Light of the World by James Lee Burke

Published by Simon & Schuster on July 23, 2013

As the opening paragraphs of the twentieth Dave Robicheaux novel expressly state, Light of the World is an exploration of evil, a familiar theme in James Lee Burke's books. It is Robicheaux's tale of how "one of the most wicked creatures on earth made his way into" the lives of Robicheaux's family and friends. Initially, the reader wonders whether the "wicked creature" is a born-again rodeo clown named Wyatt Dixon, the serial killer Asa Surrette (who, according to the FBI, is dead), or some other character who might be channeling Keyser Söze, making the novel a sort of whodunit. In the end, Burke's point is that evil wears many faces. Some evil people enter and leave prison, some enter the worlds of business or politics, some carry a badge. And as the best thriller writers remind us, the boundary between good and evil is often indistinct.

Robicheaux meets Dixon after an arrow sails past the ear of his adopted daughter Alafair while she's jogging in Montana during a family vacation at Albert Hollister's ranch. Alafair soon realizes that someone is stalking her, and she thinks she recognizes Surrette, a psychopath she once interviewed in a maximum security prison for a book she was writing. The stalking coincides with the murder of a seventeen-year-old girl, the adopted granddaughter of a billionaire whose son is a scoundrel.

Burke adds another dimension to the story with the reappearance of Gretchen Horowitz (last seen in Creole Belle), the daughter of Dave's friend Clete Purcel. Sexually abused as a child, Gretchen became a contract killer before renouncing her criminal vocation. Child abuse is clearly evil; whether Gretchen is evil, given her past, Burke leaves for the reader to decide. She might be less evil than a member of the local police department who brutalizes a handcuffed suspect before focusing his unwelcome attention on her. Robicheaux is a cop, but he acknowledges the evil inherent in the "sick culture" that pervades law enforcement, the "smug moral superiority" that makes police officers feel entitled to violate the laws they are sworn to enforce. Of course, any book about evil is also about good, and rare is the person who is entirely one or the other. The fact that good and evil coexist assures that they will influence (or taint) each other by virtue of their proximity. Robicheaux has learned the lesson that we all "belong to the family of man, even if only on its outer edges."

Burke writes with such eloquence that his tendency to be verbose is easy to forgive. When he waxes poetic about human nature, I take it in stride, confident that he'll eventually pick up the plot thread. His soaring prose is a joy to read. Real people generally aren't as articulate as the characters in a Burke novel (I know I'm not), but if they were, the world would be a more interesting place.

There's as much family drama as thriller drama in Light of the World, but none of it is melodrama. Family isn't always easy but it's always family, a point Burke makes through several of his characters. Burke has a knack for creating characters I'd sometimes like to strangle, while at the same time making me understand why they behave as they do.

Thrillers that take evil as their theme often allude to the devil, and this one is no exception. When Burke asks whether evil has human origins or whether it comes from a darker place, he's walking on familiar ground. When his characters started smelling peculiar odors that they associate with malevolence and seeing prints made by two-legged goat-footed creatures and at least half believing that the killer is an emissary of the devil, I became worried about the novel's direction, but Burke offers an appealing contrast of explanations for those phenomena, grounded both in the rational world and in the supernatural. In any event, Light of the World is such a deft display of suspenseful storytelling that my qualms vanished well before the novel reached its climax.

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The Deep Whatsis by Peter Mattei

Published by Other Press on July 23, 2013

The Deep Whatsis is a familiar but funny sendup of the corporate environment. It's like Dilbert with sex, or Office Space merged with Fatal Attraction.

Eric Nye is 33, works in advertising ("advertising is how corporations outsource their lies") and is on page two of the screenplay he's been writing for three years. As the ad agency's Executive Creative Director, his primary job is to fire older workers, a task he handles with pleasure (for awhile, at least) despite his realization that he is the person most deserving of being fired. Like other writers who have lampooned the highly compensated denizens of corporate culture, Peter Mattei emphasizes Eric's shallow self-indulgence, his obsession with trendy consumerism, his emotional emptiness, and his dependence on mood-stabilizing drugs, none of which ward off his panic attacks.

Eric's one-night-stand with a client's young intern becomes problematic after she accepts an internship with Eric's employer and begins to stalk him. Naturally enough, Eric is obsessed with the one person who is devious enough to cause him professional harm. Yet Eric's mind seems to take occasional breaks from reality, leaving the reader to wonder whether the problems in his life are caused by the intern or are of his own design.

Mattei's characters are hilariously stereotyped, from the politically correct HR lady to the antisocial IT guy. Eric is a jerk but he's a self-aware jerk, so over the top in his jerkiness that he's almost likable. Eric experiences a transformation of sorts that gives the reader a reason to care about him, but how much he's actually changed is an open question by the time the novel reaches its abrupt ending. Eric's relationship with the intern is central to the story and to the development of Eric's character, but Eric's strong feelings about her are not entirely convincing.

