Category Archives: Action thrillers and spies

Adventures of Rategan, Volume 1

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The book I have been waiting for was worth the wait. Robin Benger is a noted documentary journalist whose travels have taken him to most of the world’s trouble spots, but his prior published work was  journal about some

months he took to et away from it all. Now we get a look inside the events that led to some of these tremendous stories. Benger notes in the foreword that Rategan is a fictionalized avatar for the author, one who says and does the things we wish we would have said or done in a particular situation. It is a little disorienting for the reader, since Benger himself did say and do many of those things and has it on tape to prove it.

What does Rategan get up to? Deep cover stories about the horrors of civil wars, oppressive governments, or dysfunctional societies. Rategan meets underground cells in Mozambique, El Salvador, and Peru. As a semi-voluntary exile from apartheid in his non-fictional life, the author’s biggest emotional moment is the opportunity to return to South Africa and meet the Mandelas whom he has long idolized from afar. For me, the most striking chapter was the coverage of a sub-culture within Toronto that was just as dysfunctional as any of those he found in far-flung battle zones. Throughout the book, Rategan’s driving need is to find the underdogs in unfair fights and broadcast their stories to the world, or at least to Canada. As narrator, Benger is sufficiently self-conscious of his idealistic urges and biases and allows himself and the reader regular doses of macabre humor and irony as Rategan is usually disappointed (if not dangerously betrayed) by the very people he has come to help.

Benger tells us that he split his sort-of memoir into 3 parts to make the books a readable length. Fair enough, but don’t make us wat too long for installments 2 and 3. If you take anything away from this book, it is that you just never know what is going to happen next, so you’d better make the best of a good thing while it lasts.

Link to this book on Amazon

Old Boys

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The Old Boys by [McCarry, Charles]An excellent yarn about a group of former spies getting together for one last caper. The premises are an entertaining homage to several classics in this field – a central character who is declared to be dead but may not be, the mysterious jihadist who has also returned from the dead, and (surprisingly) a long-lost Gospel that could have enormous repercussions. This last item is in fact an enormously intriguing concept but it serves only as the omnipresent McGuffin; I should like to have seen it developed a lot further.

About the only objection I found was that the geezer factor really didn’t play into the story except as a running punchline: these old guys are still lethal, still able to undertake feats of derring-do, and still highly connected even though all their colleagues would also have been long gone. I would much rather have seen them overcome situations through recalling old situations or craftiness. But, having said that, the book is an entertaining read and well worth the small investment.

Only to be expected in a spy thriller, there is quite a lot of violence, but (thank goodness for geezerdom) no sex scenes, so it is more than safe for teens.

Amazon link

Radiant Angel and the Cuban Affair

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Two recent offerings from Nelson DeMille explore his similar but different sub-genres and both are well worth your time.

Radiant Angel is another in the series about ex-NYPD detective John Corey, the wise-cracking hard-boiled contract investigator. As ever, the dialog owes much to Robert Parker’s Spenser books although Corey’s wry remarks tend to be more often in the nature of side observations to the reader, except when pushing some official’s buttons. This particular novel also draws on the Clancy approach with Russians and technical terminology. It is a true thriller in the sense of guns, terrorists and chases.

The Cuban Affair, by contrast, is without a doubt an homage to John McDonald and his creation, Travis McGee. With the settings in Key West and Cuba, and the inevitable maritime phases of the story, there is a great deal of mention of Hemingway and some reflection on his biography during his Cuban residence, but those are mostly color. This story is in Travis McGee’s voice and it develops by acting pretty much as McGee would have. The difference is that McDonald’s stories were pretty much straight up: damsel in distress, reluctant participation, ferret out and deal with bad guys while getting injured or having boat blown up in process; girl goes her way in the end. In DeMille’s hands, while the book follows the same general arc, the plot is broader and twistier, and the big question is whether we really grasp who the good guys and bad guys are. In addition to enjoying the thriller part of the novel, you’ll be interested in DeMille’s take on the “Cuban thaw”; for those who think socialism would be just wonderful, it offers glimpses of what life under such regimes has always been.

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The Reckoning, Camino Beach and the Rooster Bar

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John Grisham’s three latest offerings are sure to excite his readership in several ways at the same time.  The reviews are already in and heavily bi-modal; people like them or they don’t, and then they reverse positions on the other book/s. The reason is that the three are incompletely different voices; the good news is that you are certain to like at least one of them, and will probably not like one of them. Which is which will depend largely on you!

The Reckoning is the sort of book that Mr. Grisham wants to write. It is in the same vein as “A Time to Kill”, which was his first work and that usually indicates it’s the one he really had to write. It also went nowhere until he broke out with The Firm. The Reckoning starts out a bit weird in that the protagonist goes out and commits a very violent act pretty much in plain sight, so it seems improbable that the lawyers can get their man off – and apparently, that’s fine with him. In fact, although lawyers are necessarily involved in this type of event, they aren’t the centerpiece that one expects of a writer of legal thrillers, and the story wouldn’t change much if no mention were made of the lawyers at all. It’s a serious work, seeking perhaps to move into the “literature” category, addressing a couple of Grisham’s topics of interest (veterans’ issues and Old South racial tensions). It is not uplifting in any way. But it will probably keep you reading to find out why the protagonist did what he did.

