Review: Dark Irish Mystery

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★★★★★

Celebrated author John Banville’s latest novel is a slow-burn mystery simmering with secrets, fears, and sins. Almost everyone in it seems a bit off in one way or another, including Detective Inspector Strafford. He’s a fascinating character: brooding, alienated from himself, his feelings, and even the woman he thinks he loves. “It sometimes appeared to Strafford that his life was a series of tableaux as elaborate, studied and unreal as a stage performance at Versailles at the height of the reign of the Sun King.”

The mystery opens in the 1950s with the discovery of a flashy car in the middle of a rural Irish field and a peculiarly calm man claiming that he and his wife have argued, she’s run off and he’s been looking for her. Has she had an accident, committed suicide, or just abandoned him?

At a nearby house where the police are called, the couple renting the place for a week seem to know this man but pretend they don’t. When the local cop shows up, he’s drunk, which adds to the peculiar buzz underlying every word and glance of these people. The mystery fades in and out of view from that point, seeming to parallel a previous mystery Strafford and his pathologist colleague Quirke were involved in. At the end of the novel we find out why that other case lingers here.

Along the way we dive into and out of Strafford’s ambivalent love life and alcoholic Quirke’s profound loneliness. This is where some of the book’s best, most moving prose can be found. And writers who want to polish their dialogue can take a master class from Banville in Chapter 5 where Strafford and his estranged wife have a long conversation that’s quietly nasty and deeply unsettling for both of them. It’s a scene I read twice because it’s so finely crafted. 

There’s also a dazzling, deeply moving foray into the depths of mourning and loneliness which details how badly Quirke is badly coping with the death of his wife. Banville paints the portrait with elegant, moving brush stokes: Quirke feels as “if nothing had happened. The blunt, unceasing continuity of things, baffled him, affronted him. It was a scandal, the entire indifferent business of being alive.”

Equally as fascinating for this American reader, there are many smarky interactions where people recognize with great accuracy each other’s origins and religion based on their accents, something that does not have the charm of anything Henry Higgins sings in My Fair Lady.

Adding to the overall melancholy of the book is the deft description of scenery and the weather which is grim whether the summer has gone on too long or winter rain is pelting down. Physical and emotional atmosphere is everything in this novel.  The Booker Prize-winner is a masterful writer about anything that has been lost.  Here’s how colleagues feel after their boss has died:

“Yet his going left a vast and unfillable absence. It was as if a sacred idol, present for so long that even the attendant priests had ceased to take much notice of it, had been stolen by some sacrilegious vandal, and suddenly the rgeat, glittering temple was reduced to bricks and mortar, and nothing remained of its former sanctity, save a wisp of incense and a gleam of light through one corner of a stained-glass window.”

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has reviewed for The Washington Post as well as several Michigan radio stations, one of which aired his interview show. His guests there included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Erica Jong.

 

Review: Must-read Social Media Satire

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★★★★★

Jesse Sutanto’s searing satirical crime novel is set in LA among the world of TikTok and Instagram influencers who are all desperate to be skinny, beautiful, and have millions of followers no matter what their online “niche” is.  Not just any kind of skinny, mind you, but “LA skinny.”

Successful influencer and gifted schmoozer Meredith, whose super power is making people like her, was offering “beauty and fashion advice with sass” until her fan-protégée Aspen led her into “momfluencing.”  That’s content aimed at mothers of all ages to show how their lives can be fabulous and efficient at the same time. It seems like a deliciously inventive, smooth road that all-too-soon turns rocky.

Aspen was struggling hard until she met Meredith in person. She’s got three kids, one of whom has diabetes; no insurance; and a resentful, low-earning husband. As she puts it, she feels “like I’m on a hamster wheel, needing to come up with nonstop content to feed the perpetually hungry social media machine. But my family, spoiled by my success, had no idea how I was breaking my back to earn as much as I could for their sake.” 

Originally, Aspen only had a measly five thousand measly followers. Under Meredith’s canny guidance about “looks” and content, Aspen soon outpaces her mentor and her numbers blow up. But major success is a torment because it’s absolutely voracious–it makes her hungrier for more, more, more.  She’s increasingly desperate to churn out video and photos of her home and family to show how perfect her life is.

