Kingpin by Mike Lawson

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on February 6, 2024

Patrick Grady is a Washington, D.C. lobbyist. Real estate tycoon Carson Newman hired Grady to kill a bill that would protect tenants’ rights. His efforts put him in the middle of a war between Newman and House Minority Leader John Mahoney. Newman expected Mahoney to kill the bill as a reward for Newman’s campaign contributions. Mahoney, who is usually happy to grant favors in exchange for cash, saw greater value in passing the bill and showing voters that Democrats could actually accomplish something they care about. Mahoney is therefore cheesed off that Grady successfully lobbied a dozen Democrats to oppose the bill.

Mahoney assigned his intern, Brian Lewis, to investigate the Democrats who voted against the bill and figure out how they were connected to Newman. Lewis finds the connections and writes a report but dies of a drug overdose before he shows it to anyone.

Lewis’ mom raises a stink with Mahoney because she knows her son was investigating corrupt politicians and believes he was murdered. To keep Lewis’ mother from going to the press, Mahoney assigns Joe DeMarco to appease her.

Series fans will know that DeMarco would rather play golf than work. He doesn’t use his law degree for anything useful. He has a basement office in the capitol and a job title, but his only duties involve cleaning up messes and running errands for Mahoney.

DeMarco’s initial plan is to placate Lewis’ mother by making it seem like he’s investigating her son’s death. She convinces him that her suspicions might have some merit, but he doesn’t know what Lewis discovered. Lewis’ laptop is in the hands of a private investigator who is working for Grady. The PI had Lewis followed by Sydney Roma, a recovering drug addict who is getting her life together with the PI’s help. At Grady’s request, the PI wipes the incriminating evidence from the laptop and has Sydney concoct an excuse that will allow the laptop to be returned to Lewis’ mother. DeMarco views the laptop’s sudden reappearance as suspicious and begins to look for Sydney as his best connection to Lewis’ killer.

DeMarco novels are fun because murders and criminal conspiracies are balanced by humor. DeMarco isn’t an exemplary individual but his compassion and sense of justice offset his many flaws. Mahoney is a corrupt alcoholic but somehow likable, in part because he sometimes uses his power to help people who deserve a break. Sidney is a great addition to the story because of her unbreakable spirit.

DeMarco uses a clever ruse to move the plot toward a desirable ending. He also defies an FBI agent because, true to form, the FBI is willing to let murderers off the hook if they can take down a more headline-worthy villain — in this case, a wealthy Albanian gangster. DeMarco doesn’t want that to happen, even at the risk of making himself a target of an FBI investigation.

DeMarco stories usually have credible plots and reasonably happy endings. Kingpin is no exception. DeMarco novels might have a bit more violence than a typical beach read, but the violence isn’t particularly graphic. Crime novel fans can spend pleasant afternoons on a beach with Kingpin and come away smiling.

RECOMMENDED

The Price You Pay by Nick Petrie

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 6, 2024

Nick Petrie continues a reliable thriller series in the latest Peter Ash novel. Trouble has a habit of finding Peter, interfering with his desire to live a quiet life with his wife June, the woman who helps still the noise of PTSD that would otherwise make it impossible for Peter to sleep indoors.

Peter’s good friend Lewis used to be the leader in a small group of thieves who specialized in stealing from criminals. The criminals who survived or the organizations for which they worked would like to get revenge, but they only know the thieves as the Ghost Killers. Cops think the Ghost Killers are an urban legend, but the underworld knows better.

After the Ghost Killers retired, one of their number needed help to recover from a brain injury. Teddy’s speech therapist told him to record every memory of his past in a journal. Teddy dutifully wrote down everything he knew about the other Ghost Killers and the crimes they committed. Unfortunately, he shared some of that information with his speech therapist (he was shagging her by that point and wanted to impress her). She turned out to be bad at keeping his secrets.

One of the criminals who lost money to the Ghost Killers learned about the journals. Lewis worries that if the journals are distributed throughout the underworld (or to the police), all of the Ghost Killers will be at risk of arrest or retribution. Yet the woman who wants the journals suffered a deeper loss than money, giving her a special motivation to find Lewis and the other Ghosts. She wants to go Keyser Soze on them. She hires a man to find the journals and to bring the Ghost Killers to her. The man is a former CIA agent. He’s good at his work but he learns that Peter and Lewis are formidable adversaries.

The Price You Pay is an intelligent action novel. Peter and Lewis stay true to the personalities they have developed in earlier novels. Peter is defined largely by his courageous efforts to battle his PTSD while Lewis is overcoming his dark past by making a relatively normal life with his new wife and her kids. Or course, life might not qualify as normal when Lewis is being chased by men with guns, as is often the case.

