Rules of Deception by Christopher Reich

Dr. Jonathon Ransom and his extraordinarily gorgeous wife Emma (why are they all gorgeous?) work for Doctors Without Borders as surgeon and facilitator, respectively. They travel from one hot spot to the next and manage to get out just before something goes wrong. Just lucky he thinks. The price one pays for working in hot spots.

One winter, they are mountain climbing near their home in Zurich when Emma falls into a gorge and dies, but the snow and ice around the gorge means the rescue folks need to wait until it’s safer to enter. Ransom, in his sorrow is packing up their things when a courier delivers an envelope to Emma in their hotel room. In it are 2 claim tickets for a train locker. Once he figures out the specific station, he finds money, passports, and keys to a top class Mercedes sedan.

In the car is a GPS that he follows to a house to find the 2^nd of two seemingly unconnected executions. The victim is Swiss, no make that Iranian. The other victim is Swiss, make that from Belgium. One connection is a manufacturing plant in Zug, a town near Zurich. This plant makes all kinds of stuff and the dead guy travels a ton selling his products.

Turns out, a lot of the products can be retrofitted to become centrifuges necessary to enrich weapons-grade uranium by Iran so they can bomb Israel. Meanwhile, a Swiss cop following the murders is trying to connect the dots only to be pushed off the case by his superiors. Something ain’t right in Switzerland.

Somehow, Ransom’s wife of 8 years has been living a double life and using Doctors Without Borders as her cover. Ransom’s chase is more to find out who is wife was and less about the centrifuges, but the two are connected and all the clues come together at a big meeting of government economists in the Swiss Alps.

And guess who ain’t dead.

This was a random selection off the shelf at the library and it fits perfectly as one of West Coast Don’s “airplane books.” This was a very easy and fast read with each chapter ending in sort of a cliffhanger, ala Dan Brown. I think part of why I liked this book is that I have a history of numerous trips to Zurich and so much of the plot took place in familiar location. Yes, the plot is a little far fetched, but it was still an entertaining diversion. Looks like Reich has a “Rules of . . . “ series and when I’m at a loss for some escape, I’ll check another book by Reich out of the library. I doubt he’ll join my power rotation, but I’m guessing other books will be reliable entertainment.

East Coast Don

The Secret Soldier by Alex Berenson

Part V of the John Wells saga.

John Wells is out of the CIA and living the quiet life with his North Conway, New Hampshire cop girlfriend. Been a civilian for 2 years now. Unfortunately, there is a loose end in the double agent Robinson who ran off at the end of Midnight House. A chance postcard to Robinson’s spouse alerts the CIA to send (ask) Wells to Montego Bay; if private citizen Wells tracks the guy down the CIA isn’t involved. Wells and Gaffan, a soldier he met in Afghanistan, perform the take down. No problemo.

About the same time, a coordinated series of terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia kills hundreds. On the lead is a former Saudi security officer who believes that surviving a desert 4-wheeler accident years before is a call by Allah to form a group of loyal believers and wait for a mission. Bakr believes that the royal family has lost their way and the line of succession that King Abdullah wants is not what his brother Saeed thinks would be the best direction for a new Islamic republic.

This splinter cell is training in Syria and conducts an execution of King Abdullah’s granddaughter raising the stakes. Abdullah is at first shaken, then his anger is directed toward his brother, but he can’t verify anything. And he can’t use the Saudi police, the royal’s security force, or the Islamic police because Saeed controls them all. He needs someone totally outside who can find out if Saeed is behind this mess.

John Wells.

Now Wells hasn’t killed in 2 years, but he is pretty sure he will be killing again, real soon. He calls Gaffan and they start to track down clues through Egypt, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. The old skills never left him. As the great sage Don Henley once said, “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

Bakr not only wants to bring down the House of Saud, he wants to provoke a war between Saudi Arabia and the US and has a pretty good plan – kidnap the American ambassador, make ridiculous demands, cut off some limbs, provoke the US to invade and voila, end of US presence 0n the Arabian peninsula. And he nearly pulls it off if not for Wells tracking the hostage to Mecca and uncovering damaging evidence about Saeed.

Now the palace intrigue may indeed be reminiscent of some old Shakespeare play or Greek tragedy; I wouldn’t know. But the House of Saud is seriously screwed up. This was another believable tale of high-energy espionage with uber agent and alpha dog, but emotionally bruised John Wells, plowing the road. Can’t say I could see any clues about where the next book will take us, but wherever it goes, I guarantee, I’ll be there. A quick run through Berensen’s first 5 books ends here. Now I have to patiently await his next.

