Tag: spy

No Tomorrow, by Luke Jennings

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Literary rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

“I’m just you without the guilt.”

As we recently discussed, the first book and first season of the TV series had some major differences. The second book does make a significant effort to narrow the gap. Indeed, by the end, we have almost got to the same point as at the end of the TV show, albeit by a rather different route. Then, just when I was expecting this to wrap up and set the stage for the second season, Jennings drops a major bomb. I have to say, well-played: I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as stunned by a twist in a novel before, yet thinking about what had gone before, it made perfect sense. I’m really curious to see whether the TV show follows suit, because if so – nothing will be quite the same again.

To that point, we had more of the cat-and-mouse games between the international assassin codenamed “Villanelle” [though these days, it’s basically her real name, with her true identity buried deeply in the past], and harried MI-5 operative Eve Polastri. The latter is struggling to balance her increasing obsession with Villanelle, and a husband who would greatly prefer it if she was not jetting off to Venice or Moscow at a moment’s notice, leaving him to open a tin of beans. Eve is very much a desk jockey, and not exactly suited to go head-to-head with a ruthless killer. Can wits and persistence counter cold-blooded psychopathy?

It was the twisted relationship between the two which separated the first book and the TV series, with the show having much more development in this area. Jennings said his approach to the second book was altered by the strong reaction of fans to the TV version, and you can tell: there are a couple of scenes which can only be described as fan service, apparently inspired by one notorious broadcast line [Villanelle’s confession to Eve, “I think about you, too. I mean, I masturbate about you a lot.”] This angle really doesn’t fit, considering Eve finished the first book literally tooling up to kill Villanelle, and I found it an abrupt and jarring shift in tone.

The rest of it though, is really well-done, from the explanation of The Twelve’s intent through to Eve’s dogged piecing together of her target’s identity. I read the whole thing in about 30 hours, which is far from my usual leisurely pace. Staying up late, waking up early, in front of the TV… I ripped through it, powered by Jennings’s great eye for description; particularly in terms of locations. Whether it’s attending a conference of neo-Nazis on an Alpine mountain-top or shivering in a cell, deep in the bowels of the infamous Lubyanka prison, the reader feels there.

The balance of the book also feels improved. The first was mostly about Villanelle, with Eve almost feeling like a supporting role; this time, it’s much more even. Indeed, the contrasts in the transitions between the two lead characters form some of the book’s most memorable imagery. For example, we jump from Villanelle prepping the ground by seducing her next target, Rinat, to following Eve on her way home from work:

“The sun is low in the sky, half obscured by oyster-pink cirrus clouds. Rinat turns to beckon to the waiter, but he’s already standing there, as patient an unobtrusive as an undertaker. In the bus, moving at a snail’s pace up the Tottenham Court Road, the only person to give Eve a second glance is an obviously disturbed man who winks at her persistently. It’s a warm evening and the interior of the bus smells of damp hair and stale deodorant.”

This bone-dry dark wit is fairly common, and the style with which Villanelle operates can only be applauded, making up for in quality of mayhem perhaps what the book lacks in quantity. I suspect she would make a fine Bond villain, with an eye for the grandiose and demonstrative over the purely functional [There’s an idea: with all the talk about diversity for 007, why have we never had a Mrs. Blofeld?] In the absence of that, Sunday nights can’t come quickly enough.

Author: Luke Jennings
Publisher: Mulholland Books, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 2 of 2 in the Codename: Villanelle series.

Kim Possible

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★★½
“A pale Kim-itation”

The new trend for Disney appears to be, live-action version of their beloved classic movies. This year alone, we can expect to see Dumbo, Aladdin and The Lion King, with Mulan to follow in 2020. A possible stalking horse for this was the live-action version of (somewhat) beloved TV series, Kim Possible, which ran for four seasons from 2002-07. It was pretty good, likely peaking with TV movie A Sitch In Time – but if the reaction to this adaptation is any guide, Disney may be in trouble. For this seems to have flopped, reportedly getting the lowest ratings of any Disney Channel Original Movie, and most fans of the original were far from impressed.

