The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson

John Wells, one quarter Palestinian, has the look. Dartmouth grad, adept in Arabic and some various dialects, and is a deadly shot. A convert to Islam whose distrust of the excesses of the west has made him a valued soldier for Allah. Ten years. Fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya.

And he is a CIA operative. His Al Qaeda bosses have a new task, a new responsibility, a new destination to take his Koran, to say his prayers.

He is being sent home. To wait. To wait for the call.

Wells is secreted into the US, but on his way to Atlanta, he contacts his handlers who haven’t heard from him in 10 years. While they trust him, others in the CIA aren’t so sure, but Wells still manages to go underground and wait for instructions.

In LA, 2 massive truck bombs are exploded, killing dozens attending a bar mitzvah or walking down Hollywood Blvd. A street person enters a storage locker that the FBI has staked out and ends up blowing himself up and scaring the crap out of Albany. A Muslim grad student in Montreal is busily growing plague virus in his basement, but how does he get it into the US and then how does he gets it spread into the NYC population. A Pakistani nuclear engineer has verified that some found radioactive material could be made into a dirty bomb.

The American infidels need to be prepared. Thousands are due to die by the bomb. Many more thousands will die the agony of the plague. And countless more will suffer radiation poisoning. When it all comes together, all the planning will be worth it when the Great Satan is brought to its knees.

The only real question is whether Wells is faithful to Allah or to his native land.

This is Berenson’s first book and it was an Edgar Award winner (the Edgar’s are for best new novel). He is a NYTimes writer who has covered Iraq so his descriptions of the Middle East have an authenticity I haven’t seen recently. He builds the tension higher and higher as plans progress, as Wells is tested again and again, as years of planning get changed in an instant and the shit has to fly NOW.

Now I like Flynn, Thor, Hagberg, et al. in the thriller/espionage genre, but I will definitely be making room on my bookshelf for Berenson and his can't-put-it-down novels. No question in my mind. This guy is a winner. I haven’t been this enthusiastic about an author after one just book since Hunter and Steinhauer. The real deal.

East Coast Don

The Death of Sweet Mister by Daniel Woodrell

Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone was about a dirt poor family set deep in the Ozarks. So is Sweet Mister. But don’t even think Woodrell is revisiting familiar ground. Same zip code maybe, but entirely different themes.

Red and Glenda Akins have one really screwed up marriage. Red is a twice-burned petty criminal with a chip on his shoulder. He and Glenda married way too young and Glenda was no where near ready to be a wife. She partied a bit and whether Red or just this guy was the father of her son is sort of obscure. The son, who goes by Shuggie, is a fat, 13 year old kid with a double chin (Glenda says it makes him look “prosperous.” Shug says, when you’re a teenager, you are just fat). Shug, Glenda’s Sweet Mister, is just beginning to notice girls, especially Glenda in the way she dresses “none too motherly,” carries herself, flirts with most any guy, drinks, smokes, and talks. Together, Glenda and Shug live in a broken down cabin doing caretaker work on the neighboring cemetery, doing their damn best to keep Red from blowing his stack and taking out his anger mostly on Glenda. Shug tries to protect her, but he doesn't quite seem to be cut from the same gene pool, physically or emotionally, as Red.

Basil is Red’s running bud and both are “a bubble off plumb.” They go for weeks at a time “scallybippin” anything they think has some value – cigarettes, clothes, TVs, toasters, you name it. They will also haul Shug along for “man stuff,” forcing Shug to break into homes of really sick folks who have been prescribed serious pain meds.

As dumb luck would have it, Glenda and Shug are out for a walk and meet up a guy dipping his feet in the creek next to where he parked his T-bird. Casual conversation. That’s all. But he sure seemed nice. A cook at a local eatery following the cook smoke wherever it took him.

Over and over, Red’s return is the prelude to a beating – on Glenda, Shug, or both. Shug tenderly nurses his mom’s wounds and they return to whatever normalcy follows. And the guy with the T-bird. That T-bird. A chat turns to a smoke and a drink to a dinner, to repeated visits to the cabin by the cemetery to far more. Of course, when Red finds out, he takes it all out on Glenda.

But this time, Glenda and her T-bird man fight back and Basil is forced to find out why Red has disappeared without him knowing anything. If Glenda and Shug stay, they will eventually face the wrath of Basil. The cook has a line on a job in New Orleans and wants Glenda and Shug to move there with him. Shug ain’t happy and shows proof to Basil of Red’s fate. The New Orleans job falls through, but a job on a Miami-based cruise ship pops up, so Glenda starts packing and makes arrangements for Shug to live with his grandmother.

