I don’t mean this to sound melancholy, but I haven’t spoken to my father since he died. I know a lot of people do that with their dead, but it’s not in me. He’s not there anymore—definitionally—and it feels like cheating to make him up as I would a fictional character. Too easy, too narcissistic, too small, and that last in particular. However well I knew him, the homunculus version I still carry around in memory is barely a single leaf from the text. I’m left with myself: the person created by my parents and by my own continuing encounter with the world, first with them and now without. I am the only ghost of them I will ever know.
Which made this book something like a benign, elective haunting. I stood over George Smiley’s world and built it anew: his friendships, his conviction, his disastrous yet loving marriage. I let the differences between myself and my dad—which sons and fathers insist upon, but which, despite very real variations and radically different lives and choices, are only ever part of the story—fade away. I know the rhythm of his voice. I know he distrusted Latin and favored German; that he admired Conan Doyle, as I do, and Wodehouse and Dickens. I can quote his occasional misquotations from his favorite stories. I know him, to the extent that any human being knows another.
That said, I’ve spent my professional life, for good and sufficient reason, drawing a clear line between his work and mine, and been so successful in doing so that people are still startled to find out we’re related. In writing Karla’s Choice, I let that piece of self-protection go and turned my face toward the Smiley novels as I might toward any other fictional universe I was working with. Writing is instinct, not cognition. You take an idea and make it into words, but first you have to taste it. In Gnomon, the flavor was layered mystery, every line a puzzle of itself; in Titanium Noir, the stark, bone-dry irony of crime in a city where billionaires grow physically immense in a mirror of their consumption. In Smiley’s world, you have to drink deep to know what you’re getting, because even as every character springs to life from a cursory sketch, almost everything is left intentionally blank: People only say what they mean when they’re confident they will be misunderstood; truth is what they all want and dare not give. The core of my father’s writing is the lie—not that everything is deceptive, but that anything could be, and yet we believe in one round, unhappy fellow in glasses to show us that it is possible to know the truth, and even to do something worth doing with it.
The trick, I think, to my father’s complex, shadowy novels, is very simple. You have to let the writer be exposed, and give voice to your fear, your grief, your love—and, in the end, to the thing every writer has and doesn’t dare admit: your hope.
Photo of Nick Harkaway by Nadav Kander.
How Nick Harkaway, son of the late John le Carré, channeled his father’s voice to write a new George Smiley novel.
It’s probably manageable if the leader of the free world goes off the deep end, or if the continent that drives the world’s economy loses its collective mind . . . unless both things happen at the same time. In 1914, at the beginning of Robert Harris’ latest novel, Precipice, the stars align to create a war so horrific in its size and scope that it would later (wrongly, as it turned out) be called “the war to end all wars.” Meanwhile, British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith has fallen head over heels for Venetia Stanley, an aristocrat 35 years his junior.
Did we mention he is married?
It should be also said at this juncture that, while Precipice is a work of fiction, virtually all of the characters are real, as is the correspondence from the PM to his inamorata. In fact, the letters (which she saved) provide some of the only historical insight into meetings that determined Britain’s decision to involve itself in the continental conflagration. The lone fictional character, a Scotland Yard Special Branch officer named Paul Deemer, has been tasked with monitoring what, if any, secrets are being spilled in the lovebirds’ copious correspondence (Asquith wrote to Venetia as many as three times a day).
Harris steers the reader through the slalom course of this ill-fated love story, set against the backdrop of the war’s more consequential casualties. His supporting cast, ripped right out of the society pages, includes the ruthlessly ambitious David Lloyd George, who would succeed Asquith as PM; the poet Rupert Brooke, who is enamored of Asquith’s daughter; Winston Churchill, whose hubris led to disaster at Gallipoli; and King Edward VII, who had somewhat scandalously anointed Asquith as PM in Biarritz, France, rather than on British soil.
Harris’ ear for language is keen, capturing both Britain’s elite and hoi polloi with effortless grace. Of course, he is aided by Asquith’s actual words, quoted from one of the avalanche of love letters: “Do you know how much I love you? No? Just try to multiply the stars by the sands.” Certainly more poetic than Charles’ phone calls to Camilla, though every bit as moonstruck.
Despite the fact that anyone acquainted with modern British history already knows the outcome of the story (spoiler alert: we won the war), Harris’ skill keeps the action taut and the reader focused. And the novel echoes a much older bit of classical English political fiction: As Shakespeare said, the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.
Robert Harris’ Precipice dramatizes a real-life scandal: On the eve of World War I, the British prime minister engaged in a national security-jeopardizing love affair.
It seems like an impossible task to resurrect a beloved character, much less to do so in the voice of the most iconic espionage thriller writer after Ian Fleming. But in Karla’s Choice, author Nick Harkaway, son of the late John le Carré, manages to accomplish both, adding more nuance to the mythos of his father’s seemingly inimitable George Smiley.
Karla’s Choice takes place in 1963, shortly after the events of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and British intelligence officer Smiley is questioning his place in “the Circus”: le Carré’s nickname for Britain’s MI6. Smiley’s reeling from the recent death of his colleague, Alec Leamas, and has become cynical after discovering his home country employing the same morally gray strategies of their Communist enemies.
