The Expats – Chris Pavone

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‘Kate Moore’ is who she is now but she was Katherine—her maiden name was her professional name until Derek Moore announced that the family could move immediately from Washington DC to Luxembourg, if Kate was willing. She was more than willing—to shed the double life, the lies, the fear and the danger of her career and focus on her two little boys and a normal existence as an expat in Europe. Derek is a wonderful, faithful, beloved, slightly naive and only moderately successful technology nerd and he is Kate’s sanctuary in the brutal world of espionage and dirty dealing that she has never shared with him.

The Expats, an intricate plot that peels off layers like petals of an onion, is Chris Pavone’s imagined high-tech, high-finance, hell or high water suspense that pits Kate against nearly everybody she encounters. Derek works for a mystery bank with an undisclosed office, doing something in security he never quite manages to explain to Kate’s satisfaction. He begins to travel constantly and unexpectedly and comes home late every night. Kate is bored in the company of other expat mothers who spend their days housecleaning, dropping off and picking up children from school, ferrying the kids to play dates, shopping and cooking. She takes up tennis but feels like she’s losing her mind. Then a new American couple arrives in Luxembourg and begins to cultivate Kate’s friendship aggressively. And, of course, they are not what they seem.

The book is like a hall of mirrors. Kate sees shadows where there are shadows but misses some obvious suspicious behavior, even as her suspicions heighten. What is Derek up to? Who are her new friends? How will she survive fulltime motherhood and pick up endless toys without throwing them against the wall? Why is she compelled to revert to her clandestine modus operandi, spy on her own husband, buy a gun? Will the one major mistake she made in her field operative days finally catch up with her? How can she keep her family safe in the threatening atmosphere that gathers like murky fog around her?

It’s a good read. A little patchy in construction. A single-day journal alternates with the story of the move, the Luxembourg events, Kate’s memories of CIA assignments, and a lot of introspection. The single day takes place in Paris, where the Moores have moved after things unravel in Luxembourg, and provides the resolution to the plot. Eventually. Meanwhile, the layering of people, places and deceptions can be tricky to keep straight. Kate’s contempt for the mommy-role she sought and then finds to be a rough fit isn’t wholly credible. She is a hyper-intelligent woman who doesn’t play as clueless about how life works or what to expect. She adores her kids but she tires of them quickly. She’s in love with her husband and she trails him and searches his things. Everyone is really someone else. Kate misses conspicuous clues that the reader will catch immediately. As for spy thriller, maybe this is the way the CIA works—and maybe not—John le Carré it isn’t and I thought the set-ups were too simple and transparent. But it’s always nice to have a tough, smart heroine running the show so The Expats gets an overall thumbs-up.

The Expats: A Novel   Chris Pavone | Crown  2012

The Fear Index – Robert Harris

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The Fear Index is a sci-fi thriller—or maybe not so sci-fi. The plot revolves around the hedge fund algorithm developed by a brilliant former CERN physicist who runs a phenomenally successful hedge fund based in Geneva. Dr. Alex Hoffmann’s brainchild, VIXAL-4, scans astonishing amounts of Internet data including the “fear index,” a measure of the volatility of market fluctuations in response to fear trigger words in the media. The fear index is an excellent tool for predicting gains and losses in the market. The computer program is so advanced that it is a kind of artificial intelligence that continually becomes more efficient—you can see where this is going.

Anyway, an odd and near-deadly break-in at the Hoffmann gated estate results in Hoffmann’s head taking a serious bashing and an almost retired cop poking around in his personal and hedge fund business. Hoffmann saw the assailant and now he glimpses the man everywhere, and is afraid he may be going crazy. A first edition of a Darwin book arrives at his home although he claims not to have purchased it. In the book is an early photograph of a test subject that looks uncannily like the attacker. The Amsterdam bookseller’s records show Hoffmann emailed an order and transferred funds from a personal bank account he didn’t know he had in the Cayman Islands.