But the cook never shows. Leaving Shug to comfort his mother’s loss in ways no boy should ever have to do.

Many thanks to MRB friend Charlie Stella for his original recommendation of Winter’s Bone (and if you haven’t seen the movie, you don’t know what you are missing. Watch the ‘Making of” segment for some really eye-opening casting). I went back to Woodrell for no particular reason and this was a good treatment for one still a bit burnt out by Tom Clancy’s latest monster. This little tale packs a ton of emotion into less than 200 pages of a 6x9 inch layout.

As Red’s anger with Glenda grows, I was expecting Shug to pay the ultimate price, but in the end, that price is the end of his innocence that leads to a mother-son relationship that, according to Shug, “everyone does.” I would hardly call this uplifting. Downright depressing is more like it.

But my word, can Woodrell write. Yeah, this may be a more modern play on some Shakespeare theme, and according to some reviews Woodrell is compared to Faulkner (almost embarrassed to admit that I’ve never read anything by Faulkner, but may have to now). But, boys and girls, for lights out story telling, Woodrell is damn hard to beat. I’ll be venturing back to the Ozarks again real soon.

East Coast Don

The Ethical Assassin by David Liss

“Crap! What are you doing here?”

Poor Lem Altick is just a kid selling encyclopedias door-to-door to raise money for college and get the hell out of the cesspool known as Florida. And he’s pretty good at it, too. He’s sitting in the Meadowbrook Grove (a noted Fla speed trap) trailer of Karen and Bastard, about ready to sink the hook and get the down payment. Karen is writing the check when our ethical assassin, Melford Kean, throws open the door and plunks Karen and Bastard with a 9mm right between their eyes. Whoops. Melford notices Lem sitting there. “Crap! What are you doing here?”

And so begins the saga of young Lem and his dealings with Melford who constantly challenges Lem with arguments about the ethics of this and that. Along with this minor ethical breech of murder is Police Chief Jim Doe who not only runs Meadowbrook Grove, he is also the proud owner of an inherited industrial hog farm, an under the radar meth lab, and a really tender set of ‘nads courtesy of a Miami reporter who wouldn’t play along when pulled over for speeding. Or how about B.B. Gunn, the head of the encyclopedia scam, and his girl Friday Desiree, the surviving conjoined twin. Now B.B. rationalizes his fascination with young boys by calling himself a mentor all the while having a couple idiot teenagers selling Doe’s drugs under the cover of the encyclopedia bookmen. And then there is The Gambler who does Gunn’s bidding. And Bobby, the crew boss who is skimming payments from his set of sellers.

So, why were Karen and Bastard killed? Turns out Melford is not only a reporter, but also a member of an animal rights group investigating stolen pets and a research lab that buys strays. Melford repeatedly takes Lem on an ethical debate and the one about the exceptionalism of man takes oh, maybe 5+ pages of tedium.

Anyway, in the course of 48 hours, Lem witnesses 2 murders, stumbles across 4 more bodies, relaxes his personal ethics for an Indian book seller on the team, survives a dip in a hog waste pond, and walks away with $40K for college.

Liss has authored a bunch of historical novels and Whiskey Rebels was favorably reviewed here. This more contemporary tale has been compared to Hiaason’s humorous blasting of all things Florida. While I wouldn’t say this is as clever as anything Hiaason has done, it still pokes fun at industrial farming, drug runners, dirty cops, salesmen, and, most importantly, people who hide behind ethical arguments to rationalize their position. This took me longer to read than anticipated, probably because of a hangover from that 950 page monster by Clancy. I’ll probably look at Liss’s Edgar award winning historical mystery A Conspiracy of Paper sometime in the future. I just have to get the image of Lem diving under the surface of the hog pond searching for his just shot ethical advisor out of my mind.

East Coast Don

Pretty Birds by Scott Simon

The author, a award winning journalist and contributor to NPR’s Weekend Edition, was a correspondent reporting on the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Based in Sarajevo, that experience serves as the foundation of Pretty Birds. During the Bosnian siege of Sarajevo, both sides used young women as snipers so that the men could be involved in the heavier fighting. Simon interviewed one such sniper and catalogued a ton of details about life during the siege in order to piece together a story on the plight of the citizens of Sarajevo.