Smiley is fully intent on retiring when a Soviet hitman defects, turning himself in to a young Hungarian emigre, Szusanna. He soon finds himself swallowed back into the fold of espionage, first agreeing only to interview Szusanna and the defector, but eventually traveling back to Berlin, the site of his recent trauma. As he excavates Soviet spy networks and counterintelligence plots, Smiley learns more about his nemesis, an agent named Karla who will feature heavily in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Smiley is an unlikely spy. Unassuming, a little frumpy and rather forgettable, his strength is his ability to blend in; he is a “Gray Man” in a genre of action heroes. He’s also a man conflicted about his country’s actions in a new type of war, where violence is carried out on a faraway stage. Despite being set in the 1960s, Smiley’s concerns will resonate with readers who are familiar with today’s geopolitical conflicts.
Karla’s Choice may be best suited for fans of le Carré or vintage espionage thrillers: George’s world is a cerebral one—a chess game with a barely known enemy—not one of action or explosions. Harkaway mimics the tone of le Carré’s novels, which after 80 years may feel opaque and ponderous to newcomers.
However, Harkaway also does his late father justice in capturing Smiley’s subtlety and his shrewd ability to read the people around him. This, and the focus on the history of his nemesis, Karla, adds depth to the existing Smiley narrative, making Karla’s Choice a worthy and elevated addition to le Carré’s series.
In Karla’s Choice, author Nick Harkaway ably updates his father’s iconic George Smiley novels while lovingly preserving the tone and mood of the original novels.
In David McCloskey’s latest thriller, The Seventh Floor, the CIA team dedicated to eradicating moles is hilariously referred to as the “Dermatologists.” (I will never be able to unthink that.) There is no gentle introduction in this book, no setting of scene, no lulling the reader into a false sense of security. By the end of page six, a Russian agent is dead, having bitten down on his poison-filled Montblanc pen scant seconds before a team breaks into his office. A bit later, American agent Sam Joseph hangs upside down in a Russian black-ops site, pleading ignorance to a group of unbelieving interrogators. The heart of the matter seems to be that there is an extremely high-placed Russian mole in the CIA, with one team of facilitators dedicated to seeing that said mole remains securely in place, and a second team equally dedicated to ferreting them out. But this is the world of espionage, after all, and alliances are fluid at best and downright lethal at worst, with no handy brochure that lists true affiliations. The two main characters are Sam and Artemis Procter, the latter a no-nonsense CIA operational chief who irritates most people simply by walking into a room. Together, these two must navigate the minefields and expose the mole, or very likely die in the attempt. The Seventh Floor is not really about these heroes as much as it is about the process of flushing out a traitor, but it proves remarkably difficult to put down either way. PS, McCloskey knows whereof he speaks: He is a former CIA analyst who delivered classified briefings to congressional oversight committees, and he regularly wrote for the President’s Daily Brief, the top secret intelligence summary that appears on the desk in the Oval Office every morning. It shows.
Rough Pages
Lev AC Rosen’s Rough Pages is the third installment in his historical mystery series featuring gay detective Evander “Andy” Mills, a former San Francisco police officer who was outed and fired, and has now launched a private investigation firm serving the queer community in the City by the Bay. These postwar noir novels are set in the 1950s, when gay bashing was not only tolerated, but encouraged, even—or especially—by those sworn to “protect and serve.” Andy is drawn into a case involving the disappearance of Howard Salzberger, a bookstore owner who supplies a select clientele with queer books by subscription, and who may have run afoul of postal regulations prohibiting the distribution of “obscene materials.” At the center of the case is Howard’s missing notebook, which lists his subscribers: If the government gets hold of that, there will be hell to pay. The Mafia is also interested in obtaining the notebook, and among the mobsters, there is perhaps even less tolerance of queerness than there is by the government or general public. Rosen’s Evander Mills books are unsettling to read; like Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series, they unflinchingly depict historical—and in some ways, ongoing—discrimination against minorities. And like Mosley, Rosen takes his shots at the establishment by simply telling the day-to-day stories of marginalized people, the people who those in power tried to shove off into the shadows, but who persisted in living vibrant lives all the same.
Death by Misadventure
To begin with, a small confession: While reading Tasha Alexander’s latest Lady Emily mystery, Death by Misadventure, I happened upon the word “snarky.” As her novels are written in the vernacular of the time (in this case, 1906), “snarky” seemed to me to be very out of place. So I Googled the word, only to discover that its first recorded usage was in the year (wait for it . . .) 1906. I should have known better than to doubt Alexander. Lady Emily relates the story in the first person: A high-society murder takes place in the shadow of Neuschwanstein Castle, a killing that has roots dating back a generation, to the days of the castle’s creator, Bavaria’s Mad King Ludwig. Death by Misadventure is an Agatha Christie-esque locked-room mystery, with the victim and the cast of potential perpetrators snowbound after an Alpine storm renders the roads impassable. Lady Emily will investigate the murder, as she has done in the 17 previous novels; she easily rivals Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote in terms of acquaintances lost to untimely and violent demise. As is typically the case with locked-room mysteries, there are secrets and motives galore, but good luck figuring out “whodunit” before the big reveal. I certainly did not.