With a headful of stitches and a doctor’s futile admonition to remain in the hospital under observation for 24 hours, Hoffmann goes to the office with his partner, the charming and voluble public “face” of the firm, Hugo Quarry. The two partners are scheduled to present their latest software iteration to favored investors in hopes of raising a billion or so for increased investment. Gabrielle, Hoffman’s wife, collects pieces from her studio at home for the opening of her first gallery exhibit and worries about what is happening to her marriage and her life. When Hoffmann finally makes it to the champagne launch at the gallery, an anonymous buyer wires funds to acquire every single piece of Gabrielle’s work, unheard of and highly suspect for an emerging artist. She confronts Hoffmann, who denies it, and is furious.

And so it goes. Stranger and stranger occurrences pile up over the day as the market and the hedge fund both begin to act oddly. The fund unloads shares of an airline that looks healthy hours before a catastrophic plane crash that sends its stocks plummeting. The algorithm steadily erodes the “hedge” that protects the fund from devastating losses but the fund is making multiple millions of dollars and Quarry is loathe to override the computer system to decrease risk. Hoffmann takes off in search of his assailant and Gabrielle is confronted with shocking secrets about the man she has been married to for seven years.

The Fear Index is a very taut, anxiety-producing novel with a very accessible amount of detail about how investing and markets work. It operates in the land of the ethers—extremely high wealth, extremely high risk, way out there science and a boatload of people at various stops on the autism spectrum. You can read it in one sitting and you might because it is hard to put down. As the financial world spins out of control and Hoffmann grows ever more paranoid, the evil mastermind of the international threat becomes harder to pin down. Harris’s book is scary—you may not have personal billions at risk but, in the world of VIXAL-4, your whole world is at risk of implosion and there isn’t a single thing you could ever do to prevent it.     

The Fear Index   Robert Harris | Alfred A. Knopf   2012

Orpheus Lost – Janette Turner Hospital

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In Orpheus Lost, Janette Turner Hospital turns the story of Orpheus and Euridice on its head. This time it’s Orpheus who goes missing and Euridice who descends into the underworld to find him.

Leela is a motherless southerner who escapes to Boston from her very small town through her mathematical genius. She leaves behind a slightly cracked Pentecostal father, the sister born as their mother died in childbirth, and a lifelong best friend, a boy named Cobb whose mother committed suicide and whose father has been prone to drunken, violent rages since his return from the Vietnam war.

Mishka is a very eccentric Australian from a family of refugees who escaped the Nazi death camps and settled in the rainforest. Music is the center of their broken lives, as it was in a cultured, prosperous existence before Hitler. Mishka grows up playing the violin and believing his unknown father is dead. Music propels him to Boston where he takes up the oud, a sort of Persian lute, and plays his violin deep underground in the subway. When Leela hears the heartbreaking lament from Orfeo ed Euridice, she is hypnotized and she and Mishka become lovers.

As Leela works on a post-doc research proposal, Boston is hit with a series of terrorist attacks and Mishka grows increasingly anxious and begins staying away from the apartment. Then Leela is picked up for questioning by a government-contracted security firm and interrogated for hours in a locked room—by an emotionally brutal and calculating Cobb. Mishka may be linked to a subway bombing—his father may be alive in Beirut and is also suspected of being a terrorist mastermind. Mishka disappears and Leela, unmoored in this landscape of alien information, descends into hell to find him—and the truth.

Orpheus Lost is a brilliant and beautifully written thriller. The emotional entanglements of the characters are, at first, very disturbing but quickly draw you into a murky realm where music is both a death sentence and the only hope. The story is strongly anti-war, anti-violence and anti-fairytale. Mishka’s innocence leads him into depths he can’t manage. If Leela gives into doubt, she will lose him forever.

Hell is made in the hearts of people damaged by an unforgiving world. The myth of Orpheus is an ancient and powerful story, reworked in this novel with contemporary events that simply underscore what has always been true—our heroes, heroines, lovers and lost souls are flawed and fragile. But they are valiant and resilient, too. The music is an audible expression of love and longing. The courage that will prevail is an unblinking gaze upon painful truths–and a stubborn refusal to look back.

Orpheus Lost: A Novel   Janette Turner Hospital | W. W. Norton & Company  2007

The Technologists – Matthew Pearl

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Matthew Pearl’s The Technologists is a classic thriller set in late nineteenth century Boston, in the early days of MIT. The first graduating class of the upstart university, built on landfill and operating under principles that challenged the Harvard model of education, came close to not receiving their diplomas. Historically, that was because MIT was not granted degree-awarding authorization until a few weeks before the scheduled graduation. Pearl invents a plot to obliterate Boston, aimed at silencing MIT and reversing the progress of science and technology, that nearly takes down the university.

