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Espionage

Review

Second Shot

by Henrietta Thornton

DC resident Helen Warwick is ready for the quiet life now that she’s retired. Her frequent, moments-notice travel as a state-department trade specialist all but ended her marriage, and her grown children have had it, too. What they don’t know is that Helen (like author Dees) was actually a CIA operative, and all those times she was absent were because she was involved in “wet work”—killings—rather than diplomacy.

Helen is determined to put it all right and win her family back. But when she arrives at her son’s house to babysit his dog, her plan goes up in gun smoke as the windows are shot in and, oops!, she’s forced to kill intruders who themselves seem like trained killers. The unique habitat that is DC comes to life here as Helen tries to figure out who’s after her, or who else the killers may have been targeting—perhaps there’s another family member with a clandestine background?

At the same time, she’s drawn into investigating a separate case that her lawyer-son asks for her smarts on—that of the DaVinci killer, who emulates artworks with the bodies he sadistically kills (there is one VERY gory scene here). The pages fly by as Helen dashes through family spats and deadly maneuvers toward and away from killers, while enduring realistic turmoil regarding her exasperated family.

Look forward to more from this engaging, still-got-it character! This, the first in a series, ends on a cliffhanger; it will also be a TV series starring Sharon Stone.

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Review

Trouble

by Henrietta Thornton

Hella Mauzer, 29, is both very much of Finland—she’s a dour private investigator who seems made from her country’s six-months of darkness —but completely not what her fellow 1950s Finns want her to be. Put flowers under your pillow on midsummer night and you’ll dream of your future fiancé, they hint, with marriage and motherhood then all but guaranteed. Hella wants none of it. She keeps both her ex-boyfriend, who can’t grasp that things are over, and her new, interested neighbor at arm’s length while immersed in two investigations. One is a favor to her father’s former secret-police colleague: a background check on the prospective head of Helsinki’s homicide squad. The other is more personal. Hella is desperate to find out who killed her parents, sister, and nephew, all of whom died when hit by a truck when Hella was a teen. Getting the courage to read the police file on her family’s deaths is a big step, and one that immediately leads her to suspect that there was much more to the tragedy than an accident. The background check is far from straightforward either, adding up to a tale that brings to mind Game of Thrones, with all that story’s evil and power-hungry machinations. If Scandinavian mysteries are your thing, try this, as well as Ann-Helén Laestadius’s Stolen, and Joachim B. Schmidt’s Kalman for great stories that take place outside the more common urban settings in Sweden and Denmark.

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Review

Black Wolf

by Henrietta Thornton

This is an espionage story with a difference, featuring not a dashing ladies’ man but a young CIA operative, Melvina Donleavy, who knows her bureaucracy and sticks to it, offering an interesting look at modern-day tradecraft. Mel appears to her CIA colleagues to have no special skills, but when she’s in danger, top levels of government get involved. Readers are in on the picture, learning from the get-go that Mel has lifelong recall of every face she sees. It freaked out a middle-school crush when she mentioned having seen him at a sports event that had thousands in attendance, but when she’s sent to Byelorussia in 1990 to see if particular Iranian nuclear scientists can be spotted it’s a handy talent indeed. Mel and her colleagues are undercover, the others posing as accountants who are sent ahead of a U.S. donation to make sure none of it is earmarked for nuclear activity, she as their secretary. The stultifying Soviet observation machine moves into place, with the spies watched everywhere they go and a rigid air of we-know-you’re-spies-and-we-know-that-you-know-we-know coming off their hosts in waves. The group soon hears that a serial killer, the Svisloch Dushitel, or Svisloch Strangler, is at work in Minsk, but as its illegal to even mention the crime of serial killing, Mel has her work cut out to get to the bottom of it. Espionage, a love story, and murder mystery, all by a Department of Defense contractor assigned to the former Soviet Union in the ‘90s? Yes, please.

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Review

The Poison Machine

by Henrietta Thornton

When Lloyd first introduced Harry Hunt in The Bloodless Boy (a firstClue starred review and a New York Times “Best New Historical Novel of 2021”), the 17th-century physicist was Robert Hooke’s assistant and the investigator of the gruesome murders of London boys. Here Hunt’s fortunes are doing both worse and better. On the glum side, we see his humiliating failure to replace Hooke as Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, with Lloyd’s almost-tactile picture of academic politicking giving the book a strangely modern feel. Hunt still finds prestigious work though: when the skeleton of a dwarf is found, Queen Catherine requests Hunt as investigator. Captain Jeffrey Hudson was “her” dwarf, and Hunt is tasked with finding out both who killed him and who the still-living man is who claims to be Hudson but is taller. The physicist’s urgent work this time (“the body will not keepe”) takes him far from the Thames shores he clung to in The Bloodless Boy. France is a major setting in the book and a final lengthy and very exciting scene takes us to the Queen’s Catholic Consult, where restrictions against the much-loathed group will be discussed. Lloyd again succeeds in creating an immersive look at the various layers of life his hero encounters, one that draws enough on real events to treat readers to intriguing history, but that also adds just the right fictional elements to keep the plot rich. Another winner

