Shadows of Berlin by Trevor Scott

Published by Dorchester on March 1, 2012

The cold war warms up in this reasonably entertaining spy novel.  Nick Logan is a retired CIA officer, now working as a private security consultant.  The story opens with Logan’s discharge from an Austrian hospital, having survived an assassination attempt that killed his girlfriend.  Logan soon learns that an unknown source has issued a contract on his life.  Meanwhile, five bodies, all shot through the eye, have been pulled out of the Spree River, leaving Gustav Vogler, Berlin’s chief homicide inspector, to wonder why apparently unrelated victims were targeted by a professional killer -- and leaving the reader to wonder about the connection between those killings and the attempts to murder Logan.

Apart from the dead girlfriend, three women figure into the plot.  Alexandra Schulz is a German intelligence officer to whom Logan has always felt an attraction.  Tatyana Petrova, an Army General and highly placed officer in Russia’s SVR, has a professional interest in Logan and in the growing body count in Berlin.  Logan’s ex-wife, Tina Carducci, still with the CIA, jets off to Austria to watch Logan’s back -- if she can find him.  Fortunately for her, tracking Logan isn’t difficult, given his propensity to become involved in gunfights as he makes his way across Europe. 

Trevor Scott’s writing is sometimes formulaic; his style is lackluster.  He tends to overuse certain phrases.  The novel’s several sex scenes, in particular, seem like Xerox copies of each other.  The women seem to have been cloned from a single source; there’s little to differentiate one from another.  Scott’s attempts to inject humor are mostly unsuccessful. 

On the other hand, the novel moves at the quick pace a reader expects from a thriller.  Intermittent action sequences add excitement to the story.  Although I wasn’t motivated to keep reading by stirring prose or unconventional characters, I nonetheless kept reading.  I attribute that to Scott’s ability to craft a tight plot that kept me guessing without becoming unduly convoluted.  There is, in fact, a nifty twist that brings the novel’s leading characters together for roughly the same purpose toward the novel’s end, igniting a perfect storm of intrigue.  Scott’s deft plotting largely overcomes his pedestrian writing style, making Shadows of Berlin a worthy addition to the second-tier shelf of espionage novels.

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Pulp and Paper by Josh Rolnick

Published by University Of Iowa Press on October 1, 2011

Pulp and Paper is the 2011 winner of the University of Iowa's John Simmons Short Fiction Award for a first collection of short stories. I wasn't familiar with the award until I read this book, but I have to agree that many of these stories are award-worthy.

Four stories are set in New Jersey: "Funnyboy" begins with an attention-grabbing sentence -- "I glanced out the window as my train pulled into the station and saw the girl who killed my son" -- before exploring the issues of guilt and responsibility surrounding a young boy's accidental death, a loss his father cannot accept. Loss is also at the heart of "Innkeeping," a story written from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old whose father has died and whose mother is struggling to keep their inn afloat. The first sentence -- "I wasn't looking for a new father when Tweedy walked into the bar" -- foreshadows the rest of the story.

"The Herald" is both a tribute to the old fashioned art of newspaper reporting and a personal story of a reporter on a sleepy beat who works against deadline to write an exclusive story about the fate of a missing woman. He implores his managing editor to publish the scoop, but is the story accurate? "Mainlanders" is about two boys from a small barrier island and their tongue-tied amazement that two flirtatious mainland girls visiting the beach are actually willing to talk to them. The boys learn how difficult it is to build a bridge between different worlds.

Four stories take place in (mostly upstate) New York. My favorite story in the collection, "Pulp and Paper," tells of a train crash at a paper plant and what rural neighbors will (or won't) do for each other in a time of disaster. The strain on a relationship caused by an unplanned pregnancy is at the heart of "Big River." The pregnancy forces two lovers and lifelong friends to decide whether they want to pursue something more meaningful than the lives for which they seem destined, or whether that destiny -- a marriage, a baby, a quiet town -- carries all the meaning they need.

In my second favorite story, "Big Lake," an accident on a lake kills a boy's teacher and causes her husband to lose his arm. Blaming himself for the accident, another near tragedy forces the boy to come to terms with his feelings of guilt. Set in Coney Island, "The Carousel" is a poignant story about an aging carousel operator who is lost in time.

Josh Rolnick writes with clarity and grace and gentleness. His characters are decent people living quiet lives, confronting life's difficult choices and coping with adversity as best they can. Some are adults, some are kids, but all are authentic.

Occasionally I had the sense that Rolnick was trying a little too hard to be profound, particularly when he stepped away from the story to inject a bit of philosophy. He nonetheless deserves credit for seeking a deeper meaning in common events, simple lives, and familiar experiences, a task at which he often succeeds.

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The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai

First published in Great Britain in 2011; published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on December 6, 2011

The Artist of Disappearance consists of three long stories (billed as novellas).  Stories of this length deserve to be reviewed independently.

A young civil servant in training, stuck in the backwaters of India, must decide how to respond to a request for government support to preserve a private museum and its surprising collection of treasures.  Later in life, the man is occasionally troubled by self-doubt for reasons that the reader must intuit.  Apart from my appreciation of Anita Desai’s writing style, nothing about this story grabbed me.  “The Museum of Final Journeys” is my least favorite of the three.

