The Old Man by Thomas Perry

Published by Mysterious Press on January 3, 2017

The Old Man is sort of a Bonnie and Clyde story except that Bonnie isn’t a criminal and Clyde isn’t a bad guy. So more accurately, it’s a “two lovers on the run” story. But it’s also a Superman story, because the protagonist might be old, but he still fights like a superhero. A reader might need to adopt comic book expectations to enjoy The Old Man, because the plot and the main character are thoroughly unbelievable.

Before he retired, Dan Chase (one of several names the main character adopts during the novel) was a special ops guy who resigned from the military to carry out a boneheaded mission involving the clandestine delivery of cash to a group of insurgents near Benghazi. Predictably, the middleman to whom he delivered the money kept it. Nobody saw this coming? The government is prepared to write it off because $20 million is small change, so Chase steals it back using vaguely described techniques that apparently required super speed, invisibility, and the ability to leap tall walls in a single bound.

Thirty years later, the intelligence services that were willing to write off $20 million are still chasing Chase. Actually, the Libyans are trying to assassinate Chase and the American government is helping them. I find it difficult to believe that either the CIA or the Libyan bad guy still cared about Chase three decades later. The insurgents gained tenuous political power in Libya after Chase stole the money, but don’t they have more pressing problems to deal with than getting vengeance against Chase? And why is the U.S. helping the Libyans assassinate an American citizen, simply because an “important” Libyan wants the American government’s help? None of it makes any sense, but that’s the premise.

Chase starts the novel in Vermont with two dogs, a bugout bag, and a daughter the government doesn’t seem to know about. How the government can find Chase while remaining ignorant of his daughter’s whereabouts is another stunning impossibility that the reader is asked to accept.

A few dead Libyans later, Dan’s next attempt at a life has him shacking up with a woman and his dogs in a Chicago suburb. Of course, he has to run again, this time with his new girlfriend, who apparently doesn’t mind that he used her and put her life in danger. Seriously? It isn’t credible, but that’s the setup for the senior citizen version of this lovers-on-the-run story.

The girlfriend’s dialog seems like something a writer would put in a character’s mouth, not like anything a real person would say. The needlessly long story has several dead spots, including the tedious description of how to load and fire a gun that every thriller writer seems to think is essential to good storytelling. The girlfriend’s backstory is so contrived it’s just silly. A reader could skip several chapters of The Old Man without losing track of the plot.

The best character in the novel is Julian Carson, a conflicted young man in military intelligence who isn’t sure that helping Libyan assassins kill the old special ops guy is the best use of his time. He’s more interesting and believable than Chase, and he’s certainly more admirable than either Chase or his girlfriend.

The end of the book resolves too easily, but nothing is difficult for Superman. The ending, at least, isn’t as predictable as it might have been. I liked some of The Old Man. It held my interest, but there aren’t enough thrills in this thriller. Too much of the plot is forced and, with the exception of Julian Carson, I never warmed up to the characters.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Forty Thieves by Thomas Perry

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on January 8, 2016

I had a lukewarm reaction to the last Thomas Perry novel I read. I was more entertained by Forty Thieves. It’s a fun, light, offbeat story with a surprising but credible plot.

The body of a food scientist washes up in an LA sewer. A year later, the police are no closer to solving the man’s murder. Nothing that the police learned about his life supplied a motive for his death. Looking for answers, the scientist’s employer retains Sid and Veronica Abel, two detectives who specialize in unsolved crimes. To find out why the scientist was killed, the Abels need to uncover the hidden truths of his life.

The Abels aren’t quite Nick and Nora Charles but they do engage in friendly banter, mocking each other in the way that married people do. So do Ed and Nicole Hoyt, but they are assassins rather than detectives. Of course, the Hoyts and the Abels quickly cross paths and continue to do so as the story unfolds.

The story draws interesting parallels between the two couples. Both couples have similar experiences during the course of the novel and have similar emotional responses to those experiences. I think Thomas Perry is making the point that people are defined by more than good or bad behavior. Whether they make good choices (like solving murders) or bad choices (like committing murders), people are still people. That’s always a good message (and not a common one in thrillers, which tend to turn villains into caricatures).

