes she’s alive. Gentry intends to find a way into Russia so he can rescue Zoya. Each Gray Man novel sends Gentry on a more unlikely mission than the last, but I have to admire Mark Greaney’s ability to make them seem plausible. Or perhaps I get so caught up in the action that I just don’t care about the plot’s unlikely nature.

The novel begins with Gentry causing mayhem in Bulgaria and Romania as he tries to get smuggled into Russia. By the time he makes a plan that succeeds, Gentry has the support of his old boss, the former deputy director for operations at the CIA, Matthew Hanley. Thanks to his past involvement with Gentry, Hanley is now the deputy station chief in Columbia. The new DDO, Trey Watkins, put him there.

The coincidence of Gentry heading to a prison near the one that holds Yarovoy is too good for Watkins to pass up. Hanley persuades him to use Gentry as an asset and to enlist the military support of Ukraine in an attempt to liberate Yarovoy from one prison and his wife from the other. Much of the fighting will be done by an armed organization of Russian dissidents that is funded by an oligarch who would like to see a regime change. Watkins turns to series regular Zach Hightower (who is serving a relaxed confinement in a CIA safe house) to train a Russian assault team.

With that background, the story should almost write itself in the reader’s mind. Fortunately, Greaney did the writing instead, assuring that the reader will be treated to an escalating series of action scenes, culminating in military assaults on two prisons, pitched battles between Russian dissidents and FSB agents, chases, shootouts, explosions, daring escapes, and all the fun of a James Bond movie. Few writers can pull off such an ambitious plot, but Greaney never gives the reader time to question Gentry’s ability to survive while killing dozens of bad guys.

An interesting subplot pits the FSB, the GRU, and the SVR against each other. Another follows Zoya as she attempts to escape before realizing that she’s being played.

Greaney builds suspense through relentless action. That the reader will be confident of a favorable outcome never makes the story less exciting. The moving parts are described in such detail that the reader might feel like a participant in the final assault. Midnight Black is another fine entry in a thriller series that never disappoints. It might, in fact, be the best Gray Man novel to date.

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Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow

Published by ‎ Tor Books on February 18, 2025

Marty Hench, a character I love from Cory Doctorow’s first two novels in this series, tells his coming-of-age story in Picks and Shovels. It is both the story of a young man finding his purpose and the story of a political awakening. And it’s a story of people he met along the way who came to terms with their identities and beliefs — and those who never overcame their innate greed. While the first two books in the series are mysteries solved by a forensic accountant, this one explains how Hench solved the mystery of himself.

Marty’s father was an engineer. He sent Marty to MIT to earn an engineering degree, but Marty was unenthusiastic about his studies. He proved to be more enthused about the emergence of personal computers. He taught himself to program and fell in with a group of students who loved computers as much as he did. Marty was dumpster diving for computer paper (the kind that comes with perforated edges and holes that line up with the printer’s sprockets) when he met Arthur Hellman, an even more committed computer geek who was dumpster diving for anything he could find.

Marty and Art become roommates. To appease his father after dropping out of MIT, Marty gets an associate’s degree in accounting. Marty and Art eventually move to San Francisco, where Silicon Valley is becoming the hotspot for tech innovation, in large part because California law does not allow noncompete agreements to stifle competition. A good many people in the business world extoll the virtues of competition until they have to deal with it.

Marty starts doing freelance accounting work. He contracts with a company called Fidelity Computing, a gig that lets him merge his interest in computers with his knowledge of spreadsheets. Fidelity was founded by a rabbi, a priest, and a Mormon bishop (no, they don’t walk into a bar together). Fidelity’s scam is to sell computer systems to religious schools and businesses. The systems have been designed so that only products (such as floppy disks and printers) purchased from Fidelity are compatible. They’re also designed to fail (the printers jam frequently), forcing customers to turn to Fidelity for expensive repairs.