East Coast Don

Mystery by Jonathan Kellerman

I was invited to join this blog by my cousin Don, aka West Coast Don. I had not seen Don in nearly 40 years until I looked him up on a recent visit to you guessed it, the West Coast. Interestingly one of the common interests of two long lost cousins was reading books, oddly a lot of the same books. So, I’ve since become a fan of the Men Reading Books blog and decided to return the favor by contributing.

I am a long time fan of Jonathan Kellerman’s work and his latest novel ‘Mystery’ does not disappoint. His well developed characters from previous works, Dr. Alex Delaware and Lieutenant Milo Sturgis are again his crime solving team and make this murder mystery very efficient both in terms of character and plot development. Too much coincidence, maybe but clues only a trained psychologist could interpret make for a crisp quickly moving story that pulls you in and makes you crave the final outcome.

Alex and his long time woman friend, Robin are out for an evening to an old Beverly Hills hotel bar that is about to be demolished. The place holds fond romantic memories for the couple. They are disappointed that the ambiance of their old haunt has changed but are intrigued by another patron, a beautiful young woman in a white dress obviously waiting for someone. The following morning Alex’s best friend, an unconventional yet highly effective homicide detective, Milo Sturgis invites him to consult on a murder investigation as Alex frequently does. A woman’s body has been found on a secluded street in Palisades west of Beverly Hills and Milo and Alex go to the crime scene. The female victim has been shot simultaneously with a .45 and a shotgun at close range totally destroying her face and implicating a conspiracy of two killers. Alex recognizes the white dress worn by the victim as that of the mysterious young woman in the bar the previous night. The investigation proceeds with trying to identify the body and determine what possible motive would result in such a violent act. An artist’s sketch of the girl Alex and Robin remembered from the bar yields an anonymous tip which leads Milo and Alex to a wealthy family with secrets to hide. Turns out the now deceased patriarch had hired the young woman known as Tara to some and Tiara to others as his mistress late in life. His former movie actress wife had tolerated and even strangely supported this and many other indiscretions of her husband in their 30 year plus marriage. Their now grown twin sons are not only fraternal but share no physical resemblance yet have an unusual and disturbingly close bond. Alex stumbles across clue after clue that reveals the imperfections and sometimes perversions of each character which ultimately develop into a twisted motive for murder. Putting his own life at risk Alex uses his psychoanalytical skills to invoke a confession.

The plot development maybe uses a little too much coincidence to be totally believable but as an admirer of Dr. Alex Delaware I quickly forgave that story flaw. I was impressed by the character’s acute observation skills and his ability to interpret the most subtle actions of others into meaningful clues. Like the Milo character, I have long ago learned to take Alex’s sometimes far-fetched hunches as strong possibilities and not to totally dismiss them. I found the story compelling and wanted more information about each character’s twisted life than was cleverly rationed out. I found it a thoroughly enjoyable read and recommend you read it without interruption.

Heaven's Prisoners by James Lee Burke

After reading the second novel in the Dave Robicheaux series, I have a very different take on Burke. It’s been about 8 months since I last read a Burke novel (Neon Rain), and I was most unimpressed. However, much to my delight, this was a very good book. The quality of the writing is remarkable, at times poetic, especially with regard to the description of the Louisiana bayou. In this book, Dave has retired from the New Orleans PD, and he’s moved to the swamp where he sells bait and rents out boats to fisherman. He has settled down to a quiet life with a good wife. On one of their idyllic boat outings, a small plane crashes near the boat. They could see the faces of the people inside before the plane hit the water, and Dave’s wife, Annie, thought one of them was a child. Dave dons his scuba gear and immediately dives on the wreck only to find four dead adults and one live, non-English speaking girl. Things get screwy when the press reports that only three bodies were found. The author, something like Ken Bruen, takes us through Dave’s fight with alcoholism, a recurrent theme in the book. Mostly, Burke focuses on the fate of the downtrodden, hence the title of the book. After Annie’s ugly death, Burke invokes images from the holocaust and the Vietnam war where innocents were trapped in the midst of warfare (just like the little girl on the plane), and Robicheaux thinks, “I commit myself once again to that black box that I cannot think myself out of. Instead, I sometimes recall a passage from the Book of Psalms. I have no theological insight, my religious ethos is a battered one; but those lines seem to suggest an answer that my reason cannot, namely, that the innocent who suffer for the rest of us become anointed and loved by God in a special way; the votive candle their lives had made them heaven’s prisoners.” Along with the philosophy, Burke spins a good plot that had a twist at the end that I did not see coming. Now, I’m motivated and excited to read more of the Robicheaux series.