Events in The Technologists are wonky but urgent and understandable. The plot is constructed around science as it intersects with the darker recesses of the human heart and the combination is volatile. A thick fog and wildly spinning compasses send ships crashing into each other and the docks in Boston Harbor. A horrifying moment in the downtown financial district kills and maims in a nightmare of melting glass, windows that liquefy and encase bodies before hardening, clocks with their faces permanently melted and time stopped. And even more devastating incidents loom.

Students at MIT engage in constant banter and battle with their Harvard counterparts—there is no love lost between the scientists of either university. Pranks become deadly and class distinctions lead to violence. MIT’s lone woman student, Ellen Swallow, is assigned a solitary lab in the basement and private tutoring to maintain propriety and isolate her from the men. A scholarship student, a senior class brain and a Harvard humanities washout who is a natural engineer team up to expose the mad scientist who is terrorizing Boston. When they find an empty basement lab to hatch plans and perform experiments to determine the methods of the killer, Ellen, a brilliant chemist, is drafted onto the secret team.

Pearl has created a very good thriller and a very good book. The real history that informs some of the plot provides a convincing backdrop as the tension mounts. The effort to unravel the intrigue demands more than a whodunit approach from the reader. Science supplies the clues but elements as disparate as envy, the Civil War, suffrage, family dysfunction, probable Asperger’s or mild autism, professorial careerism, the properties of metals, disbanded secret societies, the evolution of street lighting, wheat mold, and the labor movement of the late 1800s are integral to the solution. What seems fantastical for the time is merely prototype to the commonplace of today. The satisfying battle between good and evil is, of course, timeless.

The Technologists is complex—full of twists, turns, dead ends, and slippery characters. It might keep you up late, as eager as any scientist to see what transpires once the test tube is suspended over the flame.

The Technologists: A Novel   Matthew Pearl | Random House  2012

Down the Darkest Road – Tami Hoag

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Down the Darkest Road, a mystery/thriller by Tami Hoag, takes full advantage of the stories behind grim headlines to track a serial killer and the effect of a heinous crime on a single family. Lauren Lawton’s 16-year-old daughter goes missing and is never found. The family life turns from privileged to nightmare. Her husband kills himself and 12-year-old Leah forfeits her childhood and any sense of normalcy or nurture. And the irony is that Lauren knows who took her child but nothing can be proven.

A mother’s obsession with finding out what happened to her daughter in idyllic Santa Barbara is intensified when the predator begins to stalk her and then sues the local cops for failing to protect him from her response. In desperation, or something else, Lauren moves to a smaller town up the coast, Oak Knoll, where no one knows her or Leah and they can start over. But she doesn’t start over. The move is more complicated than it first appears.

As local detective Tony Mendez gets involved in the Lawton case, the slick killer resurfaces and the stalking resumes. Danni Tanner, Santa Barbara’s lone female detective, is handed the cold case and Tony consults her for background. No evidence indicts the supposed kidnapper but ominous sightings and deliberate clues appear and Leah and Lauren are clearly in the crosshairs. The Lawtons begin to unravel psychologically while a few cops race to find some legal way to protect them and solve the crime.

Lauren Lawton has no faith in law enforcement after four years of an unending ordeal so she takes matters into her own hands. The suspect infiltrates substrata of Oak Knoll where young women and high school girls congregate and continues a lifelong course of stalking, tracking, meticulous data gathering on his quarry and perverted break-ins. He seems to be lining up a long list of future victims and Leah, approaching the same age her sister was when she disappeared, is among them.

Lots of characters in Hoag’s novel have backstories replete with murder and sexual assault. That’s almost a distraction because the incidence of such crimes in California would appear to be exponentially higher than the national average if you go by this narrative. But the requisite threats, tension and extreme violence are all present in appropriate measure at key points in the story. It’s well-written and doesn’t disappoint for the genre. Pretty easy to see why Tami Hoag is a massively successful author—she has this style down and her latest book was a compelling, if not very redemptive, read. No happy endings in Down the Darkest Road but the consolation is that things wrap up better than they might have in the real world, some threats are removed and the damaged survivors are free to rebuild and reinvent their lives.