★ The Drowned
In the 1950s, in a field adjacent to the rocky Irish coast, a Mercedes SL sits idling. The driver’s door is open, but no driver is in sight. A local outcast happens upon the car while walking his dog, and is in turn happened upon by the car owner’s distraught husband, who cries out that his wife has thrown herself into the sea. Thus begins John Banville’s atmospheric mystery novel The Drowned. The local constable, a lout and a drunkard with no love for the aforementioned outcast, is first to investigate, but the situation requires an altogether more delicate and thorough touch. So Detective Inspector St. John (pronounced “sin-jun”) Strafford is called in from Dublin to preside over the case. And where Strafford goes, it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that his colleague/adversary, pathologist and medical examiner Quirke, will not be far behind. As the investigation moves forward, Stafford and Quirke expose some troubling connections to an earlier case, a case that everyone thought had been solved, but now seems to have a few loose threads that require pulling. This is a book that deserves to be read slowly, not simply for the plotting and the characters (which are quite good in their own right), but for the sheer richness of the prose. The Drowned is genre fiction that rises to the level of full-on, capital L literature.
Lev AC Rosen’s critically acclaimed series has another win, plus new reads from Tasha Alexander and John Bancroft in this month’s Whodunit column.
The idea for You Will Never Be Me came in two parts: The first was that I knew I wanted to write this big twist ever since I watched a certain sci-fi show on HBO years ago. Seeing a similar twist implemented so beautifully in that show completely blew my mind and I knew I had to do something with a similar format. It had to be used differently, and it couldn’t possibly be sci-fi since I am not very scientifically inclined, so I let the idea percolate in the back of my mind for the next three years or so, while I worked on other books.
“One day, there is nothing left of you that you haven’t already posted to TikTok.”
Then I read an article about a husband who was leaving his wife because of “aesthetics.” At first, it sounded so callous; what a reason to leave your spouse! But then I read the article. The wife in question was a mom-fluencer, and due to the demands of her job, everything in their lives had to fit a certain aesthetic. By now, we all know the aesthetic I speak of: A beautiful, bright, airy house that is decorated in all neutral shades; a perfectly photogenic family that wears matchy-matchy outfits; and none of the usual clutter that one would expect from a family with small children.
This husband spoke of how he bought a plastic pink castle because their young daughter had been begging for one, and it upset his wife so much because it “ruined” the aesthetic of the neutral tones of their house. Only wooden Nordic toys allowed, otherwise the colors would clash and the photos and videos would be ruined.
Reading the article, I couldn’t help feeling bad for both the husband and the wife. I empathized with the husband, because it sounded like he was stuck in a nightmare he never asked for; when they got married, his wife wasn’t a mom-fluencer yet. But I also felt bad for the wife, who sounded extremely stressed out, trying to run what was basically a business that demanded her time 24/7. That’s the problem with being a social media influencer—unlike being a celebrity, there is no off switch, no clear boundaries. You gain followers by sharing bits and pieces of your life, and the drive for #authenticity is so fierce that you end up carving out more and more pieces to share online until you find that one day, there is nothing left of you that you haven’t already posted to TikTok.
I knew then that I had to marry these two pieces of inspiration to each other. It was the perfect match, this twist I’d been saving paired up with a world of influencers who are really f*cking stressed out. My hope with this book is not only to show the ways that social media drives us to impossible lengths to curate our lives, but also to show that at the end of the day, we are products of capitalism. Oh, and of course, as always, I aim to entertain along the way.
Photo of Jesse Q. Sutanto by Michael Hart.
The author homes in on the anxiety beneath the aesthetics in her latest thriller, You Will Never Be Me.
Caroline Ixta doesn’t shy away from representing Oakland’s complexities—its vast socioeconomic inequalities, its legacy of racial tensions, its rich but complicated Mexican American community—in clear-eyed ...
The Seventh Veil of Salome is another triumph from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a page-turning historical drama with mythic overtones that will please readers of her realistic ...
Cristina Henriquez’s polyvocal novel is a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. It’s easy to imagine, in these ...
In You Will Never Be Me, Jesse Q. Sutanto not only gives readers a voyeuristic glimpse into the lives of mom-fluencers, she pulls off a twist sure to surprise even veteran thriller readers.
Meredith Lee and Aspen Palmer were once friends, but the cutthroat world of influencing has driven them to frenemy status. When they met, Meredith’s career as a beauty and fashion influencer was on the rise, but after Aspen had children, she pivoted into the mom-fluencer sphere and skyrocketed to fame. Now Aspen and her perfect home, husband and kids are driving Meredith insane with jealousy. She’s been trying to break into mom-influencing with her own baby, but she can’t quite crack it, and Aspen’s easy-breezy success is pushing her to the edge. When Meredith snags an iPad from Aspen, giving her access to all of Aspen’s accounts, she can’t resist wreaking havoc on Aspen’s carefully cultivated internet presence.