I found it a real grab-bag. Some elements were great, but others, utterly cringeworthy. Unfortunately, the latter included the main plot. As in the TV series, Kim Possible (Stanley) is a teenager, who has to juggle saving the world with high-school life, alongside her sidekick Ron Stoppable (Stanley) and tech genius Wade. This involves them facing supervillains such as Professor Dementor (Patton Oswalt, reprising his role from the original show), but in particular, Dr. Drakken (Stashwick) and his rather more competent and sarcastic sidekick, Shego (Taylor Ortega).

If they’d simply stuck to these tropes, this would have been fine, and when they do, the movie fairly crackles. The Kim/Ron dynamic is fine and there’s some good jokes in her school life, such her rushing desperately to get to class on the opposite side of campus, only to find the same teacher already waiting for her on arrival. Or there’s her dismissal of her mother’s concerns: “It’s just high-school; how hard can it be?” What makes that amusing, is Mom being played by Alyson Hannigan, famously part of the Scooby gang on Buffy – where high-school was situated on a portal to hell. This is the kind of under-the-radar wit for which I signed up. Then there are Drakken and Shego (below), who nail it perfectly. I’d have been fine with 85 minutes of their acidic banter.

Instead, however, there’s a really horrible plot about Kim befriending Athena (Wilson), another new student. I’m sorry, when did Kim Possible become a relationship drama? Jealousy of Athena – despite her being super-annoying –  causes Kim to suffer self-doubt, and fail when she is needed most… blah blah blah. Awful scripting, the portrayal of their relationship is sub-juvenile pap, which I’m sure would turn the stomach of any actual high-schooler. Worse, it goes beyond “flawed”, making the heroine weak and no longer heroic. And what’s with Kim being obsessed with joining the school’s soccer team? She was a cheerleader; these days, I guess that’s no longer an acceptable pastime for an aspirational role-model figure or whatever, in Disney’s Little Red Book.

It does eventually pay off, though in a way that makes no sense, with Kim suddenly regaining all her talents, purely when necessary to her plot. Though she still ends up needing help from her mother, her grandmother and Ron’s naked mole rat. Again: weak. And do not even get me started on the pointless cameo for Christy Carlson Romano, who voiced Kim originally. She shows up in one scene as singer Poppy Blu, whom Kim supposedly helped out of a sticky situation… with the IRS? What? No, really: what? Kim Possible, tax accountant?

I will confess that it did manage to keep my attention, and the pacing is generally brisk. But all the elements that work here are the ones where they are faithful to the tone and spirit of the original. The more the makers try to shoehorn in “girl power” and so forth, the more it flounders. It’s about as flaky an effort as you’d expect from a movie which was explicitly pitched as “Wonder Woman for the prepubescent set.” More evidence, as if any were needed, that when you conceive of something as a message first, and relegate entertainment to second-place, you are almost inevitably doomed to fail.

Dir: Adam Stein & Zach Lipovsky
Star: Sadie Stanley, Sean Giambrone, Ciara Riley Wilson, Todd Stashwick

Bring It, by Seeley James

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

It took me about six years after reading the series opener to get back to the adventures of one of my favorite action heroines, Seeley James’ Pia Sabel; but I only wish I’d done so a lot sooner! Some of my comments in my review of the preceding book, The Geneva Decision, are relevant here as well, and that review also explains something of the premise and who Pia is. In this second book, we learn significantly more of her backstory (and the revelations are corkers –but no spoilers here!).

