• Find You First, by Linwood Barclay (Morrow):
Forty-four-year-old Miles Cookson has had a life-changing day. Told by his doctor that he has a non-treatable and fatal genetic disease, he is advised to use part of the time he has left to put his affairs in order. Miles resolves to do just that, and before
long he receives some equally dramatic news: sperm donations he made in his youth have resulted in nine offspring. Miles has done well in life. A tech-savvy billionaire, he decides to track down his children and leave them a sizable portion of his wealth. As he begins to do so, though, he learns that several of them are either dead or disappearing. It seems someone else is trying to track down those same people … but for a very different purpose. For the ill-fated benefactor, what ensues is a race against time. Think Bill Gates meets Jeffrey Epstein. In Find You First, author Linwood Barclay has fashioned an original and gripping tale of good versus evil. But it is not a classic story in which readers can expect that in the end, good will prevail. For evil, in this case, has the face of a wildly affluent sociopath with virtually unlimited means at his disposal—and no shortage of enablers to do his bidding. Find You First is a dark and compelling story, exquisitely told, and frighteningly apropos for our twisted times.• Five Decembers, by James Kestrel (Hard Case Crime):
Honolulu, Hawaii, December 1941: Police detective Joe McGrady is assigned to solve a gruesome double homicide on the eve of the United States’ long-awaited entry into World War II. A young man has been found hanging upside-down in a remote dairy shed, naked, his body split open by a knife, and dead for a day or more. After reporting his find by phone, McGrady returns to the shed to find a gunman
lying in wait. A firefight ensues, and when the dust has cleared McGrady is alive; the other man isn’t. Entering the shed, the detective investigates the murder scene more closely. A nearby cot attracts his attention, and he discovers underneath some clothing the body of a second victim, a young Asian woman, bound with her throat slit. Back in Honolulu, the male is identified as Henry K. Willard, the nephew of Admiral Kimmel, the ranking naval officer at Pearl Harbor. He’d been in Honolulu preparing to study at the university there. Kimmel is anxious to solve his nephew’s death, and McGrady is given a free hand to go wherever the evidence leads him. Ultimately, McGrady will follow the trail across the Pacific Ocean to Hong Kong and on to the Empire of Japan, where the detective finds himself caught up in the global conflict and struggling to survive. After the war ends, the dogged cop returns to finish his investigation, ultimately tying up some very personal loose ends in Japan. An evocative hard-boiled tale that is part Dashiell Hammett, part James Michener, Five Decembers is a sweeping saga of love, hate, innocence, and evil, consummately told.• Diamond and the Eye, by Peter Lovesey (Soho Crime):
In Bath, England, Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond focuses on a break-in at a local antiques shop. The owner, one Septimus Hubbard, has gone missing, and a week later his daughter, Ruby, is growing increasingly concerned. Diamond is bemused to find that Ruby has hired a private invesrigator to help locate her father. And not just any private detective, but an especially brash—and to Diamond’s mind, offensive—gumshoe in the classic American mold. His name is Johnny Getz. The motto on his business card reads
“Getz Results.” Not the sort of thing to impress the stolid and methodical Diamond. Following the break-in, the shop was taped off by police. A week later, Getz, Ruby, and Diamond enter it to determine whether there is any clue to Septimus Hubbard’s disappearance. Before long they discover a body concealed in an Egyptian coffin and overlooked in the earlier (and cursory) search of the premises. However, the body is not that of the vanished shop-owner. To his chagrin, Diamond soon finds himself saddled not only with the insufferable P.I., but also with Lady Bede, a local member of the nobility who also sits on the police ethics committee. It grows increasingly unclear as to whether Lady Bede, a woman with an overactive libido, is interested primarily in the conduct of this case or in the widowed Diamond himself. In Diamond and the Eye, prolific British fictionist Peter Lovesey has great fun juxtaposing the very different styles of Diamond and his shamus nemesis, assigning them alternating chapters marked by dissimilar narrative voices, and creating a comic send-up of the private-eye genre. Readers will enjoy the duel between the brash P.I. and his more prosaic alter ego, Detective Superintendent Diamond, as well as a cracking plot that has its own version of the much-sought-after Maltese Falcon.• Slough House, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime):
Mick Herron occupies a unique niche among spy thriller writers: he eschews the sensationalistic (and formulaic) chronicles of authors such as Ian Fleming in favor of the darker and more prosaic portrayals of the craft offered by writers on the order of the late John le Carré. But while le Carré’s writing is spare and largely humorless, Herron’s is packed with an uncompromisingly dark humor more characteristic of Irish writers: barbed and with a cynical message firmly embedded in the narrative. In this outing the denizens of Slough House, a marginalized purgatory to which apparently underperforming spooks are relegated, find themselves under attack— not metaphorically, but literally. Someone seems to have them in his or her crosshairs. Soon it emerges that this is payback for the killing of two Russian agents on their own soil, itself retaliation for the (real-life) effort to kill a dissident Russian and his daughter on British soil, using a highly toxic nerve agent known to be the product of Russian research. The attack had failed, but it left the targets fighting for their lives. The rules of spycraft are amorphous at the best of times, but one of them is fixed in stone: one nation doesn’t kill another nation’s spooks on their home ground. So when Russian agents start dying, the Russkis seek to even the score, and events threaten to spiral out of hand. The latest in a
growing series of Herron novels currently being adapted for television, Slough House casts a caustic (and dare I say brilliant?) light on the dark world of spies.• Seven Down, by David Whitton
(Rare Machines):
Canadian crime writer David Whitton draws on several literary efforts (not least Dorothy Sayers’ The Documents in the Case) to create his debut novel, Seven Down, and comes up with an original tale lampooning the world of spies and black ops. The setting is the aftermath of a clandestine operation gone awry. Decades earlier, seven sleeper agents had been inserted into the ranks of the employees at a single upscale hotel in downtown Toronto, Ontario. None of them are aware of the identity of the others, or even that they exist. Their brief is to remain in place and go about their normal duties until such time as they are activated by their controls with a special phrase. Just so is Operation Fear and Trembling conceived. Yet as any parent knows, there is a world of difference between the most elegant of plans and everyday reality. In the wake of what becomes an unmitigated disaster, a senior analyst is assigned to discover just what went wrong with the operation, and how. He reviews the written debriefings of each of the clandestine agents; this slender novel consists entirely of those debriefings, together with the analyst’s own observations. Little by little the curtain is drawn aside, and the reader is given snippets of information, which only confirm Murphy’s Law: what can go wrong will go wrong. Thus, Seven Down thumbs its nose at the spy trade, and at novels which attempt to take it seriously. It’s a commentary on the tendency of Those in Power to assume that grandiose plans can be made which will change the course of history. A highly amusing and a much-needed antidote to the writings of too many spy novelists.
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