And pretty soon, the All About Eve bell starts to ring as the two women’s friendship goes downhill–and takes a wonderfully bizarre and vicious detour halfway through the book.

Dealing with racism and greed in subtle ways, the novel is alternately hilarious and chilling, an indictment of social media fakery and emptiness. I read it straight through, laughing on many pages, appalled on others, and transfixed by the author’s keen eye for detail and paradox.  She’s also given her dual narrators, Meredith and Aspen, pitch-perfect voices–and that extends to all of the minor characters too, including the kids.

Sutanto excels at hitting readers with the unexpected, and there are several jaw-dropping twists near the end along with what feels like a super-subtle reference to Sharon Stone’s Diabolique.  And then there’s the ever-delightful satire of LA:

“LA is full of wannabes.  It is weary of wannabes.  Its skin has been hardened by cynicism (and Botox), and it has no time for wannabes.”  And it’s “the land of over-the-top emotions.  When it comes to emoting here, you’ve got to go big and fake, or go home.”

I don’t dog-ear books, but I did find myself putting Post-its on page after page and even reading memorable passages to my spouse, like one about a picture-perfect dinner Asp[en cooks that is a total, tasteless sham. 

You Will Never Be Me can be seen as a beach read, but that doesn’t do it justice.  Sutanto’s thrilling, electrifying novel is an evisceration of how social media oppresses and intimidates far too many people and can ruin their lives when it’s ostensibly doing the very opposite. It’s also a fast-paced and thrilling story of narcissistic friendship and betrayal. 

I bloody love this book.

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has reviewed for The Washington Post as well as several Michigan radio stations, one of which aired his interview show. His guests there included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Erica Jong.

Review: Revenge is Best Served Boiling Hot

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★★★★

Meet wildly paranoid and sociopathic Jane Morgan. She’s a midlist author with a dismal career; an obnoxiously superior, unsupportive husband; and a deep wellspring of jealousy and rage.  Being half-Asian has always been a source of shame for her because her family is poor and she’s not slim, glamorous, and beautiful.  She thinks she deserves to be one of those Crazy Rich Asians.

She hates herself as “wildly mediocre,” hates that husband, her career, social media influencers, successful writers, and especially hates California where she grew up because it’s the worst place in the world for someone antisocial like her:

“It’s too loud, too sunny, too fucking friendly. Everyone gets revved up on kale smoothies and cocaine so I can’t even get a tub of hummus without the Trader Joe’s checkout lady grinning at me and calling me honey and asking me how I’m doing and what are my plans for the weekend?  Californians just can’t help themselves.  If I stayed there any longer I was bound to kill someone.”

Jane’s rancid, roiling sarcasm doesn’t simply cut with a razor throughout the book, it wields an axe–and that’s perversely entertaining in this dynamic thriller.

When Jane did her creative writing masters at Oxford University, she became obsessed with Thalia, a gorgeous, charismatic, and wealthy woman in the same program. Thalia seemed to like her, which astounded Jane. Their lives mesh in reality and fantasy as the book goes back in forth in time, taking readers deeper into Jane’s pathologies. 

Sutanto has a superb ear.  She’s given Jane a dazzling, dark, compelling, sometimes appalling/sometimes hilarious voice of a woman trapped inside her own head who hesitates at the simplest reply because she has to make sure that it sounds “normal.” After all, she thinks that her “thoughts are spiders waiting to leap from my tongue and poison everything they touch.”  And they’re worse than that since she often thinks of stabbing people just to shut them up.

She can also imagine walking through a museum “with a little razor, casually slicing apart priceless canvases” because “there’s just something about perfection that makes [her] want to defile it.”  Plain Jane is a ferocious savage inside.  Does Thalia tame her?

Some readers might find the multiple plot twists in the final chapters excessive.  All the same, Jane and Thalia’s story is a cunning exploration of hero worship, shame, internalized racism, and the splendors and miseries of female friendship. On top of everything else, it’s a sharp and knowing satire of publishing: “Anyone who thinks that publishing is a meritocracy is not in publishing.”

