Crime Fiction: Faithful Place by Tana French

Today in January Magazine’s crime fiction section, Gretchen Echols reviews Faithful Place by Tana French. Says Echols:

On a frigid December night 22 years ago, teenager Frank Mackey left his gritty Dublin neighborhood, intending to run away to London with his girl, Rosie Daly. They planned to get married, find good jobs and not look back again toward the poverty and unforgiving reality of their lives on Faithful Place.

But Rosie never showed up for their meeting.

She’d previously been forbidden by her father from associating with Frank. So the young man just assumed that Rosie had had second thoughts about hooking up with him, and had instead lit out for England on her own. Frank wasn’t about to be stopped by this unexpected turn of events. He was already bound and determined to leave Faithful Place, and even without Rosie at his side, he kept on going.

Now flash forward two decades. Frank Mackey is a cop, a member of the Dublin Murder Squad, working in the undercover unit. He has a 9-year-old daughter, Holly, who is the light of his life. And he is determined that she won’t ever be exposed to the sorts of horrors he once experienced with his own family, back in Faithful Place.

The trouble is, most roads lead in two directions -- and Frank is about to revisit the past he hoped to leave behind forever.

Faithful Place is Irish author Tana French’s third novel (following 2007’s In the Woods and 2008’s The Likeness), and certainly her best one yet. Narrated by Frank Mackey, it is a masterful tale of forbidden love, family loyalties, sibling rivalries and sins of the fathers extending their injurious reach into the next generation.

The full review is here.

Crime Fiction: Moscow Sting by Alex Dryden

In his new release, Moscow Sting (Ecco) -- the sequel to 2009’s Red to Black -- Alex Dryden picks up the story of Anna Resnikov, once the youngest female colonel in the KGB, who defected to the West out of love for Finn, a British MI6 operative who has since been murdered. As Finn’s despondent widow, she has been stashed in a “safe house” somewhere in the south of France with their 2-year-old child, Little Finn. Only recently has she begun to feel an interest in life again and look forward to the periodic visits by her handler, Willy.

Unfortunately, the Russians (KGB), the Americans (CIA), the Brits (MI6), plus other independent intelligence agencies all want Anna. The Russians want her dead for her betrayal with Finn, and the other agencies want the information and contacts she can supply. Finn was the only handler for a spy buried deep in the Russian hierarchy (code name: Mikhail), and Anna now holds the key to Mikhail and his secrets.

Dryden’s story unfolds from the viewpoints of multiple characters:

• Adrian Carew, the head of MI6, is obsessed with avenging Finn’s death. He now has the identity of the killer and wants Anna to help him exact his retribution.

• Logan, a clever freelance espionage agent, is constantly trolling for information. During a routine lunch with one of his blustery contacts, he stumbles on a clue to the possible whereabouts of Anna’s safe house. After confirming his hunch, Logan proceeds to sell Anna’s location to various intelligence communities in a large-scale double-dipping scam.

• Lars, a hired assassin, specializes in extreme challenges. His prowess with difficult shots, which include maximum distances and tricky angles, is told in loving detail.

• Burt Miller, the jovial head of a private information-gathering firm called the Cougar Intelligence Agency (initials CIA -- ha ha), has seemingly unlimited resources with which to pay for intel and maintain safe houses all over the place.

Then of course there’s Anna, the ex-KGB officer, who is at the center of this story. She had quickly advanced in the KGB, but threw it all away for love. Her son is the only thing she has left of her beloved Finn. She just wants to protect the boy, at the same time as she shields the mysterious Mikhail. But Anna has become a pawn in a dangerous game played by the Great Powers. And after a plan to kidnap Little Finn and blackmail Anna into returning to Moscow falls apart, Anna and her son are “saved” by Miller and relocated -- to America. The stakes for all parties involved are now higher, while the chances that matters might be resolved without bloodshed have declined sharply.

The potential in these pages for an engrossing tale was considerable, but the results are less than satisfying. I think I finally understand what is meant by a “plot-driven story,” and it’s not a pretty picture -- or rather, not a rewarding read. If you want a book with minimal character development and negligible reflection, or one in which actions and lifestyle choices result in little or no personal angst, then Moscow Sting is just your ticket.

One of the most annoying faults here is Anna’s behavior in regard to her separation from Little Finn, after their secret move to the United States. Anna finally agrees to leave the child behind and go to Washington, D.C., with Miller and Logan, hoping to convince Mikhail to defect. Apparently, she “talks” with her son, but how exactly does she accomplish that? Via Skype? And why does she seem curiously long-suffering but not frantic about their separation? Every mother I know (myself included, although my last encounter with a child of mine at 2 years of age was more than three decades ago) would be hysterical at such a parting under dangerous circumstances. Perhaps she feels that the safe house Miller has found her among the peaks of northern New Mexico (in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, maybe?) is the equivalent of the Fortress of Solitude, and Little Finn is safe there. Who knows? Author Dryden doesn’t make it clear at all.