The Midnight House by Alex Berenson

This is part 4 of 5 (so far) in the John Wells saga.

John and his fiancé have split sending John to the outback of New Hampshire to collect his emotions and figure out his post-CIA future. The morning after the one night he gets lucky, he gets a call from his former boss, Ellis Shafer.

A CIA operative has been gunned down in his car. A former Ranger has been shot dead on his doorstep. A former Army psychiatrist has committed suicide, two others died under strange circumstances. The connection is they were all a part of the 10-member Task Force 673 and Ellis and the DCI want John to see if he might be able to find out who is on the hunt.

Task Force 673 was a joint Pentagon-CIA project housed on an abandoned air base in Poland. Here, the baddest of the jihadis were housed, interrogated, and broken. No rules, no paper trail, just don’t leave any visible marks. The task force was nine guys, all experienced in high-level interrogation, and a shrink to keep watch over the bad guys as well as the members of the task force. And someone is after them, one by one.

The obvious thought is that some Islamic fanatic is exacting revenge on the team for what they did and John is thrust back into the Middle East to gather information. And what he finds is shocking to even someone with John Wells’ sensibilities. Interrogations that bordered on barbaric, money skimmed by members of the task force, a connection with the Pakistani secret police, the murder of a Pakistani political dissident, safes dropped into the Black Sea, political ambition, executive level cover ups and deception within the CIA, Pentagon, and the White House – all of which started with some obscure incident in Poland followed by the erasure of 2 prisoner ID numbers from a database of captured enemy combatants kept under the highest level of security by the NSA.

The key is the psychiatrist. While what she witnessed in Poland was disturbing, what sent her over the edge? She was the first of the unit to die. Why did she spiral downward upon finishing her assignment? And who is the next target?

This is the 4^th of 5 current John Wells novels by Alex Berenson. This one wasn’t as slam-bang, high body count as the first three books, but that doesn’t make it any less intense or suspenseful. This one is one part investigative procedural, one part political thriller, and one part mind game. Stir that all together and you get a terrific, almost mesmerizing tale of depravity, cynicism, revenge, political manipulations ‘for the greater good’ and an astounding lack of justice for the dead. All in all, this is one terrific book. Berenson has hit his 4^th home run in as many at bats.

Berenson's 5^th trip to the plate has been requested from my library. More on John Wells to follow.

East Coast Don

Siren of the Waters by Michael Genelin

I took the recommendation from Amazon, and the author is new to our blog. This is the first novel by the author, the first of three about detective Jana Matinova who works in Slovakia, but in the pursuit of solving a murder, is pulled all over Europe. Jana is a compelling character, one who has been damaged by her own original family, by her marriage to a dysfunctional artist (is that a redundancy?), and by the communist regime in which she grew up. The author does a great job bouncing backward and forward in time, and most of the characters with whom Jana associates are believable. I found the story line sometimes had too many of those remarkable coincidences among characters, and sometimes those connections between people were too vague. But, I like reading about life behind the former Iron Curtain and the residual difficulties that come from the slow integration with Western culture. I was entertained and I might read the second book in the series. For a more complete review of the story, see the following.

http://www.eurocrime.co.uk/reviews/Siren_of_the_Waters.html

Movie: Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

I know we don't do movie reviews here. But . . .

As of today, Michael Connelly is the 2nd most reviewed author on this blog. This Mickey Haller novel is the 2nd movie based on Connelly's books - Blood Work starring Clint is the other. Matthew McConaughey plays Haller and Marisa Tomei plays his ex-wife Maggie McPhearson, aka Maggie McFierce. I read this book well before we started this blog.

Saw it this afternoon and for a Hollywood rendition of a best selling mystery, the film followed the overall plot of the book, something that isn't always the case (cf. the Firm, Red October, etc.). Should the movie moguls have any sense (a bit of a stretch, I know), they would continue the Haller character and Connelly's books. A very reasonable way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Far better than the remake-reboot schlock currently so common today.

One thing I do when reading books is try to picture who might play a character in a movie. McConaughey is good casting for Haller. One of the minor characters in the film is a LA homicide detective and I wondered if it might be Harry Bosch, Connelly's other continuing character who for the life of me I've been unable to imagine who might play him. The character was played by Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame (and 2 or 3 straight Best Drama Actor Emmy's to his credit) and I was thinking, yeah that could be Bosch. Too bad. He was playing another cop named Langford.