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Review

The Handler

by Henrietta Thornton

Meredith Morris-Dale used to work with her husband, John. Now they’re divorced and moving on, their daughter grown and out on her own and John retired and pursing his passion as an artist. Meredith’s job needs John for one last gig, though. That wouldn’t be too unusual except that the task is for him to re-up in the CIA and re-establish contact with a scientist who’s sabotaging Iran’s effort to build a nuclear bomb. John was suspended from “the company” for an operation that went wrong, the traumatic details of which are slowly revealed; he also doesn’t want back in, but Cerberus, as the Iranian scientist is known to the CIA, won’t deal with anyone else. Soon John’s on a perilous journey to find Cerberus, a journey on which he’s pursued by other global bad guys who are using him to pin down details of the international spy network and move up in the superpower ranks. From the opening, this is like the best kind of action movie—fast moving, smart subplots, hair-raising escapes from death. Adding to the action is John’s decency toward the good people he meets and ruthlessness with all the rest. If you’ve ever wondered what a much scruffier James Bond would be like, this is the book for you.

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Review

Geiger

by Henrietta Thornton

Talk about jumping right into the thick of the story. As Skördeman’s debut opens, a wife says goodbye to her visiting daughters and grandchildren, picks up the phone, and, hearing just the word Geiger, shoots her husband in the head. We have no idea why she would do this nor where she’s headed after immediately going on the run, and what unfolds is more bizarre than we could have imagined. It’s also much weirder than the Swedish public ever thought could happen to the victim, a beloved TV presenter and jolly father figure known as Uncle Stellan. Espionage involving Sweden’s relationship with East Germany during the Cold War and after, and the relationship between Uncle Stellan’s spoiled, mean daughters and their childhood friend and bullying target Sara—now a police officer who elbows her way into the investigation—are highlights of this tale, as are the frequent head-spinning twists. Potential readers should note that child sexual abuse is a major plotline here. For fans of Elizabeth Elo’s Finding Katarina M., which also has echoes of a communist regime.

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Review

The Lightning Rod

by Henrietta Thornton

Meltzer, Brad. The Lightning Rod (A Zig and Nola Novel #2). March 2022. 432p. William Morrow.
The intriguing setting here is life around Dover Air Force Base’s mortuary, where fallen soldiers are prepared for burial. In the opening title in this series, Escape Artist, Dover mortician “Zig” Zigarowski helped the Army’s Artist-in-Residence, Nola Brown, who was on the run. Now, Nola, a master at sabotaging the military’s plans for her, clandestinely attends a funeral at Dover, and the action revs back up. Meltzer’s thrilling plot veers from flashbacks to Nola’s dangerous childhood to glimpses inside the military’s orchestration of public knowledge about threats to our lives. Meltzer’s talent for detail makes even idle moments leap to life. While Nola waits for a computer program to load, a gust of wind rolls a beer can into a shopping cart that’s on its side; a nurse who encountered Nola has a necklace with a charm for each of her children, all boys. These mundane moments also highlight the casual viciousness that faces characters at every turn. Personalities, too, offer extreme contrasts: Zig prides himself on having done a loving job with the care of dead soldiers, while his foes care for nobody and stop at nothing to win. Fans of military thrillers should clear a weekend for this; it’s gripping.

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Review

The Bloodless Boy

by Henrietta Thornton

“Life owns a way of disappointing most,” notes a character in Lloyd’s meticulously written and researched debut, in which murder is hot on the heels of the disappointments. One of the killings is the goriest I’ve ever read: brace yourself for a man having his Adam’s apple bitten out, with the gruesome fruit spat out to roll across the floor. And that’s only a minor character, one of those enmeshed in the politics swirling through London’s grimy, cold winter of 1678, when paranoia about Catholic plots to kill the King and turn the populace toward popery abounds. A light in the gloom is real-life polymath Robert Hooke, who leaves his elaboratory experiments to investigate the murder of the book’s titular boy. The child is found with his blood entirely removed, dates written beside various wounds on his body, and a coded message left on his chest. Once Hooke’s newly invented means of creating a vacuum in a jar is employed to preserve the body, the sleuthing is afoot. London of the day is almost its own character here, with Lloyd shoving readers into the chill, stink, and fear for a wonderfully atmospheric time. Try this if you enjoyed Cathedral of the Sea by Ildefonso Falcones, which illuminates the same era, but in Barcelona

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Review

Our American Friend

by Henrietta Thornton

Journalist Sofie Morse is puzzled when U.S. First Lady Lara Caine, who at first appears to resemble Melania Trump—Eastern-European former model, cold demeanor, revolting husband—asks Sofie to write her biography. Sofie grows more bemused when interviews for the book reveal intimate details of Lara’s shocking history, a backstory that the president’s devotees won’t like at all. The tale woven by the First Lady is both a romance and a political drama that takes readers from Moscow to Paris and then New York, as Lara grows from dutiful Russian child to rebellious teenager, becoming forever changed by powerful love with a Soviet resistor while the regime he loathes crumbles. In the present day, Sofie and her husband are dragged into peril themselves as the interviews play out, with Lara’s family in the past and Sofie’s in the present embodying Churchill’s description of Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” After Pitoniak’s (Necessary People, 2019) absorbing, immersive thriller, readers who enjoyed the romantic side of the work should try Paullina Simons’s The Girl in Times Square, while those who liked the dysfunctional Russian family aspect should be steered toward Zhanna Slor’s At the End of the World, Turn Left.

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