Then there’s the later and thoroughly unconvincing plot twist involving assassin Logan. If you haven’t read Moscow Sting, beware here of spoilers -- and jump to the next paragraph. For everyone who has stuck with me, let me ask: Is there anything less believable than that Logan should kill Finn’s slayer in order to win Anna Resnikov’s love? “I want you, Anna,” he declares. Argh!! And why would Finn’s killer, a professional assassin with a strong self-protective impulse, who is known to spend plenty of time studying situations in order to achieve maximum lethal results against impossible odds, allow Logan to get within deadly range of him within just three days? Granted, that hired gun is a Russian thug from the provinces, but even a first-bracket apprentice assassin wouldn’t let his guard down in such a short period of time, would he?

As I read along, I kept noticing references to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s KGB-controlled Russia and assorted modern-day spy schemes. I confess, I found those rather far-fetched until the news broke about a Russian ring of “sleeper spies” who’d been embedded in middle-class American life for the past 10 years. They were recently deported in a Cold War-style trade for several U.S. agents of a higher caliber, who had been jailed in Russia. Included in that ring was a couple with a small child, who held seemingly innocuous jobs in my old hometown. I found it all rather amusing. Later, though, I read that Putin had met with those deported spies near Moscow and joined them in singing the equivalent of the KGB fight song. That news, coupled with a very long article on corporate spying and a multitude of private agencies engaged in the so-called war on terror, made for a more compelling spy story than the one told in Moscow Sting. Maybe I should get on the anti-Russian, conspiracy bandwagon too.

According to the promotional materials sent out with advance copies of this novel, Alex Dryden “is a pseudonym for a journalist who has lived in and around the Soviet Union and Russia for decades, with many years experience in security matters.” Well, he may have the inside scoop on Russia and the current business of spying, but as an author he is no master of character development or creating the nuanced motivations of his principal players. I found the cast here to be thinly drawn and cartoonish. The story would have made a better graphic novel, or perhaps an action film -- one starring Angelina Jolie. She does seem perfect for the role of Anna. A New Yorker review of her latest movie, Salt, described her character, Evelyn Salt, as “impervious: her cool lies in how little she responds to what happens to her.” That sounds like Anna to me.

Comparisons between Moscow Sting and the espionage-fiction works of renowned authors John le Carré and Len Deighton are totally unjustified. Listen, I want George Smiley and his lamplighters back just as badly as the next lover of spy novels. And I remember with affection Bernard Samson toiling in Mexico while full of regret about his marriage going down the drain. But it’s a cheap trick to invoke those writers and get our hopes up. Most books I’ve read lately with blurbs comparing them to stories by Saints John and Len are major disappointments.

If you are looking for novels that are both well-written and do a fine job of building tension, check out some of those by Jo Nesbø (The Devil’s Star) and Olen Steinhauer (The Nearest Exit). In the case of Moscow Sting, all I can say is caveat emptor. Wait for the movie adaptation -- it ought to be worth at least renting. ◊

Gretchen Echols is a Seattle writer, artist and bookstore employee with a longstanding fondness for crime and mystery fiction, especially the works of Ross Macdonald, Reginald Hill and Tana French.

Crime Fiction: The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer

Love and revenge is a sweet and sour mix that permeates the lives of the secret agents in Olen Steinhauer’s The Nearest Exit (Minotaur). In this new novel’s prologue, Henry Gray, a young hack journalist, is tossed off his balcony. He is in the possession of an enigmatic letter from the now dead director of The Company, Tom Grainger. The Company was introduced in Steinhauer’s previous thriller, The Tourist (2009). It is a fictional secret arm of the CIA whose operatives are called Tourists. The analysts who run the Tourists from desks in a central office on New York City’s Avenue of the Americas are called Travel Agents.

In any event, Gray miraculously survives the fall, but winds up in a coma for several months. He gradually awakens and with the help of his girlfriend, reconstructs Grainger’s letter. Sensing that he is still in grave danger, Gray vanishes from the hospital -- and Steinhauer’s story -- only days before Milo Weaver comes looking for him.

