Under Occupation by Alan Furst

 

Under Occupation by Alan Furst

 

I don’t usually offer two book reviews so close together.  My three faithful readers may disapprove….until they see this is another Alan Furst World War II spy novel!  Then, they’ll pour a generous snifter of Cognac, settle into a comfortable chair, and, be swept back to the cold, rainy, maelstrom in unsafe, cobbled streets of occupied Paris, 1942.

 

The main character, Paul Ricard , is not a spy, he’s a spy novelist, at least  until one dark and stormy night, on his way to the café Saint-Germain, one of his countrymen streaks past him, a shot rings out, then another.  Ricard rushes to help the fallen stranger, and before the man dies, he manages to thrust a folded piece of paper into Ricard’s coat pocket.

 

Two things about Alan Furst. He doesn’t leave your conscience alone, with the twists and turns of uncertainty.  His sense of time and place become a web that captures your imagination.  Ricard is only one of the sharply drawn characters that suffer under the pressing heel of the Nazi  jackboots  Listen closely.  Do you hear the crack of their pistol shots, the shrill blast of the sirens, shiver when they are arrested, thrown in the back of a black Citroen, and taken to the basement of Paris’ infamous Gestapo Headquarters?

 

At war with a heartless enemy, intent on silencing decent, and killing all opposition. Parisians lived in a bitter world of mistrust, gathering the mental strength to fight back in a desperate city, where a neighbor’s or a colleague’s smile and handshake could be the poisonous fangs that send you to a slow and torturous death, exposing your friends , colleagues, and even your family, just to put an end to your gut wrenching pain.

 

And yet, writers, shop keepers, normal men and women still stood proudly in opposition to the overpowering enemy, meeting at night in quiet, smoke filled bars and cold apartments, gaining and passing secrets, organizing routes of safe passage, and continuing to bring the fight to the Nazi war machine that terrorized one of the most beautiful and civilized of cities.

 

Furst leads the reader on a remarkable journey of dark alleys, and nights of thinking any moment could bring a knock on the door that spells doom.  He brings home high voltage fear, raw courage, and the bravery it takes to persevere despite the cost.

 

Alan Frust will take you to 1942’s Paris, if you can stand the journey.

Camino Island by John Grisham

Camino Island

Camino Island, John Grisham’s latest doesn’t start out as a page-turner, but that’s how it ends up.  Along the way, you’ll meet thieves, a bookstore owner in the town of Santa Rosa, on Camino Island, Florida, and a young and semi-failed novelist and former resident.

A motley group of thieves, who seem to have little in common besides greed, plan a perfect heist of rare manuscripts from the Princeton University library.  With the manuscripts insured for twenty-five million dollars, insurance investigators snap into action, along with the FBI. Do they work together? In which book have you ever heard of two agencies working in harmony? But, in this case dual purposes make perfect sense.  Insurance companies don’t care about the crime only the recovery of property, and the FBI only cares about arresting the perps.

Mercer Mann, a less than successful novelist and former resident of Camino Island, is recruited to return to her childhood home and go under-cover. The target is Bruce Cable, who runs a successful independent bookstore, but makes most of his money dealing in rare books.

Let’s take a look at the unfolding.  First off, as Grisham admits in the end notes, he knows nothing about the Princeton Library, or the nuts and bolts of robbery and the result is his robbers are as interesting as cold oatmeal, which is odd because he’s known for character development, as much as compelling plots.  His books, like The Firm, The Pelican Brief and the more recent Rogue Lawyer, all grab you from page one and sweep you along on a twisting, turning ride.  Not so with Camino Island.  But, if you plod through the first 15% (yes, I read it on Kindle), you’re treated to some real John Grisham. You’ll know Bruce Cable and Mercer Mann as well as you know Mitch McDeere (The Firm), Darby Shaw (The Pelican Brief), and Danilo Silva (The Partner).  Once Grisham develops a character, you’re hooked into a plot with unexpected detours, unexpected pleasures, and a raucous ending.

A cardinal rule of writing is, write what you know about.  Well, as an experienced practicing attorney, John Grisham knows the law and he also knows people.  When he combines those with an ingenious plot, he has a winner.  Camino Island is another winner, but like an experienced gambler, you have to be willing to accept a few bad hands before the money rolls in.

Before I Go to Sleep, a mystery by S.J. Watson

Before I Go to Sleep is Steve Watson’s first novel, published in 2011.  Ingeniously plotted, it’s the story of a woman who’s lost her memory.  I don’t mean memory loss as in can’t remember the latest dance step, or the words to the ‘Hokey-Pokey.  This is serious shit.  It’s more on the order of “What the F is my name and who is that bastard who just boinked me?”

A nightmare?  Not quite.  She knows from her body and how she dwells on trivial things that she’s a woman, but after that?  She can’t remember last night, or yesterday, or anything past today.  The next morning is more of the same.  “What’s my name again?  You say you’re my husband?”

Of course, when you’re being boinked, being with a stranger has some erotic benefits.

But, plain panic turns to panic-and-angst, twin riders on a motorcycle of confusion, going god only knows where.  I don’t mean a real motorcycle, idiot, that’s a metaphor.

Just when you think things can’t get any worse, doubt jumps onto the page like an unsolvable calculus problem you never understood in the first place.  I’m talking ‘confusion’ with a capital T.  In a world with no absolutes and no yesterdays, whom can you trust.  Lots of people tell you things, but where do truth and trust unite?  You learn.  You forget. Suspicions creep into your life.  You embrace them, then doubt them. 