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has reviewed for The Washington Post as well as several Michigan radio stations, one of which aired his interview show. His guests there included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Erica Jong.

 

Strangers on a Crazy Train: Book Review

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★★★

So there are these two contract killers who meet on a train to Paris.

That’s not the start of a joke. It’s the opening of It Had to Be You, an often bizarre novel labeled “romantic suspense” by the publisher. 

Jonathan and Eva are lonely and self-pitying sociopaths who feel most alive when they’re killing someone and earning huge fees from the respective agencies that send them out to commit murder. When they first meet on that Eurostar train, they end up having wildly intense and athletic sex on a luggage rack in the baggage compartment.

Sound improbable?  Well it’s even more so when you consider that drug-addled Jonathan has a bullet in his chest as well as what might be a concussion.  Also improbable: the fencing class where Jonathan’s neck gets cut by the teacher even though his face mask should have included protection for his neck. Likewise the scene where the two killers have a seven-course meal together at a tiny French restaurant whose owner’s name is Gestalt (!) and we only hear about the salad and the snails. Given that Jonathan’s a metrosexual sophisticate in Tom Ford suits, it’s weird that he doesn’t even discuss the wine.

After that first erotic onboard collision, he and Eva have been drawn back together because Eva feels that he ghosted her when in fact he just passed out in one of the train’s toilets. But he must be a horrible person for mistreating her, and because her job is killing horrible people, she becomes obsessed with revenge.  So she gets assigned to take him out. Jonathan, on the other hand, had plans for blockbuster sex on his mind, not murder. He’s been longing for one more magnificent encounter with Eva because he is “obsessed, magnetized, dangerously in lust.” 

Their paths cross again and again through the book with multiple plot twists amid the sex and violence. Both hired killers are surprisingly reflective about their lives, their outsider status, what it’s like to stalk and kill an assigned victim. This can sometimes makes for mordant comedy as when Eva thinks, “I know he’s lying to me, even though I’m lying to him, too….it’s how every relationships starts.”

But there are also lines that are laughable in and of themselves: “I want to touch her, but not so much, not all at once.  It is overwhelming.  I have been cooking her for so long that she burns.  I need to take her in slowly.  Blow on her first.” They’re almost redeemed by spots of lovely writing when the author describes Paris, something she excels at.

The publisher is targeting fans of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Killing Eve, and perhaps folks who remember Prizzi’s Honor. It’s ultimately a very dark book that draws you deep into Eva and Jonathan’s sociopathy and trauma. Can they have a lasting relationship while the body count around them keeps mounting? The sketchy last pages seem to say yes because they feel like they’re setting up a sequel.

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has also reviewed books for The Washington Post and several public radio stations in Michigan.

Review: Goth Girl, Interrupted

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★★★★

Agnes Corey isn’t your typical New York editorial assistant.  She hasn’t earned a degree in publishing, didn’t go to a ritzy college, and her past is “a story of abandonment, foster homes, petty crimes, and state institutions.”

She works at a near-bankrupt Manhattan legacy publisher that hasn’t had a best seller since the early 1990s and is likely to be swallowed up by a conglomerate. That might explain why even as a probationary hire, she’s grossly underpaid, earning much less than the current real-life average salary for her job.

Corey is troubled, vulnerable, poor, plagued by nightmares and memories of her mentally ill mother. Adding to the misery is being so broke she can only afford to live in a crummy hostel until luck and daring take charge of her life. She’s hired to help a famous, reclusive author of a very Gothic novel adored by millions, the novel that put her publishing house on the map. Fans have been ravenous for more content from author Veronica St. Clair, a sequel to be exact, because the first book had an ambiguous ending.

The mansion Corey comes to at night and in the rain (of course!) is like every castle or mansion from Anne Radcliffe through the Brontës to Shirley Jackson and beyond: eerie, overwhelming, oozing menace and mystery. Even better, it was once a mental institution and like Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, it seems a bit mad itself.