The Rooster Bar goes in the other direction. It is indeed a lawyer story, again taking on social issues, in this case the student loan industry, private (commercial) law schools, and the effect of immigration laws on those who have decided to evade them. The base story is that four friends realize that their huge investment in law school are not likely to result in high-paying jobs immediately upon graduation. So they decide to quit law school and impersonate lawyers so they can sue the school and the industry. As many commenters have noted, this is a pretty idiotic premise, because 90 percent of the group’s problems would have been resolved had they simply completed their last semester and buckled down to pass the bar exam. For long-time Grisham readers, the more off-putting aspect of the book is the obvious catering to the stereotype of the millennial class, from the story-line to the dialog. But he’s in the commercial end of the business, and you can’t keep selling books to baby boomers much longer, so I can’t fault it as a marketing strategy; I’m just going to have to shift from automatic purchase into checking out the reviews before buying the next book.

Camino Island returns to the mainstream work that brought him fame and fortune. It too is not a lawyer story at all, in fact none of the major players is a lawyer. Its pacing and content places it squarely in the conventional thriller genre, and among his prior works it probably comes closest in flavor to the Pelican Brief. The situations are subtle, the locales are well-described, and the dialog is crisp. This one should find favor with fans of all types, even if no lawyers do come to grief.

Prussian Blue

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An excellent read in another of the Bernie Gunther series of WW2-era detective novels. As is the style for the series, the story alternates between a post-war case in which Bernie is involved as a private eye and a pre-war case in which he is engaged in his capacity as a police detective working (under slightly more degree of protest than the regime tolerates) for the Third Reich. The link between the two stories in this case is Friedrich Korsch who had been his understudy in the prewar years; after the war, as a Berliner, Korsch has to work (also with some reservations) for the Soviet puppet government in East Germany, and in that role is responsible for making sure that Bernie does not discover or undermine what his new bosses are up to.

Kerr’s trademark is flipping back and forth between the two stories. At least he always does us the courtesy of starting a new chapter and providing a dateline when he does so. In some of his books it is all a bit confusing, but the nature and settings of these two stories offer a clear distinction, so much so in fact that either one could stand on its own as an excellent adventure.   That makes the overall book a pleasure to read.

The only drawback, really, is that if this is your first Gunther read, you will really want to know more about the back story that gets Gunther into the clutches of the German Reich in the first place, in which case try “The One from The Other” first.

Get Prussian Blue on Amazon

 

The One From the Other

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If you haven’t been introduced to Bernie Gunther, a Jew who is also a former official of the SD and SS (you have to read the book to work that out) turned post-WW2 private eye, then this is the book to start with. It may not be Kerr’s first book, according to the flyleaf, but it is the book in which Bernie starts out his post-war career, so if you read one of his other books first you’ll be a bit frustrated not having the back story.

The One from the Other provides a credible (I have no grounds for saying “authentic”) description of the chaos in occupied Germany in the years immediately after WW2. Bernie has the good fortune to be regarded as someone who can be trusted, even if he is a former Nazi official. Well, in fact, and much to his chagrin, it is mostly former Nazi officials who seek him out to take care of little inconveniences. A favor turns into another which bodes well for turning into a regular practice, and although he would much rather not deal with the former regime there isn’t a lot of employment in a non-existent economy, especially when your only asset is a hotel in the town of Dachau. Bernie never explains why that is: if you’re not up on your history, it was one of the death camps, and the horrors are recent enough that it hasn’t become a memorial. And his wife has a major illness. Like it or not, the paychecks are needed.

I’m not going to spoil a very fine read by telling you how it all works out, although the fact that there are a dozen or so books in the series tells you what the ending will not be. As with any good potboiler there are fisticuffs, near-death experiences as well as encounters with corpses, and a bit of romance, but it is all done rather tastefully so you can let your older teens read it in reasonable safety.

If you get started on this series you’re going to want to get the rest of the books which are, if anything, a little deeper. So get started.

Get it at Amazon.

White Rose, Black Forest

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A superb novel combining spy thriller and troubled romance. Franka is so beaten down by the Nazi regime that she sees no point in living and heads out to end it all in a snowstorm, until she happens across a critically injured parachutist.He may be a pilot for the Luftwaffe, part of the grisly German machine of repression and war that has taken many of her loved ones away from her. Something doesn’t seem quite right, but if he is not who his papers say then he must be an Allied pilot – one of those who have taken the rest of her friends and family in air raids against German cities and civilians. Either way, whether she is right or wrong, she will bring herself to the attention of the same Gestapo which has recently released her from prison, but not from suspicion. Her efforts to solve the conundrum without getting arrested or making a fool of herself, and the inevitable entrapment of others into the web of deceptions, provide a nicely-paced story that is avoids the breathlessness of its genres to generate an aura of authenticity. The plot points are rather obvious, but the situation makes them so; the interest factor is not determining what the challenges are going to be but how those very obvious difficulties can possibly be overcome.

Get it on Amazon