Reader -- if you haven’t read The Tourist yet, let me encourage you right now to do so. Soon after I began The Nearest Exit, I became cranky. I found the first 100 pages confusing. Then, while on vacation, I discovered The Tourist in my condo library. It is a well-crafted novel that Janet Maslin of The New York Times likened to the best of John le Carré. I discovered that while many thrillers feature the same protagonist in standalone stories, enjoying The Nearest Exit really depends on your having previously read The Tourist. Only then can you fully grasp the impact of what is happening.

This new yarn gets underway with an impulsive, perhaps even dangerous, phone call home while three men wait in a van. They are on their way to rob an art museum. While the caller is not identified, if you have read The Tourist you know it is Milo Weaver. We learn that “the first rule of Tourism is to not let it ruin you ... The rootless existence, keeping simultaneous jobs straight in your head, showing no empathy when the job requires none, and especially the unstoppable forward movement.” We see, however, that Weaver is conflicted about what he is doing. He longs for his family and to return home, to go back to his life with his wife and their daughter.

Weaver, having spent some time in prison for alleged financial fraud, is now back in Europe. But as a result of the events related in The Tourist he has been demoted to doing field work for The Company. The assignments seem simplistic and arbitrary, but Weaver figures the Company directors simply don’t trust him after the bloodbath that resulted in the death of his good friend Tom Grainger. He assumes they are vetting his corporate loyalty. Recession-driven budget cuts coupled with his previous extensive field experience mean that Milo goes where The Company needs him, when it needs him. He’s got to have a job, and his credentials don’t qualify him for any other kind of work. Furthermore, Weaver assumes The Company suspects his loyalties are conflicted between love for his family and duty to the organization. In normal times, the existence of a family would preclude his employment with The Company.

After putting Weaver through three months of relatively mindless assignments, The Company’s new director, Alan Drummond, assigns him an impossible loyalty task: He is to kill Adriana, a 15-year-old Moldovan girl living in Germany, and then make her body disappear. “Don’t ask” is another Tourism rule. But Weaver does ask. He can’t bring himself to kill the teenager. His conflicts between blind fidelity to an organization and the emotions surrounding parental love become a theme that runs as an undercurrent throughout Steinhauer’s story. Weaver makes secret arrangements to kidnap the girl and hide her for a period of time, thereby thwarting his directive from The Company.

Shortly thereafter, director Drummond summons Weaver to Antwerp and gives him another assignment: interrogate a Ukrainian defector named Marko, who claims to know about a “mole” within The Company. There are hints of a secret Chinese spy organization, and then more instructions are given to Weaver. He is like the player of a board game, drawing arbitrary cards to discover his next move. Surprisingly, at the end of this novel’s first part, Weaver himself is kidnapped.

Part two begins in the world of German intelligence several days before Weaver’s abduction. We are introduced to Erika Schwartz, a figurative soul sister to Connie Sachs, one of intelligence officer George Smiley’s people from the Le Carré series. A grossly obese woman, Schwartz is addicted to her nightly bottle of Rheinland Riesling and accompanying Snickers bar. She has become obsessed with the kidnapping and subsequent death (or so she assumes) of Adriana. Schwartz has “learned to gather her intelligence from the cracks between the questionable facts that reached her desk.” It’s she and her staff who secretly capture Milo, after they identify him as Adriana’s kidnapper and, presumably, murderer. Weaver eventually convinces Schwartz of his innocence in Adriana’s fate, but the notion of a mole in The Company resurfaces.

Part three of The Nearest Exit relates the search for that clandestine infiltrator. Weaver is recruited by Drummond to learn what truth -- if any -- there is behind the Ukrainian defector’s reports of a mole. The evidence seems to indicate that such a spy (perhaps working for the Chinese) does exist. On the other hand, though, that evidence may be misleading and the mole imaginary. Then again, on the third hand, maybe that undercover agent is at work after all. Such confusing and mysterious goings-on are common in the world of international espionage. Only as Steinhauer’s tale races on do we realize that a diabolical plot is in place to cripple The Company.

I won’t give more away, except to say that Milo Weaver has clearly been set up to serve, in this great series’ next clever and complicated installment, as an agent of The Company’s revenge.

Reader, remember: read The Tourist first and then proceed to The Nearest Exit.

Crime Fiction: The Devil’s Star by Jo Nesbø

(Editor’s note: With the publication of this review, January Magazine welcomes a new contributor. She’s Gretchen Echols, a Seattle writer, artist and bookstore employee with a longstanding fondness for crime and mystery fiction, especially the works of Ross Macdonald, Reginald Hill and Tana French.)