Down the Darkest Road   Tami Hoag | Dutton  2012

The Mozart Conspiracy — Scott Mariani

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I have to stop picking up books with the names of composers in the titles. At least I have to stop adding them to my reading stack before I scope them out. The Mozart Conspiracy by Scott Mariani was a fast-paced read but it really exhausted me. In true thriller fashion, the book opened with some gruesome and perverted incidents that were creepy enough to alert a sane reader to the havoc to follow. No claims for sanity here—reading a book a day in medias res is a less than rational challenge. So I read on, knowing full well things would get more horrible as the pages turned. They did.

Ben Hope is a former SAS officer, member of a British special services unit of highly trained operatives who carry out the most critical and dangerous missions. These days he’s a hero-for-hire, rescuing children from pedophile rings and solving complex and deadly crimes. Ben’s friend Oliver Llewellyn dies a suspicious death and Ben is contacted by an old flame, Oliver’s younger sister Leigh, a world famous opera star who happens to be the girl Ben left behind.

The twist is the Mozart letter, a document discovered in the hollow leg of an antique piano by the Llewellyns’ father. The letter contains a secret that reveals something important about Mozart’s puzzling death and may prove that he was murdered. Some people will stop at nothing to get the rolled parchment in Mozart’s handwriting. Ben has to piece together what Oliver stumbled across as he researched the letter, and how that may have killed him. Leigh is in the same danger after she reveals on television that she will carry on her beloved brother’s research, using the materials he sent to her.

A conspiracy encompassing an ancient order that may still exist, a mysterious estate with a ritual assassination room in the cellar, a rising young politician with a green agenda and sadistic enemies, the terrified opera diva, a dogged Viennese gumshoe who is working in a compromised police department, a young kid who gets kidnapped a lot but remains resilient, a renegade nun on the lam from the law in a totalitarian regime, a scarred and deformed very very bad guy in a large cast of unsavory characters, all this captures and nearly kills Ben who wants to save his former lover and avenge his friend.

The torture is ugly, the weapons are plentiful and powerful, a shocking thing happens and then an even worse thing happens and then it gets nasty. Ben Hope has an astonishing ability to withstand injury and pain and escape imprisonment, imminent death and sophisticated traps. Many things become weapons and many weapons are lovingly described and demonstrated. Mariani would seem to know his knives and guns. He doesn’t quite know his opera, which undercuts the credibility of the tale at a few points.

Leigh Lllewellyn is about 34, still early in an operatic career. As a big star she would sing the major roles. As a trained singer she would choose roles carefully to mature and preserve her voice. But Mariani has her singing Verdi’s Macbeth, Puccini’s Tosca and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte—the Queen of the Night role. The Verdi and the Puccini call for darker, full-bodied voices with the heavier timbres that a singer develops over time. Singing those roles too soon will imperil a soprano’s top notes and the topmost belongs to the Queen of the Night, a high F above high C. No way does one singer tackle all those parts at the same point in her career. So, being an opera nerd, the discrepancy made me wonder what else might have been lightly researched.

The violence is convincing, though, if sickening. And Ben loves Leigh, the two of them dash all over Europe in every type of conveyance, evil triumphs again and again and many bodies pile up—one has an iron skillet half-buried in his brain, courtesy of our clever hero. It’s a very bloody book and most of the characters die and the conspirators trace their lineage to a sect of the Masons, the organization Mozart belonged to and glorified with The Magic Flute.

Clues do fit together neatly; villains are beyond redemption; Leigh is beautiful and as good an actress as she is a singer; Ben finds it increasingly hard to protect her. Every beat is a fresh disaster. The Mozart Conspiracy earns its thriller stripes in an action movie explosion of nonstop brutality. Mozart isn’t very essential; he serves mainly as an excuse  for absolute carnage that continues senselessly after the book’s logical end. It seemed like too much to me. I would have preferred more Mozart and fewer maniacs and several dozen fewer murders in the mix.

 The Mozart Conspiracy: A Novel    Scott Mariani | Touchstone  2011