The author name checks plenty of celebrated Gothic works, and the novelist’s name even echoes the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily St. Aubert.  Goodman deftly deploys time-tested Gothic tropes: scary scenery, shadows, the damsel in distress, exploring dark corners, paranoia, claustrophobia, imagined phantoms, dreadful weather, real and misplaced fears–and of course the house that seems like a brooding, malevolent being.

The author can even make the West Village in Manhattan seem creepy and mysterious–at least at night.  She also writes good satire of the publishing business while giving it the ironic hipster appeal of vinyl and flip phones.

As the novel develops, Corey’s nightmares are so intense that they bleed into her everyday reality, in part because she’s a sleep walker. When she starts taking dictation from the reclusive author whose life might echo the storyline of the original best seller, is that fact or fiction?  Is she a remotely reliable narrator?  If she is, can we trust Veronica St. Clair?  The novel more and more feels like a Russian nesting doll as stories keep appearing within other stories.

Readers may either be fascinated or thrown by the way the book slowly drifts into a tale of drugs and Goths in New York whose soundtrack could easily be Lou Reed’s Street Hassle. And the focus on Corey’s dreams can sometimes feel excessive.  For a deeper immersion in the Gothic style, I highly recommend Sarah Perry’s brilliant, beautifully-written novel Melmoth which revisits the 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin and turns it inside out.

Lev Raphael spent his senior year of college reading all the classic Gothic novelists, some of them in period editions.  The author of twenty-seven books in genres from memoir to mystery, he has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other outlets. His most recently published short story “Lost in London” is a Gothic ghost tale.

Review: “Shanghai” Is a Great Wartime Thriller

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★★★★★

Like Alan Furst and C.S. Harris, Joseph Kanon has a remarkable gift for time travel. Open one of his novels and you’re immediately immersed in the sights and sounds of another era–and something even better: how people thought in that period, what they feared, and what they dreamed of.

That gift is on rich display in his new novel, Shanghai, set in 1939 when part of that city was basically a European-controlled enclave–or colony. Take your pick. It’s been the destination  for European refugees, many of them Jews, who have fled the Nazis and the inevitable war that will plunge Europe into complete and utter chaos. But while they may be safe in Shanghai in one way, there’s the threat of what Japan, which now controls vast swathes of China, might do if their army decides to seize the city. The “island” they cling to could sink at any moment.

Tension and fear permeate the book, infusing the staccato, jittery dialogue and a narrative that is filled with sentence fragments. Kanon has made those compelling stylistic choices to better plunge us into the lives of refugees who have nothing and now live in a chaotic and dangerous work of smuggling, drug dealing, gambling, prostitution, gangsters, and murder.

The hero is Daniel Lohr who’s escaped from Berlin thanks to a mobster uncle in Shanghai paying for his first-class passage from Trieste. As a writer,  Daniel has had no real involvement in anything illegal before, but he learns quickly what the “smart play” is in every situation when navigating the murk of Shanghai’s criminal night life and hyperactive underworld. 

Daniel’s deftness at negotiating comes perhaps too fast to be completely believable. Yes, he was in the nascent anti-Nazi resistance, but he never got a real foothold there before he had to flee from the Gestapo. Ironically, on board the ship from Trieste, he meets Colonel Yamada, a member of Japan’s version of the Gestapo, and their lives become balefully intertwined once they reach China.

Yamada is man whose every word, smile, nod, and glance seems like a move in three-dimensional chess. An on-board scene where he subtly spars with a Jewish table-mate is a chilling masterpiece of threatening understatement. 

As one high-ranking criminal in Shanghai puts it, however, “The Japanese are the war lords now. They want tribute [and they] really believe they’re a superior people.  So they underestimate everyone.” That of course includes Daniel who becomes more and more enmeshed in his uncle’s business.