Mattei's insights into advertising (the art of persuading consumers to buy junk they don't need) aren't new but his description of consumers buying shiny new things to increase their "game status" in the game of acquisition is amusing. His notion that technology is "taking away the fundamental truths about our humanity and making us pay to get them back" is, sadly enough, at least partially true. It is, in fact, Mattei's take on modern urban life -- more funny than profound -- that furnishes the novel's best moments.

Although The Deep Whatsis is built upon ideas that are recycled from other novels, Mattei has infused enough fresh humor to make it a breezy, entertaining read. The novel has an unfinished feel that might disturb some readers -- it's a slice of an unsatisfying life, with much remaining to be resolved -- but readers who don't mind writing their own endings are given ample opportunity to imagine where Eric's life will take him.

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Masaryk Station by David Downing

Published by Soho Crime on June 18, 2013

Masaryk Station appeals to the intellect but not to the heart. David Downing's writing lacks passion and the story is only moderately suspenseful. The plot is nonetheless intriguing and the background is skillfully rendered.

John Russell is an American journalist, but that's a cover for a rather complicated life. He's married to Effi, a German movie star. He also works for the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps, currently (1948) assigned to Berlin. For the moment, however, he's on loan to Trieste, serving as an interpreter for the flood of Russians seeking to defect. He's also running errands for the CIA. He uses his free time to poke into a ratline operated by Catholic priests for the benefit of (among others) the Americans who pay by the head for each refugee smuggled out of Eastern Europe. When they aren't working for pay, the priests are saving the skins of Croatian fascists and fugitive Nazis, an embarrassing fact that Russell would like to expose. Russell's other secret is that he's a double agent who reports to Soviet intelligence.

During the course of the novel, the CIA sends Russell to Udine, Belgrade, and Prague. None of his missions go well, but since Russell doesn't seem to like any of his employers, he's content simply to stay alive -- a tricky proposition given the multiple attempts that are made on his life. Russell's real agenda is to get out from under the thumb of his Russian and American employers.

A less interesting storyline follows Effi in Berlin as she wrestles with career choices (including pressure from the Soviets to act in a movie being filmed in Moscow), assists a mother who hopes to reunite with her daughter in Prague, and becomes embroiled in the mystery surrounding an actress' death. Also in Berlin, Gerhard Ströhm, a liaison between Russia and Germany, engages in a series of academic discussions about socialism, capitalism, and communism that are a tad dry. More interesting are the efforts Russia is making (and that Ströhm must help orchestrate) to disrupt American activities in Berlin.

Masaryk Station is a pleasantly meandering novel, but not a particularly suspenseful one. One disadvantage (to the reader) of Russell's status as a double agent is that, when captured by either side, he can extricate himself from trouble by saying "Hey, I work for you guys." It's hard to worry about a spy who carries a "get out of jail free" card. Although Downing delivers a satisfying amount of action, I never had the sense of danger that the best espionage novels deliver. I also found it difficult to believe that the Americans and British failed to notice that Russell is a double agent, given events in the novel that practically scream out his betrayal.

Perhaps because I haven't read the earlier novels in the series, I didn't feel I ever got a handle on what makes Russell tick. He's clearly a man with a conscience and I appreciated that aspect of his character development, but I never understood why I should care about him. I spent much of the novel wondering about his motivation to act on Russia's behalf until Downing finally alluded to it. I suppose that's my own fault for beginning with the last book in a series so I don't hold that against Downing, but I wonder if I might have enjoyed this novel more if I had read the others first. In any event, I didn't find myself fully engaged with Russell's plight.

Still, I appreciated the novel's historical setting and the atmosphere that Downing creates. I also admired Downing's ability to craft an intelligent plot even if I didn't feel particularly connected to it. On the whole, Masaryk Station is a reasonably enjoyable novel, but I would recommend that readers avoid my mistake and start with the first book in the series.

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Downfall by Jeff Abbott

Published by Grand Central Publishing on July 16, 2013

As the result of events in the first two Sam Capra novels, former CIA agent and current bar owner Capra is running errands of a questionable nature for a woman named Mila on behalf of the Round Table.  His new assignment is to identify the person who poisoned Round Table member Dalton Monroe.  Before he can make any progress, he’s fighting for his life against a Russian who chased a woman into his San Francisco bar.

Capra’s larger problem is a bad guy named John Belias.  When Belias isn’t training soccer moms to be assassins, he’s busy “hacking people” as if they were computers, plugging them into a network of powerful people that he’s assembled.  As is typical of modern thrillers, the network extends into the highest levels of business and government.  Conspiracy theorists should love the Capra novels.