However, I liked this book even better. Here, there were no interspersed deus ex machina revelations to jump over plot obstacles, and for the most part I could visualize the action scenes better (with only a couple of exceptions). I attribute this to the author’s increasing skill at writing. A review by a Goodreads friend had stated that Pia isn’t the main character in this novel; I also knew that Seeley had opted here for using Sabel Security agent Jacob Stearne as a first-person narrator (actually, his narrative thread only comprises part of the book), and that Pia is kidnapped early on by the baddies. Since, for me, her character is the main draw of the series, all of this was somewhat off-putting; I feared that she would be largely inactive and off-stage here.

But I needn’t have worried; I would definitely dispute the assessment that she’s not the main character, and I can categorically guarantee that she’s neither inactive nor off-stage! Although the two characters are distinct and not clones of each other, in some ways Jacob reminds me, in his personality and his relationship to Pia, of Peter O’Donnell’s Willie Garvin and his relationship to another kick-butt heroine, Modesty Blaise; both Willie and Jacob are utterly clueless in their certainty that recreational sex is a perfectly harmless pastime and that any woman they meet should be a potential partner, and both are apt to prompt some eye-rolling moments from readers who aren’t similarly clueless. (There’s no explicit sex in the book, however.)

They differ, though, in that while Willie adores Modesty, he thinks it would be an impermissible “liberty” to entertain romantic fantasies about her, but Jacob definitely has romantic fantasies about Pia. (Of course, he also has feelings for another of our old friends from the first book, his colleague Agent Tania –but that doesn’t inspire fidelity to either woman.)

Another aspect of this book that’s superior to the first is the seriousness of the theme, because here the author takes a hard fictional look at the real-life underbelly of America’s Deep State, where an out-of-control, largely unaccountable security apparatus can too often be run by sociopaths who think only in terms of “us against them” rather than right vs. wrong, see morality and law as quaint superstitions, and can and do carry out outrages (up to and including murder) against innocents, including American citizens. (Yes, the horrors of Operation Snare Drum here are fictional –but there have been documented crimes by U.S. government personnel or “contractors” that aren’t fictional.)

To his credit, Seeley doesn’t portray this as a partisan issue with just one establishment party as the bad guys, because it isn’t; it’s not a Republican vs. Democrat issue, but of decent Americans of whatever party label vs. traitors to our ideals regardless of what party label they use. (Though this was written during the Obama administration, it’s set after it, with a fictional new President of unspecified affiliation.) It’s a needed eye-opener for any American who cares about the rule of law and ethics in government –which is why I’ve recommended it as not just for genre fans!

A quick disclaimer: Seeley and I are Goodreads friends (though he’s not very active here), but I bought my copy of this novel myself, and my rating wasn’t at all affected by his “friend” status.

Author: Seeley James
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 2 of 2 in the Sabel Origins series.

Code Name: Griffin, by Morgan Hannah MacDonald

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

A painfully clunky mix of spy and crime thrillers, this really needs to decide which it wants to be. Alexandria Kingston – code name Griffin, in case you hadn’t guessed – was an abused child, with the good fortune to be rescued and brought up by Margaret Murphy, the head of Irish organized crime in Boston. Though to avoid Alex being targeted for leverage, she was never acknowledged to be part of the family. As an adult, Alex joined the CIA and became a top field agent, jet-setting over the globe on demand. But when her foster mother suffers a stroke, she returns to Boston to find herself in the middle of a war for control of the turf. The rival Killeen clan, sensing an opportunity, pounce. It’s up to Alex and her brothers to defend the family – and then take the battle to the Killeens.

It’s all utterly implausible. Apparently, the CIA don’t bother doing any kind of background check on their employees, and have no problem recruiting and giving security clearance to people with close ties to organized crime. Alex, meanwhile, wobbles uncertainly between remarkable proficiency and incompetence, as necessary to the plot. She can reel in a member of the Killeen family by simply ordering a whisky, yet this top-notch spy inexplicably can’t form sentences when faced with her former childhood sweetheart. I admit her latter burbling is actually kinda endearing, but c’mon: have some consistency in your lead character. And, of course, the Murphys are an almost saintly crime family. By which I mean, they still do prostitution and human trafficking, they just do them the right way. Yeah. About that…