When Aspen’s immaculately scheduled and sanitized life begins to fall apart due to Meredith’s meddling (surreptitiously rescheduled meetings, declined sponsorship opportunities, etc.), she starts to question her own sanity. But what Meredith doesn’t realize is that Aspen can only be pushed so far. Her children are tired of playing a role for social media, her husband is distant and resentful of her success, but she can’t quit her online persona because of the six-figure income it provides.
Sutanto pulls back the curtain on a culture that is as intriguing as it is narcissistic. Meredith and Aspen both have to maintain a perfectly curated image in order to monetize their online presences, but those images are far from reality. The dissonance between the real world of crying children, messy homes and diaper blowouts and the aesthetic both women present online is impossible to resolve, and this anxiety, so vividly conjured by Sutanto, is clearly enough to drive Aspen and Meredith to unimaginable acts.
You Will Never Be Me’s truly twisty, unexpected plot will hook readers, even those who don’t find either of its main characters particularly likable—it hardly matters, as both are absolutely fascinating. The eventual confrontation between Meredith and Aspen is shocking and brilliantly executed, the crowning achievement of this truly unforgettable read.
Jesse Q. Sutanto pulls back the curtain on the world of mom-fluencers in her unforgettable, brilliantly executed thriller You Will Never Be Me.
A woman is standing beside me at the swings. I can see the exact expression on her face; I can hear her voice as she chats with her son. Her name is Tessa, and she isn’t real.
Like all readers, I’m familiar with the way reality and fiction can blur together. I remember visiting Edinburgh, Scotland, and walking around feeling absolutely giddy at being surrounded by, basically, characters from Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series. I sometimes find myself wondering about Rachel, from Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident, the way I might if we’d been friends in college. And I find it easy to forget that Karamat Lone, from Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, is not an actual British politician. I’m used to being haunted by characters, and Tessa has been a very stubborn ghost.
“It’s still hard for me to believe that Tessa doesn’t exist, in some corner of Dublin, just out of sight.”
I first wrote about Tessa and her sister, Marian, in Northern Spy. After turning in the book, I noticed that Tessa’s story kept spinning in my head. Her relationships with her family, her former handler and the IRA kept shifting with new complications and revelations. I wanted to write them all down, and I loved returning to her voice in Trust Her.
As a reader, I appreciate when authors return to characters or settings. I love the deep familiarity of a duology or trilogy or a long series, the heft that comes from sticking with a detective across 10 or 20 books, as a career shifts, relationships fall apart or come together, children grow. I’m fascinated by Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, and the way each installment twists the kaleidoscope, revealing a different view of past events. That sort of casting back offers so much energy for a plot. I don’t outline my books, which means spending a lot of time wondering if what I’m writing will make any sense. There is a big twist near the end of Trust Her. When I checked back in Northern Spy, all of the clues were in place, like I’d been writing toward that moment all along.
I wanted Trust Her to echo with Northern Spy, but also to be its own complete story, with its own specific landscape. For research, I spent time in Dublin wandering around Tessa’s neighborhood, walking up and down her road in Ranelagh, hearing the Luas light-rail trams go past behind her back garden. I had breakfast at The Fumbally, a restaurant Tessa visits in The Liberties. I browsed the shelves in Hodges Figgis, her favorite bookshop, and sat on the top deck of the bus she takes home from work. I rode another bus out of the city towards the Dublin Mountains, looking out at the snow on the rooftops after a rare winter storm. Following Tessa has brought me to places I’d never have seen otherwise. It brought me into the politicians’ canteen hidden inside the Irish Parliament, and, earlier, into a production booth at the BBC during a live radio broadcast.
It’s still hard for me to believe that Tessa doesn’t exist, in some corner of Dublin, just out of sight. Maybe she does, and I’m the one who has been haunting her.
Photo of Flynn Berry by Sylvie Rosokoff.
Why Flynn Berry wrote Trust Her, a surprise sequel to her 2021 bestselling suspense novel, Northern Spy.
When Daniel Lohr’s and Leah Auerbach’s eyes meet as they wait to board the SS Raffaello, their connection is instant and electric. The year is 1939, and they’ve both booked first-class passage on a weekslong journey from Trieste, Italy, to Shanghai. But while the cruise liner is massive in size and gorgeous in design, its opulence stands in sharp contrast to what the vessel really is to Daniel, Leah and their fellow Jewish passengers: a veritable lifeboat carrying them away from the horrors of Nazism in Europe to the great unknown (at least, for them) of the Far East.
In his fascinating and elegantly written new crime thriller, Shanghai, Joseph Kanon once again whisks readers back to World War II—as he did in previous bestselling novels including Alibi, The Good German and Leaving Berlin—immersing them in a pivotal time and place he describes as a “wonderful open window” offering the possibility of survival for those hoping to make a new start even as the world they knew crumbled around them.
“I thought, what would be more embarrassing than a publisher who can’t write? So I never told anybody that I was doing it . . .”
As the author explains in a call with BookPage from the upper Manhattan home he shares with his wife, “for about a year, Shanghai was the one place in the world that anybody could go without a visa, and it was a lifesaver” for approximately 20,000 European Jews, many of them hailing from Germany, like Daniel, and Austria, like Leah and her mother.
Kanon learned about prewar Shanghai’s unique role in world history on a 2019 vacation to China. “I hadn’t known about, or if I did I just marginally knew about, the Jewish refugees who came from Europe after Kristallnacht [in 1938]. What an extraordinary story! I don’t know that it’s as well-known as it might be.”
His fans are sure to spread the word: The internationally bestselling author’s books have been published in more than 24 languages. That massive readership originated with his first book, 1997’s Los Alamos, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the 1998 Edgar Award for Best First Novel.
While his writerly career certainly got off to a rollicking start, it isn’t something Kanon had pined for. Rather, the former publishing executive (he held top positions at both Houghton Mifflin and E.P. Dutton) says, “I never wrote when I was working as a publisher. I didn’t have manuscripts secretly in drawers or anything like that. I enjoyed publishing and enjoyed what I was doing, and I didn’t really anticipate this life change.”
But then came the summer of 1995. “I was with my wife in the Southwest, just as a tourist . . . . I’d always been interested in World War II and we were so near Los Alamos that I said, let’s go and see it. And I was absolutely floored by it and so intrigued: This was once the most secret place on the Earth, in the world, and you can go there.” As the site’s history and mystery sank in, he says, “I thought, gee, what would’ve happened if there had been a crime? How would they go about solving that, since it’s a place that technically doesn’t exist?”
With his publisher hat still firmly in place, Kanon says, “I thought, this is actually a neat idea. Who can I give it to?” Fortuitously, there were no takers—and he couldn’t shake his fascination with the notion of a crime occurring at such an extraordinary place in such an extraordinary time. “It just got me hooked, and I decided I would write the book. I’d never written anything, and I thought, what would be more embarrassing than a publisher who can’t write? So I never told anybody that I was doing it, and it became my secret book.”
Of course, word eventually got out in what he describes as “a sort of Cinderella ending, because the book worked and I discovered that I loved doing it. And so I was a poster child for career change: I was 50 when I started writing.” When asked what winning the Edgar Award meant to him, Kanon says, “Oh, it’s great, I won’t pretend otherwise. It’s fantastic! And you think, well, gosh, I guess I really am a writer.”
As evidenced by the 10 subsequent novels he’s written, Kanon has fully immersed himself in his surprise second career. “To do anything creative and live inside your head, which writing requires, is a special luxury and I’m so grateful it’s happened,” he says. “I enjoy the process.”
That process has reliably begun with “some spark of interest, usually in a place” because “I like stories that could not have taken place anywhere else, where the place is actually determinative.” Intensive research that includes books, news media, maps, photos, etc., about and from the time and location in question is de rigueur, as well as bouts of on-the-ground “location scouting,” as he puts it.
Kanon says that, as he crafted Shanghai, it was top of mind that “here we have these people who have literally escaped with their lives. . . . No passport, no citizenship, no money, no language and nowhere to go . . . and I thought, now what do you do? How did people survive? Of course, that led to looking at the city that they had docked in as a port of last resort.” It was a place that became, he adds, “a byword for vice, like Chicago in the 1920s or Weimar Berlin, filled with gangsters and brothels and gambling clubs and jazz clubs with chorus lines.”
“I like stories that could not have taken place anywhere else . . .”
And 1930s Shanghai was, Kanon says, “obviously a place where you can sink really fast, and morally you’re going to be compromised almost from the get-go. I wanted to combine both those worlds: I wanted to write about the nightclubs and the vice, the sort of seedy glamour of it, and how it’s glamorous on the one hand and terrible on the other. There were people who would die in the streets of hunger; it was a really extreme kind of situation.”
Despite the tragic circumstances of the Jewish refugees who did not survive their stay in the city, Kanon says, “most people did make a life for themselves. There were community organizations that were formed, there were soccer teams and some attempt to have a normal life to get through this period.” Shanghai “constituted a kind of refuge because the Japanese just didn’t take over. They just let it be,” thus rendering the city largely self-governing in practice.
In this volatile place, characterized by a “mixture of crime and politics and gang warfare,” the SS Raffaello passengers must forge a new life. After the ship docks at the mouth of the Yangtze River, Daniel and Leah emerge from the romantic, staving-off-reality bubble they’d inhabited while on the high seas and go their separate ways on unfamiliar terra firma. “We’re all going over the edge,” Leah frets, “and there’s nothing we can do.”
Leah and her mother are taken to refugee shelters called “heime” (German for “homes”) established by charitable organizations, while Daniel enters his uncle Nathan’s domain in the Shanghai underworld. Additional characters to watch include Florence Burke, an American whose vivacious exterior belies hidden depths, and the ever-calculating Colonel Yamada, a member of the Japanese Kempeitai (or as Daniel puts it, “their Gestapo”).
And then there’s Uncle Nathan who, in Kanon’s deft hands, is at once appealing and appalling. He bankrolled Daniel’s passage and offers him a well-paying job in Shanghai, a place where so many are penniless—but he also has no compunction about putting Daniel in danger via dealings with Chinese gangsters and other unsavory sorts.
