The Night Manager

by John le Carré
429 pgs

John le Carré is one of those authors who has been writing for a long time, whom I’ve often thought I should read one of his books, but for whatever reason, never seemed to get around to picking one up. It wasn’t until I watched the mini-series adaptation of The Night Manager, which recently aired on AMC, that I was finally motivated enough to pick up one of his books and bump it up to the top of my “to-be-read” pile.

The Night Manager is a story about two men. Both are refined and well-polished. Jonathan Pine is a former British intelligence operative who has made a life for himself after his military service working as the night manager at one of the top hotels in Zurich. Richard Roper is a British arms merchant, operating in the Bahamas, selling weapons on a massive scale to the highest bidders. He’s formed a world-wide network of shell companies to operate behind, and has surrounded himself with a protective retinue of former agents and operatives, who have kept him beyond the reach of the CIA and its counterpart in the UK.

The two men’s paths cross late one snowy night when Roper, his mistress, and a dozen or so others who protect him and his interests check in to Pine’s hotel. Pine knows of Roper, and considers him “the worst man in the world.” Pine used to be in love with a woman who came to know too much about Roper and his operations, and who paid the ultimate price because of it.

Pine resolves to find a way to expose Roper and if possible, to dismantle his extensive operations. Working with U.S. handlers, he devises a way to insert himself into Roper’s inner circle and begins to feed his handlers with information that may one day bring Roper down.

The book was enjoyable. Le Carré used to work for the British Secret Intelligence Service and his background is evident in the level of detail he works into his story. But I struggled with the pacing and excitement level of the book. Even near the end, when spy stories usually get to the point where I can’t put them down, I never felt that way with this one. I’ll probably try a few more of his books eventually. Maybe some of his earlier ones dealing with the Cold War. But this one didn’t make me want to rush to read his entire back catalog.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

The High Mountains of Portugal

by Yann Martell
332 pgs

Fifteen years ago Yann Martel made a huge splash in the publishing world when he released Life of Pi, a book that spent over a year on the NYT Bestseller List. Obviously many people read the book, and from what I can tell, either they really enjoyed it, or the really didn’t. I’ve never talked with anyone who read the book and was lukewarm about it. I was among the group who really enjoyed it and have been waiting for him to write another book that compares. His next book, Beatrice and Virgil fell flat for me, so much so, that I hesitated to bother reading The High Mountains of Portugal when it came out. I’m glad I decided to give it a try. While it’s not quite the book Life of Pi is, it’s a very worthy successor.

The book consists of three separate, but interconnected stories. Each takes place in the rural area known as “the high mountains of Portugal,” and each explores the nature and role of grief and faith in the life of Martel’s characters.

The first story takes place in 1904 and tells the story of Tomás, a young man who recently lost his son, his lover, and his father. Tomás is so affected by his grief that he decides he will walk backward for the rest of his life, physically demonstrating to God and the world that he has turned his back to them. Tomás embarks on a quest to find a religious relic he read about in the diary of a 17^th-century priest who ministered to the slaves brought to Portugal. To help him search for the relic he borrows his wealthy uncle’s automobile, a new invention that very few people in Portugal, including himself, have ever seen before. Tomás has no idea how to operate nor maintain the automobile, but doesn’t let those facts deter him from using it to aid him in his journey.

The second story skips forward in time to the late 1930s and takes place in the office of Dr. Lozora, a pathologist. Lozora’s wife is a fan of Agatha Christie mysteries and has an unusual but entertaining theory about the connection she believes they have to The Four Gospels of the New Testament. Her theory serves as a precursor to a visit Lozora receives late in the night by an elderly widow who shows up with her husband’s dead body folded up inside her suitcase. She asks him to perform an autopsy, which turns into a metaphor for the life her husband led and her own grief at his passing.

The last story takes place decades later and involves Senator Peter Tovy, a Canadian politician who visits a chimpanzee refuge in Oklahoma and decides to adopt one of the chimps, quit his job, and move to Portugal, where his ancestors came from. Peter is still grieving the loss of his wife and without looking for it, finds the peace a solace he needs in the minimalistic life he makes for himself with his new companion in “the high mountains of Portugal.