Petrie creates suspense by forcing Peter and Lewis to overcome obstacles as they track down the stolen journals and protect their families from the woman who seeks revenge. They use their wits in combination with their fighting skills, bringing a freshness to action scenes that go beyond improbable shootouts and tough guys hitting other tough guys in the throat. Their wives bring skills of their own to assist Peter and Lewis. The ending delivers the kind of tension that thriller fans expect. I’m pleased that after eight books, this series hasn’t gone stale. I hope Petrie can keep it going for a few more.

RECOMMENDED

Prima Facie by Suzie Miller

First published in the UK in 2023; published by Henry Holt and Co. on January 30, 2024

The marketing of Prima Facie gives the impression that it is a legal thriller, but the impression is false. This is an agenda-driven novel. I have no quarrel with the agenda and I have no problem with using a novel to make a point if the writer honors the elements of successful fiction. Disguising an essay as a novel usually results in an uninteresting novel. That’s certainly true here.

Tessa Ensler is a barrister who is extraordinarily pleased with her cross-examination skills. Unfortunately, Suzie Miller writes courtroom scenes in the abstract. She rarely treats the reader to actual cross-examinations, opting to have Tessa boast of her technique without revealing the questions she is asking. Miller makes no effort to deliver the suspense that good cross-examination scenes generate.

Instead of following the traditional path of a courtroom thriller, the book focuses on Tessa’s personal experience as a crime victim and the impact of crime on her life and career. It’s fine that Miller didn’t write a legal thriller. She can write any book she wants. Unfortunately, the book she wrote isn’t interesting.

The novel is written in two parts. Both halves travel between the past and present. In the first half, the past focuses on the circumstances of Tessa’s acceptance into a prestigious law school. It’s a typical story of a working-class girl transitioning into a life where her contemporaries are posh. In the present, Tessa is pleased with herself because she regards herself as a masterful barrister. She enjoys flirting with posh Julian and enjoys even more his admiring comments. Before the first third of the novel has gone by, Tessa is feeling even better about herself because she shagged Julian on the couch in his office. When she actually goes on a date with Julian, however, they have wonderful drunken sex, Tessa wakes up and vomits, Julian wakes up and wants round two, and when Tessa declines he rapes her.

In the novel’s second half, the past focuses on Tessa’s report of her rape to the police and the present begins with her testimony in Julian's criminal trial. The then-and-now format slows the pace of a story in which only the now is interesting. I kept wanting Tessa to get on with the trial, but her trial narrative is constantly interrupted by flashbacks that the reader will recognize from countless similar stories. Tessa sees Julian at work, Julian seems perfectly normal and acts as if their encounter was insignificant, the police interview Julian and Tessa’s life at work becomes unbearable. Why frequent interruptions of the trial were necessary to flesh out the recent past is unclear to me. I’d chalk it up to deciding upon a trendy literary technique that wasn’t well executed, rather than sticking to a linear story. If the intent was to build suspense by delaying trial scenes, the technique instead caused all suspense to evaporate.

When Miller finally has Tessa on the witness stand, Tessa spends most of her time explaining her thoughts between questions. She has so many thoughts the jury must have wondered why it took her so long to answer. When she finally answers, almost always with a fluster, the answer is followed by an internal monologue questioning why she didn’t give a better answer. I understand that trial witnesses second-guess themselves, but all the fretting about answers — and I mean every answer, even those she has rehearsed with the prosecuting barrister —destroys the flow of direct and cross-examination that might have made the trial interesting. We are treated instead to an insecure witness who forgets her training as a barrister and seems incapable of clear thought.

Now, I get it. Miller wanted to bring home the trauma of testifying in a trial after being victimized. The reader can understand that trauma without having Tessa constantly telling us how traumatized she feels. To this reader’s dismay, Miller disregards the rule that advises writers to show, not tell.

Prima Facie is a well-intentioned but somewhat misleading indictment of the failure to secure more sexual assault convictions in England. A prosecutor repeatedly tells Tessa that the conviction rate in sexual assaults is very low. Dig into the statistics, and you’ll learn that the conviction rate of reported rapes is low because (for whatever reason) the complaining witness decides not to pursue the case before it goes to trial. Tessa wants her case to go to trial, so the overall conviction rate doesn’t apply to her case. She claims the conviction rate of cases that go to trial is 1.3%, but that’s just not true. The unsourced statistic pops up in the press, but it is an estimate of the percentage of rapes (not just those that go to trial or even those that are reported) that end with convictions. When charges go to trial in England, the conviction rate is somewhere around 75%, only a bit less than the 81% conviction rate for all crimes. Again, I have no quarrel with pursuing an agenda — it’s quite likely that the British system of justice does not serve rape victims well — but a writer who pursues an agenda loses credibility when she makes her point with inaccurate assertions of fact.

