A smorgasbord of books

Vampire | Thriller | Spy | Legal | Science fiction

Twilight | Area 7 | Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves | Private Wars | The Hearing | Illegal Action | Brood of Bones | I am FanFare | Post-Human

Stephanie Meyer | Matthew Reilly | Greg Rucka | John D Lescroart | Stella Rimington | AE Marling | Milo James Fowler | David Simpson

I'm embarrassed to admit that I'm so far behind in my notes on books I've read that I'm in danger of forgetting which ones I've read, so for now I'm just listing them out, and will give longer reviews later. In no particular order:

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. I've finally worked out (to my satisfaction, your mileage may vary) why this series became so wildly popular, and why some people hate it so very bitterly. Promise, I'll write more on this some day.

Area 7 and Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves by Matthew Reilly. I think I've written in more detail about Ice Station, the first book in the series, some time earlier, so not rehashing that. Area 7 is the second book, and Thieves is the fifth, so I haven't read the ones in between. Aussie writer M Reilly writes about an American soldier, Shane Schofield aka Scarecrow, who can give Rajnikanth pause, and run rings around Chuck Norris. His books are the equivalent of very fast-paced Hollywood action movies, complete with helpful italics and utterly improbable scenes in quick succession. Suspend disbelief, pack a tub of popcorn, and read breathlessly. It doesn't make sense, you have things like negative and positive magnets, and rusted aluminium tanks, but who cares? Some day M Reilly will grow up and become all thoughtful and plausible and then we'll all stop reading.

Private Wars by Greg Rucka. This features Tara Chace, Minder 1 in MI6. OK, here you thought the agents with licence to kill had 00 prefixes, and there are at least 7 of them. Wrong, there are three only. Tara Chace leaves MI6 to have a baby (clearly, I need to stop entering a series in the middle), and then is brought back in by her boss. Nothing is as it seems. Uzbekistan is being run by a dictator, and his ruthless daughter and her besotted chief of the secret police are bent on getting her the post next. Her brother is the hitch, being a sort of heir apparent, apparent only to the US Ambassador, who asks the Brits for help. Tara is sent in to get him out. Mayhem follows. Forget James Bond. Cut to the Chace.

The Hearing by John D Lescroart. Lawyer Dismas Hardy (what kind of name that is becomes clear in this book) is begged by a friend to get her brother to hospital. He's a junkie, and the prime suspect in the murder of Elaine Wager (spoiler warning!) who is the chief detective, Abe Glitsky's unacknowledged daughter and a rising legal star. Abe has hinted to his staff to hang the mugger out to dry, hence the call. Dismas slowly becomes embroiled in the case, though Abe is his best friend, he admired Elaine, and hates his new client. Vintage Lescroart. But read the series in order, okay.

Illegal Action by Stella Rimington. This is what comes of writing without googling first. I have moaned in an earlier post that S Rimington wrote a wonderful first novel and would probably not write any more about Liz Carlyle. Serves me right (but, hey, I'm delighted). She's written five more. This is the third in the series (and I haven't read the second). Liz gets to protect a Russian emigre from an assassination attempt. Yup, the Russkies are as evil as ever. Or are they? I liked the first book more, but this one was good too. 

Dang, I've forgotten the next book. Never mind, carrying on...

Brood of Bones by AE Marling. Amazon sent me a hint that this one was a free download for a time. Unfortunately, that means I cannot go out there and give it a five-star rating. Our heroine is the Elder Enchantress, and has won 27 gowns in academia, showing her prowess. For some reason, in a land of banyan trees and protectors named Gautam, she wears all of them at the same time, making movement tiring and complex. Which is the least of her problems, since she keeps falling asleep all the time. In this world, magic is done only when asleep, so her magic is fine, if only she can keep awake long enough to find out what the problem is she needs to fix. The great city of Morimound, from where she hails, has suddenly been afflicted with mysterious pregnancies. Every woman 12 or older is pregnant. Is it godly or an evil magic? Whom can she trust? Our heroine turns out not to be snobbish, incompetent, sociopathic or stupid, but a shy nerdy young woman you begin to love more and more as the book moves on through horrors and petty people to a rivetting end. Read this book! I look forward to more.

I am FanFare by Milo James Fowler. This is a short novel about a different kind of nerd. This one spends his life (if you call that a life!) on a social network. Curious about the ads it shows, he finds a horrible truth, with grievous consequences. Funny and a bit poignant.

Post-Human by David Simpson. What I liked best about this book is the seamless way the post-human technology is introduced to us with the minimum of exposition. In the post-human society, nanobots or nans support humankind with everything from permanent online connectivity, to morning wake-up calls, trauma repair, IQ upgrades and work commutes to Venus. When James Keats, whose IQ of 200 is still above the international average, is working on terraforming Venus, his team suffers a problem and finds themselves offline. Navigating back to Earth by memory, they find every connected human on Earth dead. Now, all their hopes lie with the Purists. Somehow, they have to save the world. Very enjoyable (I'm on the sequel now).

Terrorists from different angles

Thriller | Kyle Mills / Stella Rimington | Fade / At Risk

OK, this one is going to be fast, as I've got to write three more (what a nice problem to have!). I'll write about Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold later this week.