In “Translator Translated,” a woman searches for her roots by relearning her childhood language and visiting the remote region where it is still spoken.  The lyrical work of a provincial writer inspires her to translate the text, but she finds its eventual publication to be less than the transformative experience she had imagined.  When the writer sends the translator a disappointing novel, the story explores the role of the translator:  should she be faithful to the original text or should she try to improve it, essentially becoming a co-author?  This is the best of the three stories.

“The Artist of Disappearance” starts as the story of a quiet life -- too quiet to be gripping.  Ravi, an adopted boy, raised to be rarely seen and never heard, becomes a reclusive adult, more comfortable in the wilderness than in the company of people.  The story gains energy when documentary makers, searching for environmental degradation, stumble upon the landscape art that Ravi has devoted himself to creating, a garden that has blossomed out of devastation.  But will Ravi’s work be desecrated if outsiders are permitted to gaze upon it?  The weak opening and a mediocre ending bracket excellent storytelling in the middle.

Anita Desai is unquestionably a fine writer.  She writes earnestly of people and their pain.  She paints characters with astonishing clarity.  For the most part, I admire her writing style, although I think she occasionally tries too hard to be eloquent, forcing words into contexts where they didn’t quite fit, sometimes indulging herself with unnecessary adverbs.  On the whole, however, her prose is a pleasure to read.

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Too Much Stuff by Don Bruns

Published by Oceanview on December 12, 2011

James and Skip, the two lads who founded More or Less Investigations, are hired to find a ton of gold that went missing in the Florida Keys during a hurricane in 1935. James and Skip are about as well equipped to handle investigations as Wayne and Garth (in fact, they often reminded me of Wayne and Garth), but the promise of earning a small fortune if they find the gold, not to mention the inducement of $1,000 in expense money, sends them on their way. The task will not prove easy; another pair of investigators, hired six month earlier, has disappeared. Of course, in their effort to find the buried treasure the young men uncover something far more sinister and find themselves surrounded by danger.

Too Much Stuff is a fun novel, more a comedy than a mystery/thriller. The mood is light, the characters amuse themselves with entertaining banter, and the plot has just enough goofiness to offset the traditional trappings of a PI story. This is a quick and easy read, a nice respite from thrillers that take their tough guy heroes too seriously.

James and Skip would never be described as tough; they're easy-going guys who don't carry guns or litter the landscape with corpses. In James and Skip, Don Bruns has created a pair of engaging characters: James has a way with the ladies while Skip can't believe he's lucky enough to have a girlfriend. James has a head full of movie trivia and frequently quotes his favorite lines of movie dialog while Skip tries to guess the source. Yes, that's been done before, but even if the use of film trivia is unoriginal, it adds to the novel's entertainment value.

Bruns writes in a breezy style that's well suited to the novel's subject matter. He creates a strong sense of place in the book's Florida Keys setting. A plot twist near the story's conclusion is a bit obvious -- it's hard to believe James and Skip couldn't figure out what was happening -- and the action-filled ending is wildly improbable, but it doesn't detract from the novel as a whole, provided you're willing to trade amusement for credibility.

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Murder in Mount Holly by Paul Theroux

First published in the UK in 1969; published by Mysterious Press on December 6, 2011

Originally published in Great Britain in 1969, Murder in Mount Holly is one of Paul Theroux’s early novels.  A prologue introduces its three main characters:  Herbie Gneiss, having unwillingly dropped out of college, must even less willingly find a job so he can support his gluttonous mother after his father’s death.  Mr. Gibbon is an aging veteran who walks around town carrying wrinkled paper bags when he’s not working in a war toy factory.  Miss Ball, a kindergarten teacher who collects products with catchy names, rents rooms in her house to Herbie and Gibbon so she’ll have extra money for the school janitor, with whom she’s having an affair.

“If you don’t laugh, you’ll go crazy,” says Herbie.  Murder in Mount Holly offers ample opportunity to increase your daily laughter quotient.  Theroux’s characters have ridiculous conversations, filled with non sequiturs and nonsense, and yet they all seem real, like recordings of conversations your near-deaf and slightly dotty grandparents might have with each other.  The older characters -- Gibbon, Ball, and Herbie’s mother -- are barely in touch with reality, living their lives in a past that never existed.  They are racially and religiously intolerant, wedded to political views that make Barry Goldwater seem like a pacifist.  To prove that they “still have a lot of spunk left,” they turn to crime, somehow justifying their scheme as a blow against communism.  It’s no surprise that things go wrong from the very start.  Meanwhile, Herbie gets his draft notice.  The old folks are delighted; whether he comes home is less important than their familiarity with someone who has been called to battle the communist menace.

If the story seems a bit dated, if Theroux’s targets seem too obvious, if the novel is less substantial than Theroux’s later work, the humor that inheres in his eccentric characters and absurd dialog endures, in the way that old Woody Allen comedies will always be funny.  I recommend Murder in Mount Holly to fans of offbeat comedy for that reason.

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