One of Kanon’s other gifts is the ability to write about sex in a way that is not remotely mechanical: he doesn’t just move bodies around like erotic puppets but stays focused on what the characters are thinking and feeling. They’re people, not just an assemblage of parts. Here’s a brief sample from aboard the ship to Shanghai when Daniel sleeps with another penniless Jewish refugee, Leah:

“Afternoon sex was slower, exploring, running his hand over her skin as if they had all the time in the world.  Nights were like the first one, furtive, rushed, one ear cocked toward the hall, half expecting footsteps. Every night. The sex fed on itself, their last meal, greedy for crumbs. Again and again, the hunger part of some larger defiance, outrunning whatever was chasing them. You can’t get me. Not a romance, an escape.”

Shanghai is a short, lean novel, not remotely as dense and enveloping as Kanon’s Alibi set in post-WW II Venice, for instance, but it punches way above its weight with gripping characters and scenes, and an explosive finish made for a miniseries.

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and the author of nine mysteries and one thriller, along with seventeen other books in many genres.  Raphael has also reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Jerusalem Report and a handful of public radio stations in Michigan where he had his own interview show. His author guests included Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, Julian Barnes, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.

 

 

Review: Civil War Shock & Awe

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★★★★★

Erik Larson is one of our country’s best writers in any genre and one of the few popular historians I regularly re-read.

Whether writing about a historic hurricane in early 19oo’s Galveston or Nazi Berlin in the 1930s, his books are thrilling, evocative, beautifully written, and totally immersive. His level of detail is never excessive but always well-balanced. Every book is a fantastic voyage and his subjects are chosen, he says, for their suspense and a clear beginning, middle, and end. They’re true page turners and you often feel you’ve been transported into the scenes he is sharing.

Larson’s story of the siege of Fort Sumter and the dithering in Washington D.C. about its fate as secession spread through the South is an amazing tale of courage, cowardice, treachery, stupidity, loyalty, lies and propaganda–in sum, a sadly American story.

Relying on contemporary letters, diaries, government reports, speeches, and newspaper stories and editorials, Larson makes you feel like you are in the midst of the rising turmoil in which both sides seem to overestimate their own chances for success.  You come to know President-elect Lincoln and women like the indefatigable diarist Mary Chestnut in new and illuminating ways.  They’re surrounded by myriad schemers, wastrels, fools, incompetents, liars, traitors and cowards–with rare men or women of sense making an appearance anywhere.

And the thread all the way through is the Southern culture of honor and shame. Because so many Northerners believed that slavery was evil and shameful, Southern planters and their kith and kin were humiliated by those feelings, terrified of losing the lifestyle and economy that would collapse without slave labor.  The hysteria in places like Charleston was a heavy miasma, likewise the savage hatred of Yankees.

Larson’s explanation of the weaponry aimed at Fort Sumter and the fortress itself is anything but dry.  You will feel yourself in the thick of the battle. Even more fascinating is his portrait of paranoid, cloistered, provincial South Carolina’s elite who thought of themselves as “the chivalry.”  They believed in fighting duels and quoting poems and novels by Sir Walter Scott as if they were living in another time.  And they were: the rest of the country was expanding railroads and telegraph service while they resisted because such changes could supposedly lead to unrest: slave rebellions.

The book is filled with shocking details like a 9:00 curfew bell ringing in Charleston to make sure that all Black men and women, whether free or slaves, got off the streets and went to their homes wherever they might be. Chivalry, of course, only covered rich white people who lived a life of endless, mindless calling upon another, teas and dinners and horse racing–and politics.  The up side of this was the attack on Fort Sumter which is the main story line: southerners actually at times cheered the bravery of the fort’s commander and his men.

It’s impossible to read this thrilling book that describes such myopic, arrogant, and bigoted participants in the national drama and not think about today’s current cultural and political madness.

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press and  three different public radio stations in Michigan.

England’s Medieval Game of Thrones

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While history buffs are likely very familiar with the Norman invasion of England in 1066, they might not know as much about the preceding half century and this epic book fills that gap.

It was a time of violence almost beyond belief, though it might remind readers of early 1900s pogroms in Russia and October 7th in Israel. Raiding Vikings from various countries as far away as what became Poland weren’t satisfied with just burning Anglo-Saxon towns and cities to ash–even if they’d received gold and silver as ransom. They raped women and cut off their breasts, threw victims into fires to burn alive, speared babies to death or smashed their skulls, and hanged men by their privates when they weren’t beaten, clubbed, or hacked to death.  The survivors often became slaves.