This type of tantalizing push-pull resonates through Shanghai, building tension and suspense via Leah’s determination to maintain her dignity despite moral concessions she makes in order to eke out a living, and Daniel’s conflicted feelings about the last remaining member of his family. Kanon says, “What I tried to do in this [book] is to show the duality, the good and bad sides at once. Uncle Nathan on one level can be charming, and he’s certainly loving, and I think he very much wants to be a father figure to Daniel,” in the absence of Daniel’s father, Eli, a decorated veteran and judge who died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
“There’s a lot about [Nathan] that’s appealing in the same way there’s a lot about Tony Soprano that’s appealing; he’s a mensch in some ways,” Kanon explains. “On the other hand, I wanted to make perfectly clear that he’s also involved in running brothels and is obviously destroying the lives of the people who are in them. . . . And for Daniel to see that there are two sides to this coin, and one of them may be marginally appealing, but the other sure isn’t.” Daniel is deciding what he’ll do both out of duty to Nathan and in keeping with his own desire to build a not-yet-imagined future, Kanon says. “If it means getting involved in crime, if it means getting involved in really morally compromised positions, he’s going to do it. But how long is he going to do it, and how far will he go?”
By twisted necessity, Daniel’s new existence does trade in danger—both threatened and actual—that affects him and those he cares about. Although it may have its own dark logic, Daniel doesn’t take it lightly. Rather, he muses after he witnesses a violent altercation, “the bullet didn’t stop. It kept on going, into all the lives that surrounded it, tearing through one after another, so that you never killed just one person. The bullet didn’t stop.”
Kanon says that as he sifts through history, unearthing stories and creating his own, he strives to emphasize that we shouldn’t lose sight of the “chain reaction,” the seemingly endless reverberation of violence and war.
” . . . every book has the right to bring up questions, and I would be pleased to think that my books made people think . . .”
And that, he says, is what draws him time and again to the questions at the heart of his body of work. He notes, “In [2012’s] Istanbul Passage, one of the characters said, ‘What do you do when there’s no right thing to do? Just the wrong thing,’ and I think we’re confronted with decisions like that every day in our lives. To be able to highlight that in a dramatic way is one of the things books can do. And I think they should. It’s one of their roles.”
Of course, he says, that’s “a lot of freight for a thriller to carry, and I’m not trying to suggest that each of these books is War and Peace. But I think that every book has the right to bring up questions, and I would be pleased to think that my books made people think, one way or another.”
Regarding Shanghai in particular, he says, “I would love people to take away how hard it was for these people, but also how easy it is to slide, how we need to be alert to the moral aspects of what we’re doing.”
But, he adds with a laugh, “when I say that, it sounds so sobering. I also want people to have a good time reading this! To me, the most fascinating part of the book is crime and politics being flip sides of the same coin . . . and ultimately, you really want people to take away a sense of the characters. Did these people live for you during the period when you were spending time with them? That’s what it’s about.”
Photo of Joseph Kanon by Chad Griffith.
The author’s latest thriller takes place in the titular city in the 1930s, when it was a volatile hotbed of crime—and a sanctuary for Jewish refugees.
Hard to believe though it may be, Commissario Guido Brunetti has survived 32 hair-raising adventures thus far, and is back for number 33 in Donna Leon’s sophisticated police procedural series set in Venice, Italy. As A Refiner’s Fire opens, members of two rival gangs have been herded into the police station following a late-night dust-up in a town square. One by one, the parents of the teenagers pick up their unruly offspring until only one boy is left. Orlando Monforte explains to Commissario Claudia Griffoni that his father never answers his phone when sleeping. In the interest of expediency, Griffoni decides to accompany the boy home; it is a decision that will come back to bite her. Meanwhile, Brunetti has been tasked with the vetting of one Dario Monforte, a onetime hero of the Carabinieri, the Italian military police, and, coincidentally, the father of the aforementioned Orlando. As his investigation proceeds, Brunetti is troubled by the ambiguities of Monforte’s supposed heroism, most particularly by the fact that he never received any sort of medal or commendation, seemingly because he was under investigation for antiquities theft. Tangentially, Brunetti’s friend and co-worker Enzo Bocchese, a collector of antiquities, is badly beaten and his collection is vandalized, likely by a particularly nasty gang member who lives in his building. The cases begin to dovetail as Brunetti and Griffoni uncover disturbing connections to the highest levels of the government. The grand finale is truly inspired, explosive in every sense of the word and perhaps the best of Leon’s long career.
★ The Night of Baba Yaga
The Night of Baba Yaga, the English language debut of Japanese writer Akira Otani, features all the elements you could hope for from a crime thriller set in the Land of the Rising Sun: a heroine spiritually descended from samurai stock; two pairs of lovers on the run; a beautiful and spoiled young woman treated like a hothouse flower by her doting father; and a yakuza presence that is gloriously, gratuitously violent, well beyond the traditional chopping off of a pinky finger for perceived insubordination. Both the dialogue and the prose, translated by Sam Bett, are staccato and to the point; there are no wasted words. In that regard, the story is very akin to Japanese illustrated novels (only without the illustrations, which would almost certainly be too graphic for Western sensibilities). Baba Yaga, for those of you unfamiliar with her, is a legendary Russian witch who lives in the forest, in a house built on gigantic chicken legs that would raise and lower upon her command. She is noted for her cruelty, her rather bizarre sense of humor and her occasional kindness to those who are pure of heart, few though they may be. She figures strongly in Otani’s narrative, which is nicely done, indeed.