This still might have made for an interesting detour in an established series, if we were already fully convinced of her talents as a CIA operative, with an unrevealed past. Instead, we get barely a handful of pages at the beginning to establish her credentials, with no real context: she exists in a vacuum. There’s also a fondness for the kind of florid consumerist prose I thought had gone out of style with Bret Easton Ellis culminating in this remarkably superfluous description of Alex’s perfume: “The sensuous bottom notes of Sri Lankan sandalwood and Indonesian patchouli were mixed with high notes of Bulgarian rose and citrus to add a feminine touch that was irresistible to the opposite sex.” I swear, I literally rolled my eyes at “high notes of Bulgarian rose”.

I can’t knock the action too much. There is a steady stream of set-pieces throughout the book, and MacDonald does describe these with a clear eye, and no shortage of savagery. [You wonder what, exactly, Boston law enforcement are doing while all this is going on, since Alex does not mess around, and the pile of bodies left in her wake is considerable. It just needs to be in the service of a much better constructed plot.

Author: Morgan Hannah MacDonald
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Griffin series.

Agent High-Pockets, by Claire Phillips

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

In September 1941, the author returns to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, starting work as a nightclub singer and falls in love with American GI, John Phillips. Which is unfortunate timing, because soon after, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, kicking off the war in the Pacific. A hasty marriage to John follows on Christmas Eve, but Japan invades, and Claire’s husband becomes a prisoner of war. Left to fend for herself, after a period spent hiding out in the countryside, she returns to Manila, adopting the persona of Dorothy Fuentes, born in the Philippines of Italian parents. In order to help the resistance, she opens a venue, Club Tsubaki, aimed at officers of the occupying forces.

This has a nice irony, since the profits from the business are used to fund both humanitarian work for the POW’s held on the islands, and the growing guerrilla forces up country. Additionally, “Dorothy” – also known as High-Pockets, for her habit of keeping valuables in her bra! – keeps her ears open, and becomes skilled at extracting useful intelligence from her patrons, though a combination of flattery and alcohol. This information, about troop movements, industrial facilities, etc. is then funneled back to the Allies for use in the conflict over the next couple of years. It’s a risky business, and eventually, the Japanese break up the ring, arresting those involved. Claire has to withstand torture and hellish prison conditions, before being sentenced to 12 years for her activities.

Fortunately, there is a happy ending here, since the Americans re-took Manila, freeing our heroine after a rough eight months, during which time she lost about 35% of her body weight. After the war she was awarded the Medal of Freedom, and a movie was made of her story – I Was an American Spy, starring Anne Dvorak as Claire. There are some doubts as to the accuracy of her account: a post-war claim for compensation was severely reduced, with many of her statements “later found to be without foundation,” the court even concluding there was “no corroboration of her testimony that she was married.” So we should likely take this her tale here with a pinch of salt as to the details, though the basic elements seem credible enough.

It takes a while to get to the good stuff, with rather too much about her social life, etc. Even after the invasion, she spends a good while suffering from malaria in a hut. The more it goes on, however, the more this improves, as you began to understand the daily terror of living in occupied territory, where every night could be your last, and any knock on the door might be the dreaded kempei, the military police. It’s also fascinating to read her techniques for extracting useful information from her clientele with seemingly innocent questions like “How many will be in your party? I must know so that I can reserve places.” Her matter-of-fact recounting the horrors of prison life is also memorable, such as the incident where a fellow prisoner caught and skinned a cat, eating it raw. Worst of all is the sentence which follows: “There was another cat on the premises, and I began to look at it longingly.”

To modern ears, there is something of a not-so casually racist tone here, Phillips spattering the text with references to “Japs”, “Nips”, etc. and mocking their efforts to speak Engrish [how’s her Japanese, I wondered…] However, given the war circumstances and situation – this was an invading force after all – we need to put this in context. This was a time, after all, when Hollywood was making cartoons like Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. We probably shouldn’t condemn the author by applying modern standards to an entirely different situation, to which they do not fit.

Author: Claire Phillips
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as a paperback or e-book.
a.k.a. Manila Espionage

Raazi

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★★★★
“The Spy Who Loved Me”

This Indian spy thriller manages to be both remarkably restrained and human, avoiding a potentially jingoistic approach, and going for something considerably more measured. It takes place just before the war between India and Pakistan in 1971, when Indian agent Hidayat Khan is pretending to give information to Pakistan. In order to get close to their top brass, he convinces his daughter, Sehmat (Bhatt), to enter an arranged marriage to Iqbal Syed (Ahlawat), an officer whose father (Sharma) is a Brigadier in the Pakistani army. After being trained by senior intelligence officer Khalid Mir (Kaushal), she goes to join her new husband, and begins operations as a spy inside the Brigadier’s household.

From there, it’s a series of tense incidents, with a servant becoming increasingly suspicious of Sehmat, but her also falling for Iqbal, and realizing that the enemy are not so different. These conflicting loyalties create emotional carnage, not least when she has to kill multiple people in order to protect her mission. [One of whom is killed using an umbrella laden with a ricin pellet, which is odd, since this was seven years before the KGB used exactly this method to assassinate a dissident, Georgi Markov] She does succeed in sending back vital information to Mir, but he has great difficulty in getting the Indian military to take the data seriously, being uncorroborated evidence from a rookie agent. When the Pakistanis start rolling up Sehmat’s local support cell, it becomes a race against time to extract her before she is caught in the net.

What I particularly liked about this was Sehmat’s “ordinariness”: she has no amazing abilities or combat skills. She is brave, smart and very committed, yet far from immune to the hellish toll a mission like this takes, especially on the psyche of someone thoroughly unprepared for it. The film does a much better job of depicting this than, say, Red Sparrow, in particular with an ending which is genuinely poignant, and a far cry from the black and white depiction which I was expecting. There’s as much ground to criticize the Indian side – not least for their cynical exploitation of a young girl’s desire to satisfy the wishes of her father – as the Pakistani one.

This was one of the highest-grossing Bollywood movies with a female lead ever, trailing only romantic comedy sequel Tanu Weds Manu Returns, and it’s easy to understand why. About the only misstep I can think of, was giving Sehmat’s father lung cancer, as if relying on her daughter’s sense of filial obligation and patriotism wasn’t sufficient moral blackmail. It’s a sloppy and unnecessary bit of early melodrama, whose lack of subtlety is severely at odds with the rest of the film. In a world where most spy movies treat death as a throwaway trifle, this goes a long way to remind us that the taking of another human’s life is absolutely not a trivial matter, regardless of the reason.

Dir: Meghna Gulzar
Star: Alia Bhatt, Jaideep Ahlawat, Vicky Kaushal, Shishir Sharma

Critical Salvage, by Steve Richer

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

This is briskly functional rather than particularly memorable: by which I mean, I read the book in fairly short order… only to discover, when I finished it, that I didn’t remember very much about it. Not even the heroine’s name. Mallory? Mindy? Miley? Definitely an M word… Ah, yes: Melody Cale. She’s an agent for the Geirty Solutional Diversity Group, a murky government organization – also known as the Get Shit Done Group – who “do what the CIA couldn’t… without having politicians, or reporters, looking over their shoulders.”

In this case, it’s cleaning up after a CIA operation goes wrong, and a plane goes down in the Nicaraguan jungle. The cargo, code-named “Woodland Kaiser”, needs to be recovered before it falls into the wrong hands. Which would be these of The Homestead, an equally murky group of unknown origins and motives. They contract out the search to murky [yeah, it’s like that…] Latin American drug-lord, Rojas. The GSDG send Melody, and she teams up with Owen Wright, a British ex-soldier whose father was killed by one of Rojas’s minions, and who is much more interested in revenge than a salvage operation.

Indeed, Melody appears more interested in finding out the identity of Rojas then recovering the target. It’s not long before she has abandoned the search for Woodland Kaiser entirely, not to mention the entire American continent. She is instead hob-nobbing with the rich and famous, jetting off to the Cannes Film Festival, for reasons which remain – all together, now! – murky. This is particularly dubious since, it turns out, when Owen puts his mind to it, he’s able to locate the crash site in about a page. You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you? You know, for a second there…

If you put issues of logic and common sense aside, this works much better, and it’s ideal beach material: a slick page-turner, in which bullets fly and the villain has a seaside lair nicknamed “The Aquarium”, with one glass wall below the water-level, looking out into the ocean. [Memo to self: if ever I become an evil overlord, and construct anywhere nicknamed “The Aquarium,” I will be sure to use bullet-proof materials…] This is involved in the best section, forming the book’s climax, when the stronghold is stormed by Melody, with the assistance of Adriana Tiscareno, a businesswoman she initially suspects of being “Rojas”.

The heroine is something of a cypher. It might have been nice to have learned more about her origins, and how she became such a hard-ass. For comparison, the blurb claims “Fans of Atomic Blonde, Nikita and Alias will love Critical Salvage” – two of those three did explain how their heroines came to be, and those were important parts of the story. While this ties up all its loose ends nicely, and works perfectly well as a stand-alone, it perhaps feels more like a third or fourth book, rather than an introduction. But if I’m in need of some holiday reading down the stretch, future volumes would merit consideration.

Author: Steve Richer
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon as an e-book or paperback
Book 1 of 1 in the Mercury Cale series.

The Spy Who Dumped Me

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★★★
“Competence. It’s VASTLY over-rated.”

A breezy yet slightly odd mix of comedy and ultra-violence, this drops Audrey (Kunis) and her gal pal Morgan (McKinnon) into the middle of a spy caper, after Audrey’s boyfriend Drew (Theroux) dumps her, only for Audrey to discover he was a CIA spy. He tells her she must deliver a statuette to a Viennese cafe, or the world will be in great peril. After the peril rapidly arrives, heavily-armed, she and Morgan head off to Europe, with no idea of who they can trust. In hot pursuit – whether for reasons good or bad – are MI6 agent Sebastian Henshaw (Heughan), and the agents of “Highland”, a criminal syndicate also very keen to get their hands on the statuette and what it contains. A whirlwind tour of European cities follows, including Budapest, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin.

I’ve rather more time for Kunis than McKinnon; I have previously found a little of the latter’s shtick tends to go a long way e.g. the Ghostbusters reboot, and that’s the case again here. There’s not just much of a character arc for Morgan: she starts the film off being loud and obnoxious, and more or less maintains the same, honking note throughout. Audrey is more restrained, both as a character and in Kunis’s performance, and I found that worked considerably better, to the point the film might have been fine with just her as the lead on her own. Although that might have made the obvious comparisons to Spy all the more apparent. As is, it lacks quite the same level of supporting presence given there by Miranda Hart and Jason Statham.

Surprisingly, it maybe works better as an action film than a comedy, despite Fogel’s almost non-existent work in the area previously. [Some second-unit magic being worked?] Drew and Sebastian do much of the heavy lifting, yet not all of it. In this area, there’s a great car chase, and I enjoyed the supporting role of Ivanna Sakhno as Russian gymnast-assassin Nadejda, as well as Gillian Anderson as Henshaw’s deadpan boss. Nadejda also has one of the drollest comic moments: ordered to assassinate “two dumb American women,” she’s confounded by discovering just how many dumb American women are present in Europe. The hitwoman ends up battling Morgan on a trapeze. Because Morgan went to circus school. As you do. Yeah, the script here will occasionally make you roll your eyes like that.

The end hints at some kind of franchise, which has the potential to be more fun than this origin story, the pair becoming fully-fledged agents on their own, rather than operating in the shadows and under the protection of their male counterparts. There’d be something to be said for a film featuring a pair of spies who simply pretend to be those “dumb American women” for cover purposes, while actually being smart and entirely competent. Such a film likely would need to feature someone else other than McKinnon, however. I’d be perfectly fine with that.

Dir: Susanna Fogel
Star: Mila Kunis, Kate McKinnon, Sam Heughan. Justin Theroux

The Apocalypse Door, by James D. McDonald

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

I recommended this novel mainly for fans of action-adventure/espionage fiction. It was also a bit of a head-scratcher for me –as well as for the main characters!– whether their adventure is actually in the realm of the supernatural or of science fiction. There are definitely elements that could be explained in terms of the latter. But we also have a scenario of supposed would-be supernatural intervention to usher in the end of the present world order, as described in the biblical book of Revelation (given the title, that’s hardly a spoiler), which is presumed to be a bad thing. (In books and films with that premise, it’s always presumed to be a bad thing).

A valid criticism that could be made of that whole sub-genre is that it’s theologically illiterate, regardless of whether you’re talking about Christian, Jewish, or Moslem theology. None of these faiths view God’s final action at the end of history, to deliver the righteous from evil and oppression and usher in an eternal order of true peace and justice, as a bad thing; and none of them imagine that it can be brought about or jump-started by demonic or human manipulation. A second valid criticism of this particular book, IMO, is that the integration of the supernatural and SF elements here is clunky and unconvincing.

Those criticisms aside, however, this is a very gripping, exciting read, that moves along at a rapid pace right out of the starting gate. We have two distinct narratives here, alternating: a main one set in the author’s present (2002), laid out in the numbered chapters, and an earlier one from 1980, interspersed between each chapter in short sections titled “In-Country.” How the one strand is related to the other isn’t clear until near the end, although one connection comes into focus sooner than that. This is a challenging structure for a novelist to pull off, and to my mind Macdonald does it very well; both strands held my interest, and the rapid cutting between the two made for a constant cliff-hanger effect. I was completely hooked for both of them early on.

“Peter Crossman” is our narrator for the main narrative (he indicates at the outset that this is an alias). He’s an ordained Roman Catholic priest –and also a high-ranking Knight Templar, for our premise here is that after they were slandered and suppressed in 1307, the Templars continued to exist underground, and still operate today as a secret agency for fighting evil. Much of their M.O. is similar to secular counterparts such as the CIA or MI6. (Macdonald’s Templars are thoroughly orthodox Roman Catholics –there’s no attempt here to make them into closeted heretics.) For the particular assignment he’s been given, he’s assisted by a younger colleague whose performance he’s to evaluate, and he also soon gets the unexpected assistance of Franciscan (Poor Clare) nun Sister Mary Magdalene.

But pistol-packing Maggie’s not your typical nun; she works for the Clare’s Special Action Executive Branch –a distaff equivalent of the Templars– as an assassin. Another quibble here, even if you’re prepared to accept the idea that the forces of good can permissibly employ extra-legal lethal force against evil, is that the Clare’s leadership don’t vet their contracts very well; Peter and Maggie (who’ve met before) encounter each other here when she’s sent to kill him. (That’s not much of a spoiler; we learn it in Chapter 2.) Obviously, when she finds out that her mark is one of the good guys, she doesn’t carry out the hit; but in her shoes, that would make me seriously aware that something’s amiss back at headquarters! But that aspect isn’t explored. The ensuing mission, though, proves to be challenging, lethally dangerous, and twisty as a pretzel.

Peter’s narrative voice is streetwise and heavily leavened with wisecracking humor, with the perspective of a tough veteran of too many years of rough-and-tumble action that’s exposed him to the depths of what evil humans are capable of; he doesn’t have any illusions about his fellow men or himself. But his faith rescues him from cynicism, and the reality of the Divine and the spiritual is taken seriously here. (Macdonald was raised as a Roman Catholic, I don’t know if he practices now, but he knows the nuances of Catholic belief and practice.) Good use is also made here of Templar history, and the history of their disreputable offshoot, the Teutonic Knights.