Fade by Kyle Mills is about an ex-Navy SEAL (USA) named Salam Al Fayed. He was named Fade because he could fade into the background, and because nobody in the rest of the team wanted their back to be had by someone named Al Fayed. Somewhere early in the book we get to know that Al Fayed is a second-generation American of Christian Arab parents. That made me wonder if a Muslim Arab in the same situation would not have become a SEAL, or whether some marketing person said the novel wouldn't fly in the market.

Okay, okay, you want to know what happened to Fade. Fade did all kinds of assassination missions for the CIA, until he was finally shot in the back. The bullet lodged near his spine. His best friend, Matt Egan, tried to get him some experimental surgery, which the bureaucracy couldn't process. Bitter, Fade worked for some Columbian drug barons as an enforcer, to get the money to pay for the operation, but by the time the bullet was inoperable.

In terror of falling down dead any day, he starts making furniture (of all things) for a living. Until Matt's new boss in Homeland Security (CIA not happy with Matt, so he has to move) decides to form a new crack team, and decides Fade can be induced to join up by getting threatened with jail time for the drug stuff. Voila: an anonymous tip to the police.

Enter Karen Manning, a SWAT team leader whose boss is convinced that a woman in that position is a big mistake and seems to dedicate his life to running her out or running her down, whichever works when he gets up in the morning.

Karen's team hits Fade's house to arrest him, and he thinks Homeland Security is there to kill him. Uh oh.

Now Fade is on the run, hunted by all, Karen is thrown to the media wolves, well muzzled herself, and Matt and Hillel Strand (the boss) are on Fade's shortlist of people whose lives he must shorten immediately. Karen is trying to protect her reputation, Matt his family, and Hillel his career. Fade is just trying to kill Matt and Strand and then himself.

So they now all try to do the right thing by their own lights, and very different lights these are.

The bad guys get their comeuppance, is all I'm going to say, since you expect that. As to the good guys, they get different kinds of resolution each.

Read and enjoy!

Oh, wait there is At Risk to tell you about, too. I promised terrorists from different angles, didn't I? Stella Rimington's qualifications to tell this story are that she used to be M, the head of MI5. Okay, she was never called M, but the James Bond on-screen boss became a woman around the time Dame Stella became head of MI5 (I'm not 100% sure she is a Dame, but hey, artistic license, and you can google, too, if you try). So that means that you won't get any really stupid bloopers, the type that have real agents rolling on the floor, laughing their heads off.

There are different terrorists, here, not the fake ones of Fade where venal careerists manipulate who gets called a terrorist. The ones in At Risk include a Pakistani-trained import into the UK, and a home grown 'invisible'. Clues creep in to indicate something big is going down. The forces of law and order get unexpected help from a greedy people-runner who thinks the new illegal immigrant can be easily robbed. His lesson otherwise lasts only a millisecond. Now the police are after our friend the terrorist. And the 'invisible' woman. And I always thought you couldn't have a truly silenced gun. Live and learn.

Of course that's not a spoiler! Bah, you can read the back cover.

Now, Liz Carlyle of MI5 and her surprisingly supportive boss (most such books have the protagonist trying to outsmart their boss as well) are trying to track down the villains. Yet the villains are smart, too. And committed. The 'invisible', who grew up a rebellious teen from a broken home, finds her true faith in Islam, converts, and then concludes the world is too bad and needs improvement. OK, she's a Pakistan-trained terrorist, too. (Oh, come on, less of the 'spoiler' howls, this is less than a quarter of the way through the book., and it's not like I told you her name and you went and checked her facebook profile. Sheesh). Step by step, all the people involved go down the paths of their own choices and the destinies they thereby choose.

Liz is 'assisted' by a flashy MI6 compatriot, Bruno Mackay, who fancies himself a romantic seducer, and completely rubs her the wrong way in many head-shaking ways.

And of course, as you might expect, they all conclude the terrorists will attack the wrong target. Last minute breakthroughs mean that England continues to be safe. Yay and all that.

This book is different from most thrillers. There's no shortage of the usual stuff: characterisation, building up motives, and the most obvious of villains (Islamic terrorists have completely supplanted communist Russians). Yet, the story has a steady, relentless pace--no terrific suspense scenes, just a systematic unfolding of the uncovering of the plot. It's not breathless, yet it's not leisurely. You feel for the characters, all of them, even the terrorists. Yet black is never whitened and white is not black. It's got several tropes in it, yet is more than the tropes.

Yes, it could happen this way. It may well have, in many ways. The novel has a real presence that most writers cannot manage. Maybe Frederick Forsyth, but maybe not even him.

I don't think S Rimington will write a whole lot of other novels. She's not a professional novelist, after all. And that's a real shame. I'd read more about Liz Carlyle any day. Or any other agent.

Read and enjoy!

TL;DR: Fade has the better dialogues, and the appallingly cynical look at reality that comes with such a person's background. It has friends, and good guys and bad guys. At Risk lets you feel the mud and sea spray, and you know it could well happen this way in real life. You get not the whole persons, but the slice of their life when this event happened.

And the bad guys lose and all questions are answered. What more do you want?