One of the soccer mom assassins is Janice Keene.  Diana, Janice’s daughter, initially knows nothing about her mother’s double life.  She learns the truth from a hidden video that brings both Diane and Belias into Capra’s world.  Belias wants the video.  He also wants Capra -- but, it seems, so do some other mysterious, unidentified conspirators.  The plot jumps off from that starting block.

Downfall’s strengths are the pace, the action, and the clever (albeit farfetched) plot.  If the story borders on the preposterous, it at least has the merit of being less preposterous than the first two novels in the series.  Apart from a couple of small plot holes (or at least small points that didn’t make sense to me), the story is one I could swallow, and it culminates in a reveal that, if not entirely surprising, is satisfying.  Downfall’s downside is that too many chases and fight scenes are indistinguishable from those found in other thrillers.

I’m not sure Janice’s secret career or her motivation for pursuing it are entirely believable.  Other characters who apparently live normal (albeit unusually successful) lives turn out to be part-time, stone cold killers, and I found that difficult to accept.  I snickered a bit at the Faustian references to Belias, a character who is a bit over-the-top, but in a way that makes him cool, like Bond villains are cool.  In any event, I had no trouble letting those reservations slide for the sake of enjoying a good story.

There are aspects of Sam Capra -- particularly his sarcasm -- that make him an appealing character.  He becomes a bit tedious, however, when he tells us again and again that he loves his son and craves a normal life.  The same is true of Janice, who repeatedly reminds us of her love for her daughter and her devotion to Belias, as if saying it over and over will cause the reader to accept Janice’s weak motivation for behaving in sinister ways.  I give Jeff Abbott credit, however, for developing the personalities of two soccer mom assassins in uncommon depth.

I give also give Abbott credit for moving the series forward.  Downfall sends Capra’s story in a new direction, and key events late in the novel assure that the direction will change again.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to read this installment of the Capra saga given the silly setup in the first two novels, but Downfall left me looking forward to the next book.

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The Best of Connie Willis by Connie Willis

Published by Del Rey on July 9, 2013

I'm a fan of the "Best of" series, but how does an editor pick the best of a writer who won eleven Hugos and seven Nebulas, among other awards? Some writers are better at drama than comedy, some are better at comedy, but rare is the writer who is equally adept at both. Connie Willis is one of the rare ones. Her range of talent -- her ability to write hilarious stories alongside stories that are sad and moving -- is on full display in this anthology.

Willis excels at time travel stories, making "Fire Watch" a welcome addition to the volume. History student Bartholomew doesn't know why he's been sent to London during World War II, but he suspects he's there to keep St. Paul's Cathedral from burning down. Willis' time travel stories are often quite funny but this one is both an ironic tale of paranoia and a sad reminder that the real lessons to be learned from history are often concealed. "Fire Watch" won both the Hugo and the Nebula in 1983 and it's my favorite serious story in the anthology. A close runner-up, "The Last of the Winnebagos" (1988 Nebula, 1989 Hugo) -- a story about guilt and forgiveness that combines a mystery with a commentary on the loss of privacy -- imagines a sad world in which all the dogs have died.

The other serious stories are: "A Letter from the Clearys" (1983 Nebula), in which a letter written before the nuclear war reminds a family of everything they've lost. A visitor to London notices a cold winds and smells death and decay at several tube stations in "The Winds of Marble Arch" (2000 Hugo), but when he investigates the phenomenon, he comes to understand some sad truths about life.

The funniest story (I'm still laughing) is "The Soul Selects Her Own Society," a sendup of doctoral students written as a scholarly paper arguing (rather convincingly) that Emily Dickinson was visited by Martian poets. It won a well-deserved Hugo in 1997. A close second is "All Seated on the Ground" (2008 Hugo) which asks the amusing question: What if aliens visit Earth but make no attempt to communicate and only respond to one stimulus ... Christmas carols?

The other funny stories are: Attending a convention "At the Rialto" (1990 Nebula), a physicist comes to realize that the randomness inherent in quantum physics makes perfect sense in Hollywood, where chaos theory reigns supreme and the uncertainty principle is a way of life -- particularly in a hotel where nothing can be predicted. A woman who visits Egypt with her husband and two other couples experiences "Death on the Nile" (1994 Hugo) -- that is, she wonders whether she's actually on the journey to the afterworld described in The Book of the Dead. In "Inside Job" (2006 Hugo), a skeptic is prepared to expose a spelling-challenged spiritualist who channels "Isus" until the spiritualist appears to channel the greatest skeptic of all. "Even the Queen" (1993 Hugo and Nebula) turns the concept of women's liberation upside down as a family debates a young woman's decision not to free herself from menstruation.

Each story is followed by an afterword in which Willis talks about the story. The volume ends with three entertaining speeches that Willis prepared. Fans of science fiction are probably familiar with Willis, but any fan of short stories, and for that matter, any fan of good writing, should enjoy this volume.

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