If you've passed this film up, you might rethink that decision.

ECD

Chasing The Devil's Tail by David Fulmer

Funny how one finds books to read. I was sitting in a reading room with my mom where she lives and this book with a strange title font on the binding caught her eye so I pulled it out so she could look at it. After reading the liner notes, I decided to give it a go.

Storyville is a bit of a cloistered community in turn of the 20th century New Orleans. It's home to house after house of sporting girls and the guys who turn over their money for a few minutes of delight. Tom Anderson is the elected state representative to the area and works very hard to keep a lid on criminal activity lest the city and state try to shut down the main source of income for the residents. The working girls pay attention to Lulu White's wisdom, pose for photographs by E.J. Bellocq, and love the piano technique of a young musician who goes by Jelly Roll Morton. All real characters from Storyville's picturesque past. But Buddy Bolden is the King, the man on the coronet who on one hand is inventing jazz and on the other hand is losing his mind.

Working girls are dying. Each victim seems to be letting someone they know into their room only to suffer their fate with the only clue left by the murderer being a black rose. Word has it that Buddy Bolden knew most all the girls and the police are trying to make a case out fo thin air for the mad musician to get the murders off the front page.

One way Tom Anderson keeps things in order in Storyville is by his personal investigator, Valentin St. Cyr - a mulatto with black, white, Italian, and some creole in him that allows him access to places most couldn't or wouldn't care to enter. Buddy and "Tino" go way back to childhood and Valentin can't believe that Buddy, no matter how mad, could be part of the string of murders. Anderson has Valentin investigate each bordello, the bars where Buddy plays his horn, the police, a voodoo woman, the local insane asylum and still comes up empty.

Anderson thinks St. Cyr is covering up for Buddy and fires him leaving Valentin free to look wherever the clues take him. With the help of his girlfriend Justine, herself a sporting girl, they piece together a couple comments that seemed inconsequential at the time that now lead them to one particular madam and those who populate her house.

This book won a Shamus Award for best first mystery. Since that 2001 debut, Fulmer has about 8 books out. Some continue in the historical vein with St. Cyr as the continuing character plus a couple that are more contemporary. While I've been known to read some historical fiction (Goddard, Liss, McCammon, Blevins among others), I had a bit of a hard time getting into this story. While I can't say it dragged, it just never seemed to 'get it on' meaning it seemed take me far longer to finish a 6x9 paperback of 334 pages. I may give him another try, but whether it will be another St. Cry mystery or one of his others is up for grabs.

East Coast Don

Stone Cold by David Baldacci

This is the third book in the Camel Club series. It would be impossible not to like and hate the characters that Baldacci has created. This story further develops all of the main characters that have been set up in the first two books. There’s Oliver Stone, a.k.a., John Carr, the ex-CIA master assassin; Caleb Shaw, the rare book guy from the Library of Congress; Reuben Rhodes, the muscle of the group who has other talents; and Milton Farb, the true genius of the group with OCD. Given that the members of the group are all in their early 60s, they are easy for me to identify with. In the last book, Baldacci added the bad ass Jerry Bagger, casino owner, and his antagonist, the beautiful Annabelle Conroy, ace con woman, who successfully swindled the maniacal Mr. Bagger out of $40,000,000. In this book, Baldacci cleverly intertwines the troublesome past spy/espionage/assassination history of Stone/Carr with the current conflict of Bagger and Conroy. Not all of the characters survive the end of this story, and I can see good possibilities for the continuation of the saga. This was a good read and I’ll continue with the next one in the series. It’s of my “airplane book” category – enjoyable and entertaining, while not being more than that.