I really enjoyed the book as a whole. There are times when it feels like the train Martel is driving has jumped the tracks, but by the end it’s clear that he was in control the whole time. 

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

End of Watch

by Stephen King
432 pgs  (Bill Hodges trilogy #3)

End of Watch concludes Stephen King's highly-entertaining trilogy featuring Bill Hodges, a retired police detective, and Brady Hartsfield, a sociopathic killer, responsible for one mass killing, and an attempt at a second.

At the end of the last book, Brady, in a vegetative state, is residing in the brain injury ward of the local hospital. But strange things keep on happening around him. The water turns on and off on its own, the blinds go up and down, and other things move inexplicably on their own.

Bill and Holly, now running their own investigation agency, are called to investigate the strange circumstances surrounding the suicide of one of the survivors of Brady's successful mass killing. As others who were there also attempt to take their own life, Bill and Holly begin to suspect that someone else is pulling the puppet strings. Bill's gut is telling him it's Brady and he's determined to end Brady's powers once and for all.

End of Watch is more like a Stephen King book than the first two books in the series were. As much as I enjoyed those first two, I enjoyed this one that much more because of the supernatural element King brought into it.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Solitude Creek

by Jeffery Deaver
452 pgs  (Kathryn Dance series #5)

In Jeffery Deaver’s latest book featuring kinesics expert Kathryn Dance, someone is intentionally causing panics in large crowds, and watching as people are injured or killed, crushed or stampeded by the crowd.

As a kinesics expert, Dance is trained to identify when people are telling lies. She works for the California Bureau of Investigations, interviewing suspects and witnesses in order to assist police departments in their investigations. When an interrogation she’s involved in goes terribly wrong, she’s reassigned to the Civil Division of the CBI and demoted to checking business permits and liquor licenses.

One of her first assignments takes her to the local dive-bar called Solitude Creek, where several people recently died or were injured when the crowd believed a fire had started in the kitchen. When they tried to get out the emergency exits, they found them all blocked by a large truck parked up against the back of the building.

Dance quickly learns that there never was a fire at Solitude Creek, but that someone had intentionally led the crowd to believe there was one, and drove them towards the blocked exits. While she’s investigating the non-fire, panic once again breaks out at a crowded event. It quickly becomes evident that this wasn’t an isolated event, and that the perpetrator isn’t planning to stop.

Solitude Creek is trademark Deaver. It's a smart and compelling story. He's a master at making you think you know everything that's going on, only to find out by the end that you were wrong on so many points. Even though this is the fifth book featuring Dance, Deaver writes each book in such a way that you really don't need to read the books in order. This would be a good one to try if you've never read one before.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin
598 pgs  (The Passage trilogy #3)

There have been a lot of books written in recent years featuring vampires as characters. Many of them are pretty good. They're suspenseful, frightening, creepy, and even original. Some of them—even though I’ve never read them, nor seen the movies based on them—I’m sure are terrible, and don’t deserve to occupy space on a bookshelf or memory on an e-reader. Justin Cronin’s apocalyptic vampire trilogy is one of the best I’ve ever read. First of all, the vampires, or virals as they're called, since they began as 12 individuals infected by a government-modified bat virus, are what they should be. They’re ruthless killing creatures with an insatiable appetite for blood. They’re not sparkly teenagers full of angst and emotional turmoil.

But where the books really separate themselves from the rest of the genre, is in Cronin’s writing ability and style. He’s a Harvard-educated man who previously wrote a couple of literary novels, so the books don't have the feel for most horror books. They read like fine literature. Each of the books is masterfully crafted and the series as a whole comes in at around 1500 pages, covering about 1,000 years of history, beginning with those first Twelve. The scope of the story as a whole is enormous.

After getting off to a great start in the first book, things get a little bogged down in book two. But this third, and final book, is the best of the three, and more than makes up for the faults of its predecessor. As the story begins, it's believed that all of the virals have been destroyed. The humans that have survived are ready to start picking up the pieces and rebuilding the civilization that is essentially non-existent. 