It is a July hell in Oslo, the Norwegian city gripped in a blistering heat wave. A young woman is found dead with a bizarre mutilation to her body and an odd calling card from the murderer. Meanwhile, Harry Hole, one of the best detectives on the local police force, is in his own private hell -- a month-long alcoholic binge. When he receives a call from his superior, Bjarne Møller, Hole is passed out on his living room floor, clutched in the throes of a recurring nightmare involving his sister and elevators.

Møller is desperate. The detective unit is understaffed because of holiday vacations. He has protected Hole by stalling on sending adverse reports of his erratic behavior to higher authorities, but now Hole is on the verge of dismissal. However, the only detectives left in the sweltering city with the ability and experience necessary to handle the mutilation case are Hole and his nemesis on the crime squad, Tom Waaler. Hole’s last chance to escape the implosion of his career, it seems, is to work this investigation with Waaler.

Jo Nesbø, one of today’s hottest Scandinavian crime-fiction writers, gives us in The Devil’s Star (Harper) a carefully paced thriller built on the classic struggle between a detestable murderer and a detective dedicated to saving lives and discovering truths. Hole, though, puts a personal face on evil. He is convinced that Waaler, a predator and bully, is the person behind the beating death of Hole’s former partner, Ellen Gjelten. He has spent months tracking down an eyewitness to the event, only to then have that witness disappear. Unfortunately, Hole’s boss has dismissed his allegations against Waaler as the result of an obsessive quest entirely without merit. Hole’s obsession has also ruptured his relationship with his girlfriend, Rakel Faulke, and her son, Oleg. Under the same circumstances, you might go on a binge too.

Five days after the discovery of the first body in Oslo, another woman steps around the corner for a short errand -- and doesn’t return. Is she just a missing person, or the second murder victim?

As Hole, Waaler and the rest of the team struggle to understand the meaning of the clues left by the killer, and more corpses appear, the tension heightens. A pattern in the crimes begins to emerge and there is concern that a serial killer may be on the loose. Along the way we are given insights into the source of Harry Hole’s fears of heights and elevators, the bases for many of his nightmares. Nesbø even includes a biblical confrontation -- straight from the New Testament -- between Hole and Waaler, and we begin to wonder if our hero has really gone over to the dark side.

Among the strengths and pleasures of reading Nesbø’s well-crafted mystery (his third, following The Redbreast [2007] and Nemesis [2009]) are the short descriptions revealing the complexities of his secondary characters.

Consider, for instance, Otto Tangen. He’s the owner of Harry Sounds, a mobile professional surveillance company called in on the case by Waaler. The crime team has predicted where the killer will probably strike next, and members hope to intercept him. Tangen has obviously seen Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 movie, The Conversation, starring Gene Hackman as a bugging expert, dozens of times and would have said about himself, “without batting and eyelid, that emotionally speaking he was closer to his microphones” than to his son, the result of a one-night stand. “At least he had managed to persuade [the mother] to christen the boy Gene,” writes Nesbø. Although Tangen’s friends have never heard of the Hackman movie, this reader enjoyed a smug moment of recognition, having viewed that film only recently.

Tangen has amassed a large collection of microphones, cameras and other tools of his trade. Waaler, well aware of the man’s darker secrets, applies pressure to expedite Tangen’s cooperation.

Another character worth watching: young Beate Lønn from the forensics lab. Early in her career on the force, she had her own run-in with Waaler. Now she is the recipient of his unwanted sexually charged harassment. But late in the novel Lønn has an opportunity to thwart him in a tense scene.

Nesbø shows great talent in keeping his tale moving. He shifts between multiple points of view that include several soliloquies from a character we suspect is the killer. He weaves his story lines seamlessly, ratcheting up the tension as he builds to the long finale.

But -- reader beware. There is definitely a high “ick” factor in the twisted scenes at this story’s end. When I had 50 pages or so to go, I was stopped in my tracks by the nasty, loathsome details of a murder. I was repulsed and I had to quit reading. I was committed to writing this review, however, so I had to get past my disgust. After a break of several weeks, I started over in a careful rereading of the story. This time I recognized the skill and artistry of Nesbø’s writing: the red herrings, the clues with their possible interpretations, the shrewd pacing of the plot and the variations on his principle theme of revenge. Nesbø is an excellent craftsman, so I felt I owed him the courtesy of reading through to the end. As the story spools out to its concluding battle between good and evil, the resulting violence becomes merely gruesome and strangely satisfying.

Harry Hole engages our sympathy in The Devil’s Star, despite his obsessions and fears and his reckless, alcoholic ways, because he is a tenacious protagonist intent on uncovering the truth. Don’t look for any garden parties or bodies left conveniently at the end of library benches in a murder mystery involving Hole. Expect, instead, a gritty, realistic triumph over human wickedness.