Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper by Geoffrey Gray

Published by Crown on August 9, 2011

Acting on a tip, Geoffrey Gray began searching for the true identity of D.B. Cooper, the man who hijacked a 727 in 1971, exchanged the passengers for $200,000 in cash, and parachuted to freedom (or death) somewhere over the Pacific Northwest. Gray hadn't heard of Cooper when he received the tip, which tells me that Gray (like a growing number of people) is younger than I am. I wasn't all that old in 1971, but I recall that Cooper became part of the popular culture, a folk hero whose "perfect crime" was glorified in song. After 9/11, it's difficult to imagine an American admiring a skyjacker, but at the time, Cooper's theft of money from an airline, without injuring the passengers or crew, was seen by many as a symbolic protest against corporate greed and by others as a brave act of banditry.

Gray's tip originated with Lyle Christiansen. Lyle is certain that D.B. Cooper is Lyle's brother Kenny, who died in 1994. There is some evidence to support the theory but there are also reasons to doubt that Kenny is the culprit. As Gray dreams of solving the crime and winning a Pulitzer, his investigation takes him to a number of plausible suspects. A man who in 1972 hijacked a 727 in Utah and exchanged $500,000 for the passengers before parachuting from the plane might have been a copycat criminal or he might have been D.B. Cooper. A woman claims her husband confessed on his deathbed to being D.B. Cooper, and that remarks he made during her marriage (to which she attached no significance at the time) implied his familiarity with Cooper. Another theory -- one the FBI refuses to entertain -- is that D.B. Cooper is a woman named Barbara. This sounds implausible on its face until the reader makes sense of a series of vignettes that are initially mystifying. If that theory seems wild, consider the possibility that the skyjacking was a "black ops" mission underwritten by the CIA.

The mystery is indeed intriguing. Some of the $200,000 was found on a sand bar in the Columbia River. How did it get there? An informal team of scientists attempted to answer that question, and they're just as interesting as Cooper. A few have become obsessed with the search -- they've succumbed to what Gray characterizes as "the curse." The poster boy for "the curse" is a man named Jerry who has spent more than twenty years wandering through the woods, looking for Cooper's skeleton and the money. Jerry has no use for the loosely-affiliated contributors to a website who, taking a more analytical approach to determining where Cooper might have landed, think Jerry has spent his life looking in the wrong place.

In many respects, the amateur investigators turn out to be better than the FBI agents who failed to follow up obvious leads. At the time, the FBI floated the story that Cooper didn't survive the jump, an easy explanation for the Bureau's failure to capture him. The FBI's current theory seems to be that D.B. Cooper is the skyjacker from Utah. It should be easy to determine whether Cooper and McCoy are the same person by using modern technology to test the DNA on the eight cigarette butts Cooper left on the plane, but the FBI seems to have misplaced them. How convenient.

I don't know that Skyjack answers any questions, but it is a fun and lighthearted romp through an enduring puzzle. Gray used to cover boxing for the New York Times and he writes like a gifted sportswriter (I consider that high praise). Using powerful prose and vivid imagery, Gray surrounds a dramatic story with convincing detail. We meet passengers and crew of the 727, scientific experts and law enforcement agents, and an abundance of people looking for their fifteen minutes of derivative fame, if only they can solve the mystery. Sometimes the book seems a bit disjointed, but on the whole I think it succeeds as entertainment, if not as a thorough and dispassionate examination of the evidence.

RECOMMENDED

Undercurrents by Robert Buettner

Published by Baen on July 5, 2011

Undercurrents is the second novel in the Orphan's Legacy series. The Orphan's Legacy series is set in the same universe as, and is a successor to, Robert Buettner's Jason Wander series.

Kit Born, a United States Army colonel assigned to special operations, is violating the Human Union Charter by conducting surveillance upon the planet Tressel. She hopes to determine why military officers in Tressen (one of Tressel's two nations) are collaborating with military officers from the planet Yavet. Unfortunately for Kit, she's captured by the Yavi and held by Major Ruberd Polian, Yavet's ranking military officer on Tressel pending the arrival of General Gill. Point of view then shifts to that of Jazen Parker, a retired special ops officer who owns a tavern on Mousetrap. Jazen is recruited to complete Kit's mission on Tressel. He reluctantly agrees to resume his military career only because a secondary objective of the mission is to locate Kit. As far as Jazen is concerned, his mission is to rescue his former lover.