Three women who worked for Fidelity in tech positions left to start their own company. They reverse engineered Fidelity products to create floppy disks and printers that will work with Fidelity systems. Fidelity is out to get the three women. The company hires Marty to help them. When the women persuade Marty that the company is a scam, Marty breaks his contract with Fidelity and makes a new one with the women.

The story follows the conflicts between the women and Fidelity. Some of the conflicts are violent, as the gangsters who financed Fidelity’s startup don’t take kindly to the lost profits that the women are causing. Marty isn’t much of a fighter, but a badass woman named Pat isn’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with thugs. She also teaches Marty to be a capable lover. The conflicts keep the story moving and provide a satisfying amount of action.

Marty learns other lessons in his young life. On his way to San Francisco, he meets and shags a woman named Lucille who teaches him how to get outside of his own head and listen — truly listen, even to the silences between words — when he has a conversation. Art comes out as a gay man and teaches Marty the pain of not being allowed to live the life that defines you. One of the three women who compete against Fidelity is a lesbian who teaches him a similar lesson when her religious family disowns her. She’s one of several characters who teach him about the hypocrisy practiced by certain religious folk. A few women teach him that fundamental feminist values — the importance of treating women as the equals of men — are really human values. People with money teach him that people who lust for money often place their acquisition of wealth above moral action.

The lessons are valuable, although they are repeated so frequently that the novel sometimes feels like Doctorow is hammering home the things he wants his readers to learn. Readers who think it’s bad to be “woke” — and a disappointing number of science fiction fans feel that way, despite sf’s reputation for encouraging free thinking — might dislike the novel’s emphasis on the value of tolerance, compassion, and decency. Open-minded readers, on the other hand, should appreciate it.

The plot is interesting. Doctorow avoids an artificially happy ending. He makes it easy to sympathize with the women who give the story its heart. The novel’s atmosphere, rooted in San Francisco during the earliest days of the tech boom, will probably evoke nostalgia in readers who are old enough to remember when early versions of personal computers were just arriving on the market. I’m not as high on Picks and Shovels as I was on the first two novels — the preachiness got to me after a bit, even if Doctorow was preaching to the choir — but I nevertheless enjoyed it.

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Beartooth by Callan Wink

Published by Spiegel & Grau on February 11, 2025

Combine a crime novel with a wilderness adventure and you get a different kind of thriller. Beartooth also differs from most in its emphasis on characterization without sacrificing plot.

Thad and Hazen are brothers who live in Montana. Their grandfather purchased land adjacent to Yellowstone National Park. Their father recently died, leaving behind hospital bills that his sons can’t pay. They also haven’t paid property taxes in several years and are facing foreclosure.

Thad and Hazen earn income by cutting down trees on their property and chopping them into firewood. They supplement their legal income with the illegal practice of hunting bears and selling their gallbladders to a man they know as the Scot. The Scot refers to a young girl who travels with him as his daughter, but there is clearly something off about their relationship. The Scot is known as a dangerous man, having shot a sixteen-year-old boy who may or may not have been trying to break into his gun safe.

The Scot tells the brothers that he has a market for Elk antlers. Elk shed their antlers and Yellowstone is full of them, but it’s illegal to remove them. Thad worries that it isn’t possible to haul large numbers out of the park without Park Rangers noticing. There is a limit, after all, to the number they can carry on their backs, and the Scot wants a mountain of them.

When Thad learns that the brothers are about to lose their land to satisfy their tax debt, he makes a plan to retrieve a hundred sheds and float them out of the park on rafts at night. Navigating rapids in the dark is harrowing, adding tension to a fast-moving story. Beartooth turns into a crime novel of sorts when, shortly after Hazen disappears, the girl the Scot calls his daughter disappears.

Thad and Hazen were homeschooled until high school. Thad is the smarter brother. He “wished his brother was a different way. Someone he could talk with. Formulate a plan with.” He’s always been protective of the simpler Hazen. Thad keeps Hazen from drinking too much and getting into barfights.  With Hazen, what you see is what you get. “Some people can behave in certain ways that are against the grain of their actual makeup. Hazen is incapable of doing that,” says Thad.