When the Bough Breaks by Jonathan Kellerman

I read this book on the basis of another recommendation from Cousin Dave, not the specific book, just the author. I found Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series, which now amounts to 25 books, and started with the first, released in 1985. This one was a winner from a number of perspectives. The main character, Dr. Delaware, is a child psychologist who was successful early in his career and retired at age 33, after his involvement in a particularly gruesome matter and when he realized that his own life had become empty as he blindly pursued his own financial and academic success. In retirement, he’s been having a good time, leading a fine life in Los Angeles when he gets pulled into a new crime. An LAPD detective wants him to interview a child who might have been witness to a murder but who won’t talk to the cops. Suddenly, Dr. Delaware finds meaning in his own life again, and he can’t let go of the matter, much like I felt as I read the book. This is about very dark stuff, the world of sociopathy, pedophilia, and worse. I kept wondering how Kellerman got so much right about the depraved and traumatized characters that he was writing about. Turns out, he’s a child psychologist who got his undergraduate degree from UCLA and his Ph.D. from USC. I don’t need to give you the plot, but please know that I had a hard time putting this book down. The various characters were believable, both the good guys for their altruistic qualities and human frailties, and the bad guys for their damaged egos. I also thought the quality of the writing was very literate, and I’ll give you one short example. Dr. Towle was one of the bad guys, a child psychiatrist who did not have his patients’ best interests at heart. Kellerman wrote of an encounter between Delaware and Towle: “[Towle] laughed. It was the first time I’d heard his laugh and I hoped it would be the last. It was a vacant discordant note, a blatant musical error screaming out in the middle of a symphony.” I’ve already acquired the second book in the series, “Blood Test.” Thanks Cousin Dave – a great recommendation.

Murder in the Marais by Cara Black

Maybe it’s because, unlike many Jews that I know, this Jew does not have an affinity for reading to reading holocaust related materials. In fact, I have an aversion to it. Most of the fiction I read is really just that, fiction, but the holocaust was not, and I’ve never found anything about it to be entertaining. So, maybe it’s just me. This is a current day story, a new murder of an elderly Jewish woman in the Marais, the Jewish section of Paris. Aimee, a detective who is more comfortable researching computer crimes, gets pulled into this mess by an old friend of her deceased father. She infiltrates the Les Blancs Nationaux, who are French skinheads that want to reenact crimes of the Third Reich against the Jews. And, Leduc Detective is about to go under, and Aime’s partner insists that she accept the big payments that are offered for her work. This book is the first in a long list of Aimee Luduc novels, a series that I saw recommended on Amazon. Even though this one was only rated 3.5/5 by Amazon readers, I thought I should start there, at the beginning. There must be a reason that it generated so many more stories. Right? It just didn’t work for me. I abandoned the book at the midway point.

The Silent Man by Alex Berenson

When we last left John Wells, he was recovering from being tortured by the Chinese, then averting a confrontation between the two superpowers that could have led to WW III. All in a day’s work.

The jihadists want to make one mega strike against the Great Satan. They ‘convince’ a couple Russian cousins who work at a Siberian nuclear storage facility to steal two warheads. The Russians wonder why because without the activate codes, held in Moscow, the bombs are useless. No matter. With some intricate planning, two warheads leave the facility and are trucked to the coast of the Black Sea (bye-bye cousins) where they will be smuggled into Hamburg for a clandestine boat ride across the Atlantic to Canada to eventually find their way to the stable of a rural farmhouse near Corning, NY owned by an Egyptian trauma surgeon.

In NY, an Iraqi physicist plans to open the warheads (with the help of the surgeon and the mastermind thief), remove the enriched uranium and mold a new bomb, bypassing the codes, all in time to transport to DC just in time for the State of the Union. (and OMG, am I glad that Berenson didn’t follow Clancy’s lead from Sum of All Fears and go into ridiculous detail about making the bomb. He kept that part brief, thankfully).

Wells and his fiancé, a CIA honcho, are on their way to work when an accident on the bridge stalls traffic allowing 2 motorcycles to come up each side of their SUV and open fire injuring Exley.

Naturally, Wells is honked off . . . seriously honked off. The dead hitters were Russian, so off to Moscow to corner the connection where he learns a couple things. The man behind the hit is Kowalski, the arms dealer from The Ghost War. Kowalski also knows a bit about stealing uranium. But Kowalski knows a honked off Wells on your tail is no way to live, so he trades some sanity for a name.

The chase shifts into double secret overdrive now to find the bomb’s whereabouts. Dang near every FBI agent east of the Mississippi is on the case and some dogged detective work traces the three stooges to the NY farm, but they are gone.

It’s interesting to read a series like this so close together. It’s almost like a Saturday serial at the local theater as Wells goes from one peril to the next. Now that flippant statement should not be construed to be critical. This is high octane, testosterone driven, balls to the wall action with Wells as the center of attention, reminiscent of Mitch Rapp, Kirk McGarvey, et al. Is this what the Clandestine Service of the CIA is like. Probably not, Like the genre? No question you’ll like this one.

I’ve ordered #4 from the library. Stay tuned for the next installment.

East Coast Don