Strife seemed almost constant, with Anglo-Saxon and Viking armies “marching back and forth and up and down the length of England for years, each time inflicting punishment on whatever unlucky locals got in their way, for not having sufficiently resisted the previous conquerors.”  And as if that wasn’t bad, in Normandy, nobles were known to “tear each other to shreds and destroy themselves, for they lust after rebellion, love sedition, and indulge willingly in treachery.”

In both countries, alliances between factions and families could shift with stunning speed, oaths were followed by betrayals that were followed by promises of fealty, exiles and returns were as common as brothers having their own brothers murdered and treasuries raided. Feuds simmer and erupted and died down again, only to savage a new generation.

In these sometimes hellish landscapes, castles were besieged and destroyed and rebuilt, farms were burned, cattle slaughtered, and danger and death were omnipresent–and likewise disease, since the Anglo-Saxons had no understanding of hygiene. They used water riddled with garbage, human waste, and animal corpses. “Random death was so common in England that the Anglo-Saxons had a word for it, aelfscot, ‘elf shot,’ struck down by an invisible, otherworldly arrow.”

And among the various kings, lords, and chieftains on both sides of the English Channel (or “The Southern Sea”) there were plots, coups, murders, betrayals, assassinations and enough violence to make the series Vikings look like something from the Disney Channel.

Parallel to all this madness and dislocation was the quiet, steady, painstaking work of monks copying manuscripts in scriptoriums, work that was encouraged by Alfred the Great to save such treasures for posterity. That very human impulse to save learning and wisdom is both touching and fragile, because raiders had no use for books and loved burning them.

There’s what seems like a cast of thousands here and the names like Aelgifu are hard to scan, but the author does a decent job of individualizing people and separating legend from fact, as well a immersing you in a period that is at times both familiar and utterly alien. Hollway is especially good at charting the changing names of places from Latin to Danish to Old English and Modern English, helpfully explaining the roots of those names. All the same, the fusillade of names can sometimes be exhausting, especially when someone has two or more different names. And there’s way too much speculation about what people might have done or said or felt. 

Beyond that, this book that has two main faults, both of them inexplicable: there are no maps and no genealogies whatsoever, so it’s hard to picture where cities, counties, and countries are located when they’re mentioned, and hard to remember who’s related to whom–and how.  ★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press and other news outlets as well as for several NPR radio stations, one of which hosted his interview show with guests like Salman Rushdie and Erica Jong.

 

Russia and Martin Cruz Smith

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Once American intelligence agencies verified that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, it behooved all thinking Americans to inform themselves about our long-term enemy, an enemy many of us thought was no longer a potent threat. The invasion of Ukraine and the recent suspicious Siberian death of Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s foremost opponent, makes educating ourselves even more pressing.

You couldn’t start anywhere better than with the crime novels of Martin Cruz Smith. They present a wide-ranging, richly-textured portrait of the ailing, corrupt Soviet Union collapsing and slowly turning into an even more corrupt, money-mad Russian kleptocracy. A country that undermines American democracy in profound and devilish ways, like supporting the current Speaker of the House with campaign donations.

The touchstone for all this upheaval is the cynical, battered hero Arkady Renko. Renko should have risen much higher than he has as a police inspector, because his father was a famous general in The Great Patriotic War (WWII).  But he disobeys orders, won’t cut corners, and won’t accept cover-ups. In other words: he’s honest. It hasn’t done him any good in the old order and it’s even less helpful in the new one where everything is for sale. In fact, it almost gets him killed more than once.

His latest dangerous case sends him to Siberia in search of his testy journalist girlfriend Tatiana who’s risking her life researching a story about oligarchs and oil–and much more than she’s let him know about. Siberia is “where strange things happened and stranger things were just around the corner…It was a zone on the edge where planes of existence overlapped.  Nothing was inexplicable.”