Their “sporadic mother,” Sacajawea, left after teaching them to read Where the Wild Things Are out loud. “In her absences their father picked up where she’d left off. He taught them as best he could, emphasizing areas in which he had some level of expertise, glossing over subjects that had never interested him.” Sacajawea resurfaces and makes herself comfortable in the home her father built. Her backstory and wisdom make an important contribution to the story.

Beartooth spotlights the kind of lives that most novels overlook. The brothers live backbreaking lives of labor, but they feel a fundamental connection to the land and its resources. Their parents haven’t given them much of a foundation, although they occasionally wonder how their father would feel about gutting bear for their gallbladders. The boys don’t have any use for the politics of environmentalism — they don’t understand why sheds should be left to rot on the ground where they fall when they can be turned into chandeliers and sold to people who have more money than they need — and they’re willing to transgress the law for the sake of survival, but they care about each other and have no desire to harm others. Their shared desire is to be left alone.

The story’s strength lies in the growing conflict between the brothers. Thad becomes frustrated with Hazen and with his role as Hazen’s protector. Yet when Thad is injured, he comes to understand that he has always underestimated his brother. Hazen’s disappearance motivates Thad to reconsider his own life. The reader will get a sense of where Hazen might have gone after Thad discovers a clue that Hazen left behind — a clue that will change Thad’s life.

It's rare to find a novel that proceeds with the pace of a thriller but finds ways to excite the reader’s interest without falling back on the tired themes of action novels. Two strong characters in conflict with each other despite their mutual love give Beartooth its heart, while the Montana wilderness contributes an atmosphere that anchors the story in a memorable setting.

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Smoke on the Water by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Forge Books on February 11, 2025

“For weeks the air smelled like a wet dog dipped in lip wax.” I love sentences like that one. I love Loren D. Estleman because he produces them so regularly.

Smoke on the Water is the prolific Estleman’s latest Amos Walker mystery. Walker is retained by Hermano Suerte, a lawyer in a hotshot firm, to recover a file. The firm got the bright idea to send files home with its associates while its offices were being scrubbed free of mold. A box of files went missing when Spencer Bennett, the lawyer who had custody of it, was killed by a hit-and-run driver as he was walking to a bus. The story makes little sense to Walker because Bennett lived in Detroit and owned a car. Traveling by bus violates the principles of car owners in Detroit.

One file is more important than the others. A whistleblowing accountant named Francis Birdseye retained the firm after he discovered discrepancies in his employer’s books. Rather than explaining the missing money, his employer fired Birdseye. The employer is a construction company that doesn’t do any construction but appears to be shaking down companies with threats to destroy their property if they don’t pay up.

The police searched Bennett’s home as part of their death investigation but couldn’t find the files. Walker visits Bennett’s live-in partner, an artist named Evan Morse, who denies knowledge of the files. Walker knows he’s lying but doesn’t know why.

Birdseye appears to have been murdered by a car thief who ran him down with his own car. That's another fact that makes no sense to Walker. Nor does the eventual discovery of the car in an airport parking lot, along with a body in the driver's seat that died from two gunshots to the head.

Walker is a traditional gumshoe who makes a nuisance of himself until he pieces together the puzzle. He uncovers an erudite but homeless witness who sets him on the right track, but not in time to prevent more killings. A subplot involves series regular John Alderdyce, a homicide detective who may or may not have tried to commit suicide.

As is customary of Amos Walker novels, the plot is credible and the ending is surprising. Smoke drifting into Detroit from Canadian wildfires contribute to the novel’s atmosphere (and to the novel’s title). Characters are colorful and dialog is snappy. Since Estleman never wastes words, the story moves quickly. The plot has enough action (including a traditional shootout) to qualify as a thriller, but Estleman keeps the story in motion even when Walker isn’t enduring a beating. I’m not sure that Estleman is as popular as some best-selling thriller writers, but he should be. The man just flat out knows how to write.

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