Tessa tells us about the psychological impact that the rape had on her, but again does more telling than showing. Miller makes the same error when Tessa describes a painful sexual assault exam as well as interviews with the police that (she tells us) leave Tessa feeling humiliated. The scenes feel like more like textbook accounts of rape and its aftermath as they are presented in social work literature, not as the first-person experience of a rape victim. I had the same impression when Tessa describes a failed rape attempt during her teen years. The narrative wants to make a point about feelings of powerlessness and shame experienced by rape victims, but Miller doesn't make the reader feel Tessa's pain.

When Tessa makes her complaint to the police, she suddenly feels it is unfair that the prosecution must prove the truth of her accusation while Julian is presumed innocent. I understand that becoming a victim might spark a change of perspective, but I have difficulty believing that a trained and experienced barrister would suddenly forget why all the rights she devoted her career to protecting are important. The story made me wonder whether Tessa was ever serious about her job or just enjoyed the glory of winning. Julian is repulsive, but he at least is unlikable from the start. When Tessa gives a self-righteous speech in court about feeling betrayed by the justice system she devoted her life to, I could only wonder why she forgot the reasons she devoted her life to giving exactly the same defense to her clients that Julian’s barrister gives to Julian. While she berates herself for doing “awful things to women” in her own cross-examinations (what we see of them is far from awful), the truth is that cross-examination is usually the most important protection that defendants have against false accusations. Cross-examination is not an “awful” feature of the criminal justice system even if the experience can be unpleasant or traumatic. It is the cost of assuring (not always successfully) that innocent defendants are not convicted.

In the end, by telling a one-sided agenda-driven story, Prima Facie is more a lecture than a convincing novel. Tessa is the only character who has a personality. The plot is entirely predictable because it is driven by the need to teach predictable lessons. Maybe people who are driven by the same agenda will appreciate Prima Facie but judging the novel solely by the standards of literature, Prima Facie does too little to earn a recommendation.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Harbor Lights by James Lee Burke

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on January 23, 2024

The stories in Harbor Lights feature people who have been in prison and people who might end up in prison. Some are drifters, others are professionals. Some live in solitude, others share their life with a child. Most have experienced a significant loss. Some have given up on life, others are still trying to figure it out. They are all from the deep South although some have migrated to the West. Nearly all the protagonists try (not always successfully) to cling to their moral center. Collateral characters are often racists and white trash who never had a moral center. A few characters are ghosts.

Three stories feature Burke’s recurring character and alter-ego, Aaron Holland Broussard. “Deportees” tells a story of Aaron’s grandfather as he stands up to southern hatred of Mexicans and Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The title story is told from Aaron’s perspective as the son of a man who defied the FBI by telling the press about his sighting of a German submarine while fishing off the coast of Louisiana. In retaliation, the FBI arrested the woman with whom Aaron’s father was having an affair, accusing her of being a communist spy. The story is about the ugly truth a boy learns about his father and the far uglier truth he learns about the country in which he lives.

The melancholy that pervades the novella “Strange Cargo” is almost overpowering. Aaron may have symptoms of cancer that he refuses to let his doctor diagnose because (in the doctor’s view) Aaron believes he deserves to die. All the things he loves are in the past. Following Holland family tradition, Aaron stands up to a tobacco chewing sheriff who is known for his racism, antisemitism, homophobia, and vindictiveness. The sheriff is haunted by the ghost of a slave just as Aaron is haunted by the ghost of his daughter. Aaron also sees spirits of slave chasers and their victims. If this were a different kind of story, the supernatural might threaten to get in the way. Since the story is ultimately a contemplation of death — its many causes and its effects on others — the supernatural makes a fitting contribution. It is also an exploration of southern hypocrisy, which Aaron comes to understand as an inevitability, even in his own life. The story requires Aaron to confront his family’s past (as well as his own) and, in doing so, addresses issues that arise in Another Kind of Eden and Every Cloak Rolled in Blood.