Think Twice
When the feds pay a visit to sports agent Myron Bolitar, he is more than a little surprised by the reason: They want to know the whereabouts of Myron’s nemesis-turned-friend, former basketball star Greg Downing. Problem is, Greg Downing has been dead for three years; Myron delivered the eulogy. The second problem is that Downing’s DNA has been found under the fingernails of someone who was just murdered, so now Myron is a person of interest in the investigation. Think Twice is the 12th installment of Harlan Coben’s popular series featuring Myron and his uber-wealthy and mysterious sidekick, Windsor Horne Lockwood III (aka “Win”), and the mystery is much more than a possible case of a faked death. The authorities suspect that the recent murder was but one of a series of homicides all perpetrated by the same person, a serial killer who then artfully and seamlessly framed someone close to the victim. The difference with this latest case is that the perp apparently got a bit sloppy and left DNA at the scene: Greg Downing’s DNA. And now the FBI is closing in on Downing (who may indeed be dead) and his known associates. First-person accounts by the as-yet-unidentified murderer appear here and there throughout the narrative, with “How I did it” details that are both inventive and jarring. Cool story, cool characters, tasty twist ending. What’s not to like?
Like Mother, Like Daughter
Anyone who ever had issues with a controlling and overprotective mother will empathize with Cleo, and anyone who ever had issues with a rebellious teenage daughter will certainly empathize with Cleo’s mother, Kat. But their fraught relationship is about to change in ways neither could predict, within pages of the opening of Kimberly McCreight’s new thriller, Like Mother, Like Daughter. It’s been a while since they met; they’re not exactly estranged, but are nonetheless distant. Kat has extended an olive branch, however, in the form of a homemade dinner and a promise not to be contentious. But when Cleo arrives, Kat is nowhere to be found. Food is burning on the stovetop and in the oven, and a bloody canvas shoe suggests foul play of some sort. Chapters alternate between Kat’s and Cleo’s perspectives, sometimes in flashback to each of their childhoods, but more often cutting back to the week leading up to Cleo’s discovery that her mom has gone missing, and then moving through the investigation. We learn that Kat’s law firm job was quite a bit more convoluted than she lets on, that Cleo was a part-time drug courier, that several million dollars have mysteriously gone missing from Kat’s bank account, and that Cleo’s exceptionally bad choices in lovers threaten to bring things to a very unpleasant denouement. And we also learn that Kat’s rigidity has at times been tempered by a dangerous rebellious streak, while Cleo’s fierce individuality can be overshadowed by an equally fierce protective urge, given the right circumstances. Like Mother, Like Daughter is intense, thought-provoking and completely unputdownable.
Akira Otani makes her English language debut with The Night of Baba Yaga, plus the latest from Donna Leon and Harlan Coben in this month’s Whodunit column.
In addition to her beautiful language and intricately constructed characters, one of Tana French’s great skills is her knack for an evocative setting. Think the deceptively quaint mountain village of Ardnakelty in The Searcher and The Hunter, or the siren call of cozy, idyllic Whitethorn House in The Likeness. But Broken Harbor is perhaps French’s finest achievement in terms of the setting as microcosm for the work at large. A luxury seaside development, Brianstown was supposed to represent the ultimate in upper-middle-class achievement for the Spain family, most of whom were murdered in their home by an unknown intruder. But a burst housing bubble left Brianstown’s construction only halfway completed: The neighborhood looks more like the decrepit cityscapes of Inception than the idyllic capitalist dream on the brochure, and instead of being part of a thriving community, the Spains were some of the only inhabitants of the urban equivalent of a sandcastle disintegrating on the beach. Things get even eerier when you get inside their house, which is literally full of holes, some of which have baby monitors placed next to them. There is an answer as to what the Spains were looking for, but the point is that they couldn’t stop searching, that materialistic striving can so quickly turn into paranoia, even as the walls literally crumble around you.
—Savanna, Managing Editor
Still Life
Still Life, the first mystery in Louise Penny’s beloved Armand Gamache series, draws Chief Inspector Gamache of the Sureté du Québec to Three Pines, a remote village in the mountains of Québec, whose eclectic residents cherish their solitude. What more does one need than a bistro owned by a lovable gay couple, a solid boulangerie, a musty used bookstore and a volunteer fire department headed by a misanthropic old poet with a penchant for cursing out her adoring neighbors? Here, one of these neighbors is found dead in the forest—a hunting accident, say the authorities, as one does when death visits a woman in the woods. Rather than view Three Pines as a backwater town that time forgot (even connecting to the internet becomes a plot point), the morals-driven leader and ruthlessly clever Gamache is eager to get to know a community that is much more than the sum of its parts. As seen through his eyes, readers will be taken by the wholesome charms and stark beauty of the village, despite murder after murder occurring in the next 17 books of the series. The audiobook, read by the exceptional Ralph Cosham, is as delicious as the bistro’s warm ham and brie baguette.