The story is nominally about the struggles of the half Muslim Zaric family and their daughter Irena. As the siege begins, they have to flee their home and escape to the home of Irena’s grandmother only to find her dead in the stairwell, the victim of sniper fire. From here, Simon paints vignette after vignette of the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day life in a city under siege . . . from the horror of just finding water, scratching out an existence on bread with a side of snail and grass soup, to crawling through the apartment below window level (to not give snipers a target). Irena gets recruited to be one of the snipers and becomes exceedingly effective, killing targets while voraciously reading magazines about western culture and the slavic stars in the NBA. The title comes from the name of Irena’s pet parrot whose life first in a cage, then set free only to be captured again serves as an allegory to the life of the residents of Sarajevo.

While there is some semblance of a continuing plot, in reality the story (to me) is told simply as a series of loosely connected scenes to illustrate the horror of living in a siege from the viewpoint of civilians caught in the middle of one of the worst ethnic tragedies, at least in Europe, of the late 20th century. I was able to jump around the book and pick up what plot there was and not miss a beat. The plot notwithstanding, Pretty Birds is at its best as an opportunity for those of us lucky enough to not have been born there to glimpse at the individual struggles through the talented pen of one who was there.

East Coast Don

Dead or Alive by Tom Clancy (and Grant Blackwood)

Clancy is back. After 10 years on the sideline from a brand of fiction that if he didn’t invent, he surely took it to a higher plane, the techno-thriller, Clancy jumps back in doing what he does best - detailing seemingly unrelated plans and events, bringing it to a hyperdrive finish. On one day, the bad guys are planning: a claymore mine attack outside a church in Nebraska. A mortar attack during the unveiling of a monument in Ohio. Grenades to be tossed under the bleachers of a high school football game in Kentucky. An explosion on a container ship docked in Norfolk containing the raw materials to make chlorine gas and send it into the SE Virginia air. A dirty bomb to be detonated inside the under construction Yucca Mountain, Nevada nuclear waste disposal facility. Sabotage of Brazil’s largest oil processing plant.

Our tale begins with a squad of Rangers capture intelligence in a cave in the Pakistan/Afghanistan mountains and in the process kills a bunch of bad guys, some in their sleep. Some bleeding heart in the Justice Dept reads the after action report, sends it to his boss, the AG, who brings it to the attention of President Kealty (weeny Democrat that Jack Ryan, Sr. thinks is a wasted human experience, especially when it comes to national security) who fumes about murder and wants the balls of the sergeant who pulled the trigger.

Jack Ryan, Jr., last seen working for The Campus (an off the books very black agency of spooks set up by his dad, the former President), spots an odd email amongst the mass of electronic eavesdropping that announces a birth. The extremist ‘chatter’ goes mostly silent and there are no congratulations on the birth. Seems strange that no one would acknowledge a birth.

This sets off a long, convoluted, detailed inter twinning of events in Pakistan, Tunisia, Lybia, Iraq, Brazil, Senegal, DC, Baltimore, San Francisco, Vegas, desert Nevada, Vancouver, Virginia, Annapolis, and more places I can’t recall right now. Clancy outdoes Clancy in his attention to detail of weapons, plots, communications, action, people, extremists, government, spooks, etc. Eventually, the stories all come to a head with The Campus assembling a complex puzzle and finding and capturing the Emir who is THE head of the extremists.

Once they get what they want from the Emir, now what? As delightfully fun as it might sound, trussing him up in a package and dropping him on the front steps of the Hoover Building with a note on his chest would raise more questions about just who The Campus is and that just won’t do. The Campus is that far off the books.

Clancy doesn’t pull any punches in his view of the way the US should be approaching religious extremists who would do harm to the US and I’m guessing that readers who sit toward the left will find his views somewhat troubling, but make no mistake about it. Clancy sure has brung it big time in this one. And leaves open a number of plot options for a followup.

If you wonder just where Clancy has been, he must have been at work on this story . . . all 950 pages of it. Make no mistake about it. This book take you really deep into the planning and execution of a multi-pronged attack on the US. If it’s a journey you want to take, be prepared. 950 pages is a commitment, but if like this kind of tale, the adventure is worth the effort.

To some, Clancy has become Clancy, Inc. Yes, the story, while very complex, might be considered formulaic leaving some to wonder if Clancy's penchant for creative plots might be waning. No, he probably isn't exploring any new ground. But Clancy remains an excellent story teller and fans of his should be very happy that Clancy, Inc. is still in the game.

East Coast Don