The characters are the strength of Forty Thieves, but the plot threads are all intriguing. The Abels need to puzzle out why the food scientist was killed and why the Hoyts (among others) are trying to kill them. The Hoyts need to puzzle out why they have hired to commit certain crimes and (of course) why someone is trying to kill them. Both couples pursue investigations that converge in a way that is more believable than most modern thrillers manage.

The story moves at a good pace and it leads to a satisfying conclusion. It’s also quite amusing. If you’re looking for a story that delivers chills and suspense, this isn’t it, but as a light crime story about likable characters, it works well.

RECOMMENDED

The Book of the Lion by Thomas Perry

Published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road on July 14, 2015

This is another entry in Mysterious Press’ Bibliomystery series of short stories that relate to books, bookstores, libraries, or manuscripts. Joyce Carol Oates, Jeffrey Deaver, and a number of other popular crime writers have contributed to the series.

A professor who is a leading expert on Chaucer gets a call from a mysterious stranger who claims to possess the only existing manuscript of Chaucer’s Book of the Lion. The manuscript is thought to have been lost, or possibly it never existed. Is its sudden appearance a hoax? A prank? A fraud?

Rather than offering to sell the manuscript, as a con artist might, the mysterious man has another scheme in mind. Of course, the scheme involves money. With the help of a wealthy friend who has a literary bent, the professor strives to learn the truth about the manuscript.

Thomas Perry peppers the story with snippets of history from the Middle Ages. The characters and tidbits about Chaucer’s works and medieval history make the background more interesting than the plot, which is fun but leads to an unsurprising ending. Still, the fast-moving story is a worthy entry in the series.

RECOMMENDED

The Boyfriend by Thomas Perry

Published by Mysterious Press on March 5, 2013 

The Boyfriend opens with the murder of a beautiful young escort in Los Angeles. Her parents hire Jack Till to find the killer. The reader learns in chapter one that this isn't the only escort the killer has murdered, and it doesn't take Till long to search for similar crimes. Till's pursuit of the killer takes him to Phoenix and Boston and San Antonio before the action returns to California.

To carry out his scheme (there's more to it than murdering prostitutes), the killer becomes an escort's boyfriend so he can stay with her in her residence. He manages to do this over and over in city after city. That's a trick that even Lothario would have trouble pulling off, and it struck me as implausible at best, despite the graduate level course in seduction that Thomas Perry provides. The true motivation for seducing and then killing the temporary girlfriends is even less plausible but I give Perry credit for coming up with an original and clever plot twist.

Till tracks the killer by scouring websites and finding photographs of escorts wearing a distinctive piece of jewelry that the killer has given them. That each soon-to-be-dead escort decided to have a new photograph taken as soon as her boyfriend gave her a necklace struck me as highly unlikely. It's even more unlikely that the killer would allow the photographs to be published on the net, given how carefully he covers his tracks in all other respects.

Perry devotes roughly equal attention to Till and to the killer. Some chapters focus on Till's methodical investigation and some describe the killer's methodical planning. All of that is moderately interesting (if not particularly exciting) and the story moves quickly.  The plot follows the formula of slasher movies:  naughty girls die while the audience wonders what's in store for the not-so-naughty girl who is with the killer in the end.  That's just too predictable to be enthralling.

Although a portion of the novel is devoted to the killer's backstory, he doesn't have much personality. Till's own backstory seems pieced together, bits carved out of other thriller protagonists and transplanted into Till so that he seems to have a life. There is nothing about Till that makes him stand out in the universe of thriller heroes.

The Boyfriend didn't grab me and hold me in a tight grip, nor did it give me much to think about, as do my favorite thrillers. The plot is surprisingly simple. I formed no connection to the characters and had little reason to care about them. Till is busy being stalwart, the killer is busy killing, and the hookers are busy dying. Still, I kept wondering what would happen next. In that sense the novel is more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging.  In short, The Boyfriend is an easy read, but it isn't Perry's best effort. Nothing about this thriller is unlikable, but nothing makes it stand out.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS