Moscow Exile

December 1, 2022

In The Lock-Up, Booker Prize winner Banville returns to 1950s Dublin, where pathologist Dr. Quirke and DI St. John Strafford are investigating the murder of a young history scholar when her sister points them to a powerful German family newly arrived in town after World War II (100,000-copy first printing). In Barclay's The Lie Maker, struggling author Jack is offered big money to write false histories for people in the witness protection program and now has the means to find his father, who vanished into the program when Jack was just a child (100,000-copy first printing). Bentley's Tom Clancy Flash Point gives Jack Ryan Jr. a terrorist plot to crack, but it turns out to be part of a larger, grimmer scheme. On the island paradise of Prospera, residents live contentedly until they're warned by a monitor embedded in their forearms that it's time for renewal and board the ferry for the Nursery, but The Ferryman (and some island resisters) begin to suspect that all is not as benevolent as it seems; a stand-alone from Cronin, seven years after he wrapped up his "Passage" series. With Bad, Bad Seymour Brown, New York Times best-selling author Isaacs brings back former FBI agent Corie Geller and her father, a retired NYPD cop, who must solve a cold case to prevent the murder of the crime's only survivor--unassuming professor April Brown, whose father laundered money for the Russian mob. Lawton's Moscow Exile moves from 1950s Washington, DC, where British-born socialite Charlotte has a pack of secrets to pass on to old flame Charlie Leigh Hunt at the British embassy, and 1969, with Joe Wilderness trapped behind the Iron Curtain and the stories converging in Berlin. Maden's Untitled new Cussler adventure brings back Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon for more fun and games. In Nakamura's latest, two detectives investigate the murder of The Rope Artist--an instructor in kinbaku, a form of rope bondage with both spiritual and sexual overtones--with Togashi finding himself pulled toward his own unorthodox desires and straight-arrow colleague Hayama seeking the truth in a case that's getting out of control. In The 23rd Midnight, Patterson and Paetro team up for another visit with the Women's Murder Club, as someone copycats the methods of a serial killer jailed by Det. Lindsay Boxer and profiled in a best seller by reporter Cindy Thomas, both women's murder clubbers. In multi-award-finalist Pochada's Sing Her Down, the imprisoned Diosmary Sandoval suspects that cellmate Florence "Florida" Baum isn't the innocent victim she claims to be and hounds her relentlessly when both are unexpectedly released (100,000-copy first printing). National Book Award finalist Powers (The Yellow Birds) draws A Line in the Sand with his first thriller, about former Iraqi interpreter Arman Bajalan, working at the Sea Breeze Motel in Norfolk, VA, after having barely survived the assassination attempt that killed his wife and child, who discovers a dead body on the beach (60,000-copy first printing). When her roommate is killed at the first party they throw at their Baltimore-area apartment, Morgan learns that she was the intended victim of the assailant, who steals each target's Identity and then kills her; a million-copy first printing for Roberts. After more than four decades of thrillers reflecting Soviet/Russian events, Smith drops longtime protagonist Arkady Renko in Independence Square in Kyiv, where Renko has gone to find the anti-Putin daughter of an acquaintance. Meanwhile, Renko discovers that he has Parkinson's Disease, as does Smith.

Copyright 2022...

February 6, 2023
Lawton’s disappointing fourth Joe Wilderness novel opens in 1969 on the Glienicke Bridge (aka the bridge of spies) that connected East and West Berlin during the Cold War, but the payoff for that scene, in which British agents have a covert midnight rendezvous with Russians who never show, comes late in the book. The first half meanders through the overlong backstories of Charlotte Mawer-Churchill, an unpleasant social-climber, and the louche Charlie Leigh-Hunt. Both are British; both end up in Washington, D.C., during and after WWII; and both spy for Russia—though why they turned against their country is never satisfactorily explained. Lawton draws on his deep knowledge of the geopolitical and social history of the era, but there’s too little of the former and too much of the latter. More seriously, there’s barely a whiff of suspense or danger until Joe, an MI6 agent, appears halfway through, and readers will have trouble connecting the dots between Charlotte, Charlie, and Joe in a convoluted plot that leads to Joe being shot and trapped in Russia. This one’s for die-hard fans only. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. (U.K.).

Starred review from February 15, 2023
Lawton brings the band back together for another virtuoso performance in what continues to be an espionage series of uncommon depth and breadth. London copper turned diplomat Frederick Troy and the protean figure of Joe Wilderness--cat burglar, black marketeer, unconventional spy--share the stage here, along with other regular players in the company, but it is two new characters who steal the show. Charlie Leigh-Hunt is at the center; he's not a spy out of commitment to a cause, just an amiable sort of crook always looking to work ""some sort of fiddle,"" and if that fiddle turns out to be toiling as a ""B-side"" double agent in the age of the A-list traitors--Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, et al.--so be it. That's before Charlie is transferred to Washington (""caught in the slipstream of the shitstorm that was Burgess"") and runs into a society hostess called Coky, who also has a double life and who complicates Charlie's fiddle no end. Lawton jumps back and forth between WWII and the late 1960s, tracking the machinations of Charlie, Coky, Troy, and Wilderness (languishing in a KGB prison after a ""bridge of spies"" exchange gone wrong). Familiarity with the previous cavortings of this bent band of brothers and sisters certainly helps but isn't necessary; Lawton infuses the entire troupe with sparkling life, using crackling dialogue and rapier wit to bring a Technicolor sheen to the moral ambiguity of the Cold War.

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