In “The Assault,” the police take little interest in investigating a beating that a couple inflicted on a professor’s (admittedly drunken) teenage daughter. The helplessness he has felt since his wife died in a car accident for which he blames himself is amplified by the assault, contributing to his sense of failure as a husband and father. While he is fishing with a Black professor, he has an encounter with racist rednecks. The police are more interested in the professor’s response to abuse than they are in the abuse inflicted upon the professor's daughter. A series of confrontations escalate from threats to violence. This is one of Burke’s most intense stories and my favorite in the volume.

“Going Across Jordan” tells the story of two drifters who ride the rails and enjoy a special kind of freedom. The older man irritates the authorities by singing Woody Guthrie songs. While working on a ranch in Wyoming, the younger man makes a foolish decision to accept his boss’ offer to borrow his Cadillac to bring a pretty Black girl back to the ranch. The young man learns that people with power who do favors for the powerless always have an ulterior motive. He also learns something about love and about achieving justice without resorting to violence.

I did not dislike any story in the collection, although three stories I liked a bit less. “A Distant War” is a story that would be at home in the Twilight Zone. A veteran whose radiator hose breaks brings his half Vietnamese son into the wrong bar (and maybe the wrong dimension) where he meets the wrong people at the wrong time. “Big Midnight Special” is a story about fighting and country music told in the setting of a prison. A seismologist who works in the oil drilling industry sleeps with the wrong married woman before all hell breaks loose in “The Wild Side of Life.”

Every story in this collection provokes thought. A reader might easily choose any of them as a favorite. All are told in a prose style that elevates grittiness to elegance in a way that only James Lee Burke can. This collection is a must for his fans.

RECOMMENDED

Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds

Published by Orbit on January 16, 2024

Blending the genres of crime story, thriller, and science fiction, Machine Vendetta is the third novel to feature Tom Dreyfus, a prefect employed by the Panoply, enforcers of the Common Articles (something like a federal constitution) that bind the artificial habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone. Habitats make and enforce their own laws, although nearly every public policy decision is decided by ballot. The Panoply protects an overriding interest in democracy by maintaining polling computers and assuring that habitats don’t interfere with the right of their citizens to vote. In other words, you won’t hear much about stolen elections in the Glitter Band.

The Dreyfus novels are set in Alastair Reynolds’ impressive Revelation Space universe. The criminals that most concern Dreyfus are two rogue Artificial Intelligences, Aurora and the Clockmaker. Aurora was once a human, although she no longer has any regard for people of flesh-and-blood. In an earlier novel, Dreyfus made a secret alliance with Aurora, giving her access to Panoply’s computer systems, so that she could wage a war against the Clockmaker. He has lived with guilt ever since.

Difficult moral choices make for compelling fiction. Dreyfus’ choice comes back to haunt him in Machine Vendetta when it seems that the balance of terror he orchestrated can no longer be maintained. When he confides his secret to another prefect, she faces a moral dilemma when deciding whether to rat him out, as duty requires.

Apart from adversarial AIs, the criminal of immediate concern is a Panoply officer who used the weapons on his ship to destroy part of a habitat, apparently seeking vengeance for the habitat’s historical mistreatment of hyperpigs — genetically altered pigs who have taken humanoid form. Racial bias in Reynolds’ future have been replaced by bias against hyperpigs, Haters gotta hate, they just need to find some justification for hating anyone who seems different. In any event, the habitat fought back and the officer died in the ensuing battle. But was the motivation for that crime something other than it appears to be?

Another Panoply officer, Ingvar Tench, is thought to have committed suicide by entering a habitat that harbors a strong anti-Panoply sentiment without taking appropriate precautions. Ingvar’s daughter Hafdis wants to join Panoply after learning of her mother’s death. Her existence comes as a surprise to Dreyfus and everyone else at Panoply. Perhaps she also is not what she appears to be.

The two strangely behaving officers are linked in a way that Dreyfus must discern to solve his bigger problem. Tench was investigating something important to the ongoing war between Aurora and the Clockmaker. Dreyfus needs to learn what she discovered to prevent one AI from gaining an advantage over the other. The story is filled with self-sacrifice as Panoply officers put duty ahead of safety to protect the Glitter Band and its democratic values.

Reynolds is always creative, but his novels balance clever imaginings of the future with stories that are fundamentally about people. They explore what it means to be a human (even if the human is a pig) and illustrate behaviors and choices that make people better humans. Themes of sacrifice and courage are common to science fiction, but few modern writers incorporate them into storylines as skillfully as Reynolds. Combined with a thoughtful yet action-filled plot, Machine Vendetta brings this series to a fitting end. It is is one of the most enjoyable novels sf fans are likely to encounter this year.

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