Still More Spy Novels I Have Known
Friday, December 27th, 2013 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizvogelAs always, to each their own, IMO, YMMV, etc., etc. More notes for my own reference than reviews proper; if you find something of use here, help yourself; if you think I'm completely wrong, well, that's why there are lots of different kinds of books in the world.
I've had half of this write-up sitting around forever; I rather fell off the modern-thriller wagon for a while, and forgot to post what I'd already done. So first, the catch-up:
Spoilers for:
Francine Mathews, Blown - Not bad. There seemed to be some pronoun confusion at the beginning, and it took me a while to start caring about these characters as much as the author seemed to think I should. However, some of that may be due to me dropping in in the middle of things; this is apparently a fairly direct sequel to her previous book. The characters were pretty interesting once I warmed up to them, drawn with a decent amount of depth without bogging down the plot. The author did a nice job of handling two largely separate plot-lines; the CIA agent heroine chases a connection between foreign and domestic terrorists with the help of a reporter, while her not-dead-after-all husband scrambles around Europe trying not to get done in by either the bad guys he was infiltrating or his own boss who now finds him a terminal embarrassment to be cleaned up. Mathews also managed to hold my interest with both sets of terrorists, which is pretty high praise given how quickly terrorist stories usually bore me. The tradecraft was respectable, detailed without being overdone. And the surprise twist was actually surprising, telegraphed just enough to give a sense of foreshadowing but concealed enough that I didn't have to wonder why the other characters didn't see it coming. All in all, while I wasn't blown (sorry) away, I wouldn't mind reading more, including the prequel.
Side note: I just discovered, courtesy of the author's website, that Francine Mathews is also Stephanie Barron, of Jane Austen Mysteries fame. Neat.
Andrew Grant, Die Twice - Also not bad. It felt a little like coming in on the second act of a play, but since it's a sequel, that's understandable. (Maybe I should just start with second novels?) The main character is both reflective and action-oriented enough to be reasonably engaging, the tradecraft is mostly solid, and the plot, although terrorists again, has enough going on to keep the pages turning. The writing style was nicely balanced and well-paced; first-person, but he made it work. The Brit view of Chicago was entertaining and rang true. The frequent digressions onto incidents from training should have annoyed me, but they were interesting in their own right and the author did a generally good job of linking them thematically to the main storyline. There were a couple of flaws, such as an operative in need of general background research -- in a modern-day business hotel in Chicago -- heading to the public library to look something up; um, can we say internet, and hotel business center? And I'd figured out who the surprise bad guy was by about a third of the way through the book -- at least, I kept hoping he'd turn out to be a bad guy, because otherwise he was an inexcusable doofus. The final denouement was a little pat, but not intolerably so. Mostly, this worked because of the main character, who is the sort of unapologetic hard-business operative I enjoy and who has a solid voice throughout. Overall, not brilliant, but I'd read another by this author.
Mike Lawson, House Justice - Not so good. As I write this, I've gotten to chapter seven; so far I think there's been more point-of-view characters than chapters. I've come to the realization that I don't like that technique; multiple POVs are fine, but multiple =/= infinite. As far as I can tell we haven't even met the main character yet, and of the ones we have met, I don't like any of them. The plot (a 'fixer' deals with a troublesome journalist, a leak, and an assassin) still sounds interesting, but the execution is just not my cup of tea, and life is too short to spend this much of it with people I don't like, even fictional ones. This one's going back to the library unfinished.
That was the old; on with the new:
Spoilers for:
Greg Rucka, Private Wars - I know Rucka's Queen and Country series is supposed to be the spiritual successor to The Sandbaggers. And it is, if by that you mean "serial numbers inadequately filed off". It's not so much the precise duplication of Mackintosh's SIS structure, which is understandable; it's the replication of certain character conflicts, very nearly word for word in some cases, but without the characterization depth that sold them in the original. If The Sandbaggers is 88% cocoa Endangered Species, then this is Palmer chocolates; you keep going thinking it'll be satisfying if you have just a little more, but they're just not the same thing. Also, I'm the last person to parrot "show, don't tell" like it's useful advice, but the first third of so of this book is solid tell. It does get better once there's some action going on, and the tradecraft's mostly solid. (Except for the bit with the gun in the waistband; there's a reason people don't do that, and that was it.) As it goes on, it rather feels like Rucka is trying to fit three episodes under a single cover, and the end result is awkwardly paced and, well, much more like three separate related episodes than one novel. It's not awful, but instead of engaging me, it's just reminding me how much I'd rather be watching The Sandbaggers.
David Ignatius, Siro - I started reading this once and had to send it back unfinished, partly because it was thick and thinky and I just didn't have time, and partly because it was so good it was funking me out about my own writing. I finally got around to checking it out again, and... huh. It was still good, but the sense of being totally out of my league was gone. The author certainly knows his stuff; the settings especially are well-realized, with the sense of someone who's either been there, or really done his research. Ignatius does a good job of portraying the CIA as a moribund collection of bureaucrats and time-markers while still making it interesting, and his maverick old-dog-with-a-scheme is believable without being banal. His female lead fares less well; I don't usually distinguish between female characters and male characters (they're all just characters), but it's obvious Ignatius does, to the point that she doesn't have much characterization that isn't about being a woman in the service. The plot is complex without being confusing, and while you can see the train-wreck coming, the ride is still worthwhile. Overall, not bad, I'd read more, but definitely not the omg-I'll-never-be-able-to-match-this that I thought on first exposure.
Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity - I read this because everybody and their dog had been talking it up, and as is often the case, I found myself seriously wondering what everybody and their dog were thinking. Starting out a novel with the first-person narrator caving under fairly mild duress, at least compared to what she described others resisting -- I'm not spoiling anything here, that was the first page -- does not create a character I particularly sympathize with. In fact, it makes her pretty contemptible, and that's not somebody I want to spend a novel's worth of time with. The writing style's not bad, but I trudged on only because I hate not knowing how a book ends; it took me weeks to get through the first half.
Then I read the second half in one sitting. By the end, I was crying. The beginning was redeemed, everything that was hinted at or seemed like a missed opportunity at the time was explained, and all of it was woven through with an understatedly-compelling backdrop of people shooting each other, making sacrifices, and living in fear, all for what seems like a not very good reason to be tearing up rose gardens. Damn. I don't know as I'd like to read more -- "like" isn't exactly the word for how I felt about this -- but I will approach any future books from Wein with wary respect.
I've had half of this write-up sitting around forever; I rather fell off the modern-thriller wagon for a while, and forgot to post what I'd already done. So first, the catch-up:
Spoilers for:
Francine Mathews, Blown - Not bad. There seemed to be some pronoun confusion at the beginning, and it took me a while to start caring about these characters as much as the author seemed to think I should. However, some of that may be due to me dropping in in the middle of things; this is apparently a fairly direct sequel to her previous book. The characters were pretty interesting once I warmed up to them, drawn with a decent amount of depth without bogging down the plot. The author did a nice job of handling two largely separate plot-lines; the CIA agent heroine chases a connection between foreign and domestic terrorists with the help of a reporter, while her not-dead-after-all husband scrambles around Europe trying not to get done in by either the bad guys he was infiltrating or his own boss who now finds him a terminal embarrassment to be cleaned up. Mathews also managed to hold my interest with both sets of terrorists, which is pretty high praise given how quickly terrorist stories usually bore me. The tradecraft was respectable, detailed without being overdone. And the surprise twist was actually surprising, telegraphed just enough to give a sense of foreshadowing but concealed enough that I didn't have to wonder why the other characters didn't see it coming. All in all, while I wasn't blown (sorry) away, I wouldn't mind reading more, including the prequel.
Side note: I just discovered, courtesy of the author's website, that Francine Mathews is also Stephanie Barron, of Jane Austen Mysteries fame. Neat.
Andrew Grant, Die Twice - Also not bad. It felt a little like coming in on the second act of a play, but since it's a sequel, that's understandable. (Maybe I should just start with second novels?) The main character is both reflective and action-oriented enough to be reasonably engaging, the tradecraft is mostly solid, and the plot, although terrorists again, has enough going on to keep the pages turning. The writing style was nicely balanced and well-paced; first-person, but he made it work. The Brit view of Chicago was entertaining and rang true. The frequent digressions onto incidents from training should have annoyed me, but they were interesting in their own right and the author did a generally good job of linking them thematically to the main storyline. There were a couple of flaws, such as an operative in need of general background research -- in a modern-day business hotel in Chicago -- heading to the public library to look something up; um, can we say internet, and hotel business center? And I'd figured out who the surprise bad guy was by about a third of the way through the book -- at least, I kept hoping he'd turn out to be a bad guy, because otherwise he was an inexcusable doofus. The final denouement was a little pat, but not intolerably so. Mostly, this worked because of the main character, who is the sort of unapologetic hard-business operative I enjoy and who has a solid voice throughout. Overall, not brilliant, but I'd read another by this author.
Mike Lawson, House Justice - Not so good. As I write this, I've gotten to chapter seven; so far I think there's been more point-of-view characters than chapters. I've come to the realization that I don't like that technique; multiple POVs are fine, but multiple =/= infinite. As far as I can tell we haven't even met the main character yet, and of the ones we have met, I don't like any of them. The plot (a 'fixer' deals with a troublesome journalist, a leak, and an assassin) still sounds interesting, but the execution is just not my cup of tea, and life is too short to spend this much of it with people I don't like, even fictional ones. This one's going back to the library unfinished.
That was the old; on with the new:
Spoilers for:
Greg Rucka, Private Wars - I know Rucka's Queen and Country series is supposed to be the spiritual successor to The Sandbaggers. And it is, if by that you mean "serial numbers inadequately filed off". It's not so much the precise duplication of Mackintosh's SIS structure, which is understandable; it's the replication of certain character conflicts, very nearly word for word in some cases, but without the characterization depth that sold them in the original. If The Sandbaggers is 88% cocoa Endangered Species, then this is Palmer chocolates; you keep going thinking it'll be satisfying if you have just a little more, but they're just not the same thing. Also, I'm the last person to parrot "show, don't tell" like it's useful advice, but the first third of so of this book is solid tell. It does get better once there's some action going on, and the tradecraft's mostly solid. (Except for the bit with the gun in the waistband; there's a reason people don't do that, and that was it.) As it goes on, it rather feels like Rucka is trying to fit three episodes under a single cover, and the end result is awkwardly paced and, well, much more like three separate related episodes than one novel. It's not awful, but instead of engaging me, it's just reminding me how much I'd rather be watching The Sandbaggers.
David Ignatius, Siro - I started reading this once and had to send it back unfinished, partly because it was thick and thinky and I just didn't have time, and partly because it was so good it was funking me out about my own writing. I finally got around to checking it out again, and... huh. It was still good, but the sense of being totally out of my league was gone. The author certainly knows his stuff; the settings especially are well-realized, with the sense of someone who's either been there, or really done his research. Ignatius does a good job of portraying the CIA as a moribund collection of bureaucrats and time-markers while still making it interesting, and his maverick old-dog-with-a-scheme is believable without being banal. His female lead fares less well; I don't usually distinguish between female characters and male characters (they're all just characters), but it's obvious Ignatius does, to the point that she doesn't have much characterization that