But everything is potentially lethal.  When Arkady lands in the grim Siberian city of Chita, the chatty cab driver laughingly warns him, “Don’t go by first impressions.  It gets worse. A few days ago an oil tanker on a train headed to Moscow exploded two kilometers from the station.  It went up in flames for no good reason. They say you could have seen the blast from the moon.”

Renko asks if that happens often there and the driver says, “It’s Chita. Anything can happen.” And anything does, as Arkady is the subject of more violence in this book than ever before, or perhaps more accurately, violence unlike anything he could have imagined.

I’ve read all of the previous novels twice and look forward to reading them again. They’re beautifully written, but not in such a way as to interfere with the narrative. Every word serves the story, like these quietly ominous lines from  Three Stations: “Yegor’s name was like a drop of ink in water. Everything took a darker shade.”

Line by line he’s also one of the funniest novelists we have, and Renko’s sly insolence when dealing with his nasty boss Zurin is one of the highlights of the series. Their barbed relationship doesn’t prepare you, though, for a shocking request Zurin makes near the end of the book that could not only change Renko’s life but change the course of Russian history. And while the characters may be fictional, their prototypes are not.

“Brilliant” may be an over-used word for  reviewers, and so is “stunning”–but both of them fit.  There’s more to say than that, however. Martin Cruz Smith has been writing an epic history of contemporary Russia that should have earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature by now. ★★★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other publications, online journals, and radio stations.  He is the author of 27 books in many genres.

Our Forgotten War

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Anna Reid is the author of Borderland, a brilliant book about the history of Ukraine, and she tackles an even more complicated story in A Nasty Little War.

The Allies in WWI were under the delusional belief that they could intervene in Russia’s civil war, invade the country after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Russia’s peace treaty with Germany, and force it back into the war and/or crush the Bolsheviks. Armies from more than a dozen countries landed in Russia’s Far East, in the Caucasus, and the frozen north near Finland. They fought a dizzying array of armies, supported over a dozen different governments, ignored the massacres of Jews as well as mass executions, and believed that they were making Russia great again. Or at least harmless.

Arrogance, lack of information and insight, shambolic planning, bigotry, and theft of supplies undermined the campaigns at almost every step. One of the most ludicrous examples of stupidity among many falls to President Wilson. He initially sent troops from Michigan and Wisconsin to Russia’s subarctic Murmansk and Archangel because it was believed they would be used to the cold. 

If there wasn’t so much cruelty, confusion, death and and combat, you might think the months of political and military wheel spinning had been organized by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Even when nearly 200,000 troops were on the ground across the vast country, they made very little impact.  The only real success was establishing Red Cross hospitals which had never been a war aim and some treaty agreements for the newly-independent Latvia and Estonia.

The vivid and engrossing book is enlivened by quotations from letters and diaries and many of them from the Allied side are stunning in their crudity.  Churchill as Minister of Munitions thought that Russia was “a very disagreeable country, inhabited by immense numbers of ignorant people.”  As for the Bolsheviks, he likened them at various times to ferocious baboons, vampires, rats, crocodiles, and hyenas.  He was hardly alone in his invective and myopia. My favorite English twit is the aristocrat who wondered airily in Vladivostok why anyone would want to live in Siberia.

Amid the fog of war, Jews suffered way out of proportion to their numbers: as many as 200,000 were victims of mass rape and murder.  The culprits were Russians of all stripes, Poles, Ukrainians, Cossacks. Almost as disturbing as events that presage the Holocaust was the way that British politicians, diplomats and military officers downplayed, ignored, or denied that these horrific massacres were taking place.  Readers might likely connect all of this to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

The book teems with generals, warlords, politicians, Cossacks, coup leaders, assassins–and nationalities and ethnic groups–who most people have never heard of.  Given the cast of thousands, A Nasty Little War could have used a Dramatis Personae section at the beginning to help readers keep track.  It also lacks a detailed map of the Caucasus, but it’s otherwise stunning history of events that should be much better known. Because even an American president and a British prime minister didn’t know their countries had ever fought in Russia.  ★★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press, Jerusalem Report, The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram and several public radio stations in Michigan.