But obviously, there wouldn't be a need for this book, if the virals were truly eliminated in the last one. Fortunately--for us--they're only biding their time, waiting for the right time to return and finish off the survivors once and for all.

The series as a whole deserves all the hype it's received, and this book, itself was well worth the four-year wait it took to come out. 

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆  

The Maze Runner

by James Dashner
374 pgs  (The Maze Runner series #1)

I know I’ve said this before, but one of the reasons I’m a big fan of good science fiction stories is I enjoy the sense of disorientation I usually experience as they begin. Oftentimes it takes a while to figure out, or get a sense for several key aspects of the story: When and where is it taking place? Is it here on earth? Or another world? Is it happening in the present time on some faraway planet? Or is it happening here on earth, but at some point in the distant future? Many of the really good stories in the genre prolong that sense of disorientation almost indefinitely. So after watching the movie adaptation of the first book in the series, and having questions throughout about what was going on and why, I decided the series might be worth reading.

I wasn’t disappointed. The premise is pretty solid. A group of teenage boys live in a place called the Glade, surrounded by an enormous maze of concrete walls a mile high. The boys arrived in the Glade one at a time, with no memory of their life to that point and no idea why they’re there and how to escape through the maze. About once a week an elevator box surfaces in the Glade containing necessities like food and tools, and about once a month, a new boy arrives in the box as well.

The story begins with Thomas’s arrival in the Glade. Like the others before him, Thomas doesn’t know who he is, or how he got to the Glade, he just woke up in the elevator box as it was surfacing. He quickly learns that the Glade is run by Alby and Newt, two boys who arrived a couple years ago. He learns that ever since boys started finding themselves in the Glade, they’ve been trying to discover why they’re there and how they can escape. They’ve assigned certain boys to be “runners,” assigned to enter the maze every morning and try to find a way through. The problem is that strange and deadly creatures known as Grievers patrol the interior of the maze, and every night, the entrance to the maze closes, and the interior walls of the maze move into different positions.

But Thomas’s arrival seems to indicate that things are about to change in the Glade. One day after his arrival the box appears again, this time there’s a teenage girl in the box along with a message that she’s the last one. Thomas recognizes the girl, but can’t remember her name. She’s in a coma, but begins communicating with him telepathically in his head. A short time later, the sun disappears, the deliveries of supplies stop coming, and the entrance to the maze stays open overnight.

It’s clear to Thomas that he and the girl Teresa are different from the rest of the boys and they’re somehow meant to lead the rest of the group safely through the maze to whatever lies beyond.

I enjoyed the book, more so than the movie. It’s written for young adults, but it’s not dumbed down, which sometimes authors in the genre tend to do. It poses many more questions than it answers, in fact I’m not sure any questions were ever answered. But that’s what the first book in a series like this is meant to do, hook you into wondering what’s going on, and getting you willing to wait for the next book to see what happens next. 

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Crimson Shore

by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
337 pgs  (Pendergast series #15)

Agent Pendergast and his enigmatic "ward" Constance Green are summoned to a small coastal Massachusetts town by sculptor Percival Lake to investigate the theft of his valuable wine collection. While investigating, Pendergast  and Constance discover the skeleton of a man who had been walled up in Percival's wine cellar alive more than 150 years ago. They learn that the man had been a crew member aboard a ship carrying the Pride of Africa, a collection of flawless rubies. Back in the 1880s the townspeople had extinguished the lighthouse, confusing the ships crew, and causing it to wreck along the rocky shore. They then stole the rubies and committed atrocities that have shadowed the town ever since.

Pendergast's investigation into both crimes takes a disturbing turn when the bodies of two fresh murder victims turn up, with strange symbols carved into the skin of each body.

From there the story takes several bizarre and, unfortunately, ridiculous twists and turns. I think Preston and Child have lost sense of how much reason their readers want to suspend. I like a good thriller with a supernatural element, and Preston and Child have definitely written some good ones, but this one felt like they lost a bet to someone. There were elements to the story that had me shaking my head and rolling my eyes, and I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt with that surprise ending. Hopefully they thought that through completely and they haven't "jumped the shark." Otherwise, I'm afraid they've lost their way.

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