—Erica, Associate Editor
The Secret History of Twin Peaks
Speaking as a born-and-raised Washingtonian, there’s no place like the Pacific Northwest. In particular, there’s no place like the Pacific Northwest for setting a mystery. There’s something about the towering old-growth Douglas firs and the ever-present mist and drizzle that makes a cup of good diner coffee and a great slice of pie that much more comforting—and makes an unsolved case that much more bone-chilling. If you haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing the eerie beauty of western Washington in person, Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks will just about transport you there. And if you’re a super fan who’s already seen every episode more than once, you can move on to Mark Frost’s book The Secret History of Twin Peaks. It’s written as a dossier compiled by a mysterious “Archivist” with commentary from the FBI agent assigned to review the file and determine the Archivist’s identity. The photos, newspaper articles and journal entries begin in the 1800s and continue through the action of the TV series in 1989. Read it to feel a misty northwestern chill creep up your spine.
—Phoebe, Associate Editor
House of Roots and Ruin
The sequel to Erin Craig’s House of Salt and Sorrows, House of Roots and Ruin is a story of introspection, deception and supernatural enigmas. Verity Thaumas has struggled to find her place in the shadows of her successful older sisters, especially Camille, the duchess of their family estate, Highmoor. When Verity is offered a job from the Duchess of Bloem to paint a portrait of her son, Alexander, Camille panics and confesses that Verity sees ghosts and can’t differentiate them from real people, making her a liability to the family name if she were to go out on her own. Consumed with doubt, fear and resentment, Verity flees Highmoor later that night. With nowhere to go, she makes her way to Bloem, an ethereal region of lush scenery and bright colors; it’s a stark difference from the salty, dreary mood of her homeland. But it doesn’t take long for the dreamy Bloem estate, Chauntilalie, to expose its dark side, from Duke Gerard’s poisonous botanical experiments to the ghosts stuck in a time loop. Amid her growing love for Alexander, Verity confronts the challenges of her new home, all while trying to keep her abilities hidden. But if Verity isn’t careful, she might not only reveal her identity, but also uncover family secrets that could threaten Chauntilalie as a whole. Readers will relish how Craig juxtaposes eerie details with her extravagant setting in this gothic, fantastical and romantic story.
—Jena, Sales Coordinator
All good mysteries must have a fiendishly compelling plot, but truly great mysteries place their central puzzle in an equally fascinating setting.
Chris Bohjalian’s latest thriller, The Princess of Las Vegas is a thrilling symphony of run-down casinos, teenage hackers and royal impersonators with multiple mysteries at ...
Set aside some time once you start reading Trust Her, because after a page of what seems like an idyllic summer outing on the Irish coast, Tessa Daly is plunged into a nightmare: held hostage and forced back into a life she thought she had left behind forever. Flynn Berry fans will recognize Tessa as the heroine of Berry’s bestselling novel Northern Spy. In that book, Tessa’s sister, Marian, was an IRA member who was secretly feeding information to MI5 in hopes of fostering peace talks, and she recruited Tessa to help carry out this task.
Berry’s crisp prose, artful plotting and short chapters make for another thrilling read. Trust Her takes place three years after Northern Spy’s explosive finale, with the sisters now living in Dublin and focusing on their young children. Narrator Tessa notes early on, “I’d stopped being scared of the IRA in the daylight. Stupid, unbelievable logic. . . . We should have seen this coming.” While the two mothers have been immersed in strep throat, croup and pickup times, Tessa notes, “The IRA haven’t gone away, after all. We’d only stopped thinking about them.”
Now the IRA demands that Tessa reconnect with her and Marian’s MI5 handler, Eamonn, to try to turn him into an informant. Tessa wants absolutely no part of this, but nonetheless, when she sees Eamonn again, their mutual attraction resurfaces. It’s a cat-and-mouse game of the best kind, interspersing plenty of high-octane, frightening moments with Tessa’s quotidian joys, concerns and exhaustion as a single mother to 4-year-old Finn. This juxtaposition is the rocket fuel of spy dramas, and Berry tackles both the mundane and the extraordinary equally well, with perfect pacing throughout. While this is a story full of long-held secrets and startling revelations, newcomers will have no trouble coming up to speed—even if they will likely want to read the book they’ve missed.
On top of her love-hate relationship with Eamonn, Tessa harbors complicated feelings toward Marian for drawing her into this web in the first place. Trust Her is brilliantly titled, gesturing towards “the long chain reaction” of personal ties and vendettas that led to political turmoil and splintered lives for so many families. As Tessa notes, “I know, in my bones, that the conflict won’t end in my lifetime. We’re all trapped in it, caught in lockstep.” Perhaps, at least, this might mean readers will be hearing more from Tessa and Marian Daly.
Set aside some time once you start reading Trust Her, because Flynn Berry’s return to the world of Northern Spy is nothing short of thrilling.
Sign Up
Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.
Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