In the best tradition of action fiction, things go wrong for Jazen from the start. In a scene that is reminiscent of Starship Troopers, Jazen plunges to the surface of Tressel from an orbiting ship. His insertion doesn't go as planned, leaving Jazen injured and isolated as he struggles with amphibians that want to turn him into lunch. Soon after that he finds himself fleeing from Major Polian and the Tressen navy. At some point the chapters begin to alternate between Jazen's first person account of his actions and third person descriptions of the events surrounding Polian and Gill. The Polian/Gill chapters eventually reveal the reason for the Yavi's sudden interest in Tressel.

Tressel is a sparsely populated planet but members of its two nations -- the Tressens and the Iridians -- have hated each other for centuries. The Tressens oppress the Iridians by denying them the right to own property and to procreate. The Iridians rebel as best they can. Jazen needs Iridian support to spy on the Tressens and to that end he is assisted by a one-handed man named Pyt and an eleven-year-old girl named Alia. They are charged with leading Jazen to the Iridian rebel leader, Celline, who -- like Princess Leia -- is descended from royalty.

Unlike Pyt, Alia, and Celline, Polian and Gill are interesting characters. Polian has the sense of honor and duty that are standard in military science fiction, but he's also plagued by insecurity. Gill, unlike Polian, has reservations about Yavet's policy of controlling population growth by killing illegal newborns. Polian favors torture while Gill insists on playing by the rules. Neither one trusts the other and there may be good reason for the mistrust. The conflict between the characters adds a bit of needed depth to the story.

Jazen is less interesting. He is a "Trueborn" (his parents are from Earth) but he was born illegally on Yavet, never knew his parents, and spent his young life trying to avoid extermination. Despite that background, Jazen is a stock "reluctant warrior" character, unhappy to be uprooted from a life of relative peace and returned to the landscape of battle. Given his background (he identifies neither with the Yavi nor the Truebloods), Jazen is a surprisingly dull guy. Kit is virtually a nonentity; she's there to give Jazen something to do. Kit exudes a shallow idealism that is supposed to conflict with Jazen's pragmatic desire to keep her safe. It isn't convincing. As is usually true of military science fiction, however, the characters in Undercurrent are secondary to the plot-driven story.

Three minor gripes: (1) Gill asks Polian a number of basic questions about the reason for Yavi collaboration with the Tressens. While the ensuing dialog educates the reader, it makes no sense that Gill wouldn't have that information before assuming command of the Yavi operation. (2) Saddling Jazen with a wise-beyond-her-years eleven-year-old spying partner is an obvious contrivance that might appeal to preadolescent (maybe even early adolescent) readers but it didn't work for me. Despite an ending that attempts to make her significant, Alia adds nothing but empty chatter to the story. (3) The method by which Undercurrents sets up the next book in the series is a bit too obvious.

Gripes notwithstanding, I liked Undercurrents. The story moves quickly, the actions scenes are well done, and the plot is satisfying if unspectacular. Hardcore fans of military science fiction will almost certainly enjoy it, while fans of action-oriented sf will likely find it a pleasant enough read.

RECOMMENDED

Smuggled by Christina Shea

Published by Black Cat (a paperback imprint of Grove/Atlantic) on July 5, 2011

In 1943, five-year-old Éva Farkas is hidden in a sack of flour and smuggled by train across the Hungarian border. From there Éva is transported to a Romanian village that was once part of Hungary. Her father's sister, Kati, has agreed to keep her. Éva's mother is Jewish but the village has already been searched so Kati believes Éva will be safe. Kati gives Éva a new identity -- Anca Balaj, the fictitious niece of Kati's husband Ilie -- and tells Éva she is now a Romanian and must never again speak Hungarian. All of this is a dramatic and unwelcome change for Éva, who misses her mother, thinks her new name sounds like glass breaking, and lies in bed "feeling helpless against the invading Romanian." When Éva protests that she is Éva, not Anca, Ilie tells her that "Éva is dead."

So begins Éva's story, a story that is in some respects familiar and in others remarkably fresh. It is a bleak story that is both political and personal, a story that for much of the novel is dominated by isolation and oppression. While it takes place in a part of the world that changes repeatedly during the course of a lifetime, the story derives its power from the impact those changes have on a single person.