Every morning gives not a hint of who you are, or where you are, and “Why does that stranger refer to himself as my husband?”  I suspect a lot of women would like that question answered.

Before I Go to Sleep rides on a fiendish plot that sucks you in and glues you to the sharply drawn characters.  This well and smoothly written novel will keep you flipping pages faster than a preacher who’s dropped his Bible in the middle of a sermon.  Once you pick up this extraordinary mystery, don’t plan on getting much sleep.

Before I Go to Sleep is also a motion picture, which I do not plan to see, not wanting Hollywood to tell me what the characters look like and how they act.  I already know.   Nobody gets to mess with my memory.

Dennis Lehane's THE DRoP

Just finished Dennis Lehane’s The Drop.  Little wonder it’s now a major motion picture.  Make sure you have a cold six-pack before you dive into the first page.  This one could interfere with trips to the frig and bathroom breaks.  And if your wife thinks you not paying attention now....

Bob, a bartender in the soft belly of the city, lives in a vicious world.  Violence is expected.  Deceit is the coin of the realm, and even your best friends can only be trusted while you stare them in the face.  Love?  Oh, yeah, there’s that, if that’s what it is.  If it’s not really love, then what the hell, sex is good enough.

In this city, it’s better to live an empty life, as quietly as possible.  Even then, you’re going to have to spend some time as a guest of the state.  Bob and most of his friends have been there, done that.  Of course, nobody’s guilty.  It wasn’t their fault.  Screw the evidence.

The police?  Hey, they’ve got their own problems, at home, at work, and on the soiled streets.

Law is at best undervalued, and at worse non-existent.  If you want something, take it, as long as you’ve got balls enough, and if you don’t have the balls, just shut up and pour the whiskey and try to stay in the shadows.

The biggest rule of law comes from the Chechen Mafia.  Sure, swift, brutal.  Not much evidence required. No court dates.  No appeals.

Suddenly a dog comes into your life.  A dog that needs rescuing. And a girl with her own deep scars.  And the twisted man who owns the rescued dog wants him back.  And, Bob, don’t forget you’re a nobody, a bartender.  Not making waves is the best way to keep breathing.

Lehane’s short novel is a heart stopper.  The characters couldn’t be more vivid if they swaggered through you living room.  Although, you wouldn’t want them to.  They should stay where they were born and where they grew up, in the squalor, on the wrong side of the filthy tracks.

The plot?  Rapid. Demonic.  Desperate. There’s no way out of this river of human excretion.  Just keep swimming, look around, and hold your head higher than the swiftly moving current.  Feel your heart racing?  Your pulse starting to feel like a tom-tom?  Get used to it.  The more pages you turn, the faster it gets.

Faith helps, especially when its core is faith in yourself.  Faith in God?  Yeah, even if that God is diminished by time and human frailty.

In slightly more than two hundred pages, this book will grab you by the throat, and toss you into a greedy world where only the darkly powerful, or the very lucky survive.  And, sometimes you just can’t count on the luck.  Or love.  Or faith.  At least not from the humans.

Alex, by Pierre Lemaitre

In general, what makes a good book?  Who knows?  Not I.  Varies from reader to reader.  But, if you like books that span the gaps from police procedural to mystery to serial killer to monstrous gore, I’ve finished one that will grip you in its bloodthirsty claws from page one.

Takes place in Paris.  Pierre Lemaitre’s protagonist, Commandant Camille Verhoeven, is the epitome of the anti-hero, and an original from start to finish.  Cantankerous, abrasive, short in stature and temper, the powers that be just flat do not like him.  He’s the detective for whom nothing is solved until he’s turned over every rock and stepped on everything that crawls out.  As a reader, sometimes you find yourself laughing out loud at his sarcasm.  Easy to laugh.  You’re an outsider.  Tougher when you’re in up to your eyebrows, your stupidity is hung out like dirty laundry, and the sarcasm cuts you like a rusty knife. Nobody evades his rapier tongue, or his insubordinate sighs.  Certainly not his superiors and especially not suspects with guilty looks, glibly spewing out half answers.

Camille’s superiors give him the shit cases, then are sorry they did.  Open and shut is never open and shut.  Arrogance and self-evidence never goes unquestioned by this snapping bulldog.

And what of the case itself?  A woman has been kidnapped.  You learn to hate the kidnapper in a page and a half.  But, as one curtain after another gets pulled back?  Let’s say this case and this thriller have more twists and turns than a cornered rattlesnake.  You know.  You’re sure you know.  But, you don’t know shit.  And so it goes to the last page.

I’ve simply never read a book like this.  Densely plotted. Characters drawn so sharply and deeply, you swap back and forth from love to hate to grudging admiration, until you find yourself in a quandary.

I’ve grown so tired of thriller that promise to thrill only to fall back on tired formulas, or unreasonable assumptions.  Fifty pages of splendorous magic, followed by 300 pages of pulp.  Makes you want to throw the author up against the wall for wasting your time.

This author is different.  Pierre Lemaitre has written a mystery-thriller-police procedural that not only entertains, but makes you laugh, makes you shiver, and leaves you breathlessly pondering for days afterwards.  The anti-hero, Commandant Camille Verhoeven is a character for the ages.  You may like him or not, but you’re going to be waiting for the next book to see exactly what the bastard is up to next.