This is a very quick read, with little bad language (a few vulgarisms, one f-word, and no profanity) and minimal violence; what there is isn’t graphic or dwelt on. Three stars is my best estimate for the kick-butt quotient; by her own admission, Maggie’s killed people in her line of work, and when the good guys have to throw lead here, she throws it right along with the rest -–though when the smoke clears and the bodies are counted, as in real life, it may not be easy or worthwhile to figure out who shot who. The one sex scene in the 1980 narrative isn’t very explicit, and occupies three short sentences. (Peter finds Maggie sexy, as most males would, in holy orders or not; but that’s just a morally neutral quality she happens to have, and both she and he take their celibacy vows seriously.) Our hero and heroine aren’t plaster saints, but unlike some reviewers, I didn’t find either of them “blasphemous” nor bad representatives of their faith.

This is a stand-alone novel, a fact that has pluses and minuses; I’m not looking to get sucked into another series, but I actually wouldn’t mind following Peter and Maggie as series characters! (The author has penned some Peter Crossman short stories, which I might look into.)

Author: James D. Macdonald
Publisher: Tor, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

American Terrorist by Wesley Robert Lowe

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Literary rating: ★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

This was a disappointment, and a real chore to get through. If it had been a film, I’d have been reduced to surfing Facebook distractedly on my phone for the majority of its running time. Unfortunately, you don’t get to leave a book on in the background. It’s a stylistic and literary mess, throwing at the reader Canadian Special Forces heroine Rayna Tan, without providing any real background or character building beyond an incident in the Middle East. It then randomly switches around between her, a brother/sister pair of Islamic terrorists, Ahmed and Fatima, and their startlingly incompetent American recruits, who appeared to have strayed in from Four Lions. Throw in some unsubtle politicizing – even if I don’t necessarily disagree with the ideas expressed, it’s not what I want to read in my fiction – and it feels more like a half-finished collection of ideas than a coherent novel.

For example, after quitting the military, Tan goes to work for a group called Fidelitas Capital. Their cover is that they’re a money management company with no qualms – except, when they discover evidence of wrongdoing, they also target the customers with their in-house super-secret group of former soldiers. It would be putting it mildly to say this raises more questions than it answers. Another problem, is that the “American Muslim Militia” whom Rayna and her pals are hunting are, as noted above, pretty crap as terrorists go, and likely pose a danger to themselves, more than any innocent bystanders in the USA. For comparison, the book briefly describes an attack by another group, who blow the top third off the Washington Monument using a fleet of twenty explosive-laden drones. Now, that’s what I call a terror attack. Why wasn’t the book about them?

I get that the author is trying to spin his narrative out of several threads, depicting both the terrorists and those who’re hunting them. Yet it’s all remarkably bitty, and lacking in any flow at all, such as when Rayna and her colleagues are suddenly the targets for some Japanese assassins. This seems to have strayed in from another book entirely, coming out of nowhere and going nowhere either. It all builds to a climax at Seattle’s Safeco Field, which sounded interesting because it’s a baseball park I visited last summer. As depicted here, I completely failed to recognize it. Lowe is no more adept at creating a sense of place, than he is at creating credible or interesting characters. I can also assure him that those who rent suites at a ballpark are not immune from all security searches, as is claimed.

According to the author, Rayna is “Smart—IQ off the charts. Lethal—more kills than Chris Kyle. Black belt martial artist. She’s sexy, vulnerable and complicated.” There are worthy aims. Shame there’s precious thin evidence of these traits to be found in this novel.

Author: Wesley Robert Lowe
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available from Amazon only as an e-book.
Book 1 of 2 (plus a prequel) in The Rayna Tan Action Thrillers series