In 1947, after Romania falls under Soviet control, Éva secretly befriends a Gypsy boy but loses her friend when his family is driven out of the country. In the early 1950s, Soviet domination and fear of informants join racial and religious intolerance as the defining characteristics of Éva's environment, although growing discord between her aunt and uncle has a more immediate impact on her life. In the late 1950s, Éva feels oppressed by the Jewish members of the Communist League who interrogate her about her relationship with a childhood friend from Hungary. In the 1960s, Éva enters into a troubled relationship with a man she comes to view as a changeling because of the ease with which he transforms himself from passionate communist to passionate Zionist. In the 1970s, after she marries for convenience, she loses her place as a top tournament ping pong player after her husband defects.

With good reason, Éva often feels that her existence is precarious. She learns that it is unwise to trust others, no matter how similar their lives seem to her own. Smuggled illustrates how easily the oppressed can become oppressors, how quickly the informed upon can become informants. At various times during her life Éva endures beatings and sexual abuse. She makes compromises that are necessary to her welfare. Death and abandonment are constants in her life. In 1991, having survived fascism and communism, she feels worn out. When, toward the novel's end, a friend tells Éva she has to stop "peeking through her fingers," we wonder if it's possible for Éva to set aside her ingrained caution, to live without fear of living. Yet throughout the novel Éva is able to find small moments of pleasure: from perfecting her tennis game and losing herself in a ping pong match, from eating slices of banana and watching a cat play with a pill bottle. The reader's hope is that Éva will come to know the more fundamental pleasures of life, a safe home and a loving partner chief among them.

Éva's personality throughout the book is characterized by a protective meekness. She would like to stand up for herself and for others but her life has taught her that being noticed carries the risk of grim consequences. Near the book's end, however, there is a wonderful image of Éva riding on a train traveling over a great plain and feeling "as though she is moving along a deep seam, repairing." The novel also draws a lovely parallel between Éva and a little dove that returns home, bloody and battered from its journey but safely home nonetheless.

Christina Shea's writing style is as restrained as Éva's personality. Shea's prose is deceptively simple. She doesn't overreach; passion lurks just below the surface of her words. I particularly liked Shea's use of the novel Frankenstein, which Éva reads twice, once as a university student and again at the age of fifty. The first time Éva relates to the monster's desire to be loved in a cruel world while her second reading focuses on Victor Frankenstein's failure to take responsibility for his actions. I loved that change in Éva's perspective, as I love many other aspects of this book. It's awfully rare that at the end of a novel I want a character to step out of the pages so I can give her a reassuring hug. Smuggled did that to me. For that alone I must recommend it.

RECOMMENDED

The Vault by Boyd Morrison

Published by Touchstone on July 5, 2011

Like James Bond movies, some thrillers ask the reader to accept the unbelievable for the sake of enjoying a fun story. The reader's willingness to suspend disbelief is a function of the payoff -- that is, the more farfetched the plot, the more enjoyable it must be if the author doesn't want to lose the reader entirely. Boyd Morrison stretches the limits of plausibility nearly to their breaking point in The Vault, but the result is just as entertaining as the early Bond movies. A part of the novel, in fact, is almost a homage to Goldfinger.

Jordan Orr steals an ancient manuscript from a vault. Eighteen months later, Carol Benedict and recently retired General Sherman Locke are abducted, while Carol's sister Stacy and Sherman's son Tyler are on a ferry with a bomb that's twenty minutes away from exploding. All of this is orchestrated by Orr, who needs Stacy's expertise in ancient Greece and Tyler's engineering skill to help him solve the puzzle of the Archimedes codex and find the Midas Touch -- that is, the power to transmute objects into gold. To further complicate the plot (or maybe just to add a need for speed), Orr is in a race with a beautiful and deadly woman named Gia (a/k/a "The Fox") to recover the Midas Touch from its hiding place in Naples, and thus gives Stacy and Tyler only four days to do the job. Throw in an Italian crime family and a weapon of mass destruction and you've got yourself a thriller.

If you think all of this adds up to a wildly improbable premise, I agree with you. If you can overcome your skepticism, however, The Vault tells a surprisingly entertaining story. With the help of Tyler's co-worker and war buddy Grant, Tyler and Stacy begin a quest that takes them to the Fox's London lair, to a car chase on Germany's autobahn, to a museum heist and a shootout at the Parthenon in Athens, and to a series of violent confrontations in Naples. I was worried that the novel was heading toward a predictable finish, but there's nothing predictable about this story. A little silly, maybe, but I give Morrison credit for putting together a fun, exciting tale.

The Vault moves like the Ferrari that Tyler races on the autobahn. Morrison provides a wealth of interesting information about Archimedes without slowing the plot. He clearly did his research, not only into ancient history but into architecture, steganography, engineering, explosives, extremeophiles, and how to steal strontium-90. He even came up with an explanation for the Midas Touch. I'm no scientist and therefore can't evaluate the explanation but I'm nonetheless -- shall we say -- dubious. Still, the story works so well as an action-thriller that I was willing to set aside my doubts. More troubling is a complicated bit of subterfuge in which Tyler engages toward the novel's end, supposedly without being seen by the adversaries who were guarding him. That the adversaries would be so remarkably unobservant was inconsistent with their behavior until that point and just a little too convenient for our intrepid hero.

Morrison's writing style is unburdened by clichés. His characters aren't deep -- the male characters are standard ex-military Ranger types who are adept at flying planes, racing cars, and defusing bombs, while the lead female is plucky and smart -- but this book is all about plot; the characters exist only to move the story along. This isn't the kind of writing that wins literary awards (just as James Bond movies don't win Oscars), but it is the kind of high energy writing that entertains thriller fans. It worked for me.

RECOMMENDED

English Lessons by J.M. Hayes

Published by Poisoned Pen Press on July 5, 2011

Despite Sewa Tribal Officer Heather English's disdain for the politics of Arizona's new governor-elect, she isn't pleased to have her Christmas Day shift disturbed by her discovery of his skin nailed to a wall near an abandoned mine on the Sewa reservation.  Nor is she happy to find her name printed on an envelope that has been left at the crime scene.  The enclosed letter warns of an impending war on a drug lord named Rabiso.  At about the same time, a package containing a severed hand is delivered to Heather's uncle, Mad Dog.  We soon learn that two drug dealers named Mouse and Cowboy have hired a hit man known only as "the professional" to take out Rabiso.  For reasons that eventually become clear, Cowboy's people mistakenly believe that Rabiso and Mad Dog are the same person.  The confusion of identity leaves Mad Dog fending off thugs as well as the amorous advances of a beautiful lawyer who has been hired to protect Rabiso.  Meanwhile, "the professional" has an agenda of his own.

Given the lighthearted tone of this mix-up, it's clear that J.M. Hayes wrote this novel with his tongue pressed forcefully into his cheek.  In fact, Hayes couldn't resist the puns to which an unattached hand lends itself.  If that doesn't provide enough humor for one mystery novel, Heather's dad, the sheriff of Benteen County, Kansas, begins Christmas Day by trying to figure out who urinated a message into the snow near a crèche displayed on a resident's lawn, and later confronts an informal militia that tries to occupy the courthouse without missing Christmas dinner.  Then there's Heather's love life -- she's trying to keep a date to meet her boyfriend's parents for a Christmas gathering but dead bodies keep getting in the way -- and the fact that Mad Dog is a shaman with a spiritual connection to a wolf that's smarter than Lassie.

The storyline involving Heather is essentially a spoof of a thriller while the one involving her father is closer to a farcical send-up of the extremely gullible who believe every loony idea they hear on talk radio.  Some of the humor has a political component -- Hayes pokes fun at conspiracy theorists who believe the Obama administration intends to confiscate their weapons -- that some readers might find less amusing than I did.  Readers who want their fiction to remain divorced from politics (and those who think government agents in black helicopters are waiting to swoop down and collect their shotguns) might want to give this novel a pass.

Nearly all the characters in English Lessons are likable.  Heather's father is an older, limping version of Andy Griffith.  The whackos and bad guys are too bumbling to dislike (except "the professional" who is, of course, a professional).  Even Hayes' minor characters have engaging personalities, from Sheriff English's elderly office manager (who becomes vicious when she's playing online computer games) to the gruff doctor who points out that the militia members who insist they want to "save the country" are flying a secessionist flag.

Both storylines are a bit over-the-top by the novel's end but since they aren't meant to be taken seriously, I didn't mind.  The novel is relatively short, the right length to prevent the joke from growing stale.  English Lessons is the sixth novel in the "Mad Dog & Englishman" series but the first I've read.  If they are all this goofy, I'll have to find the time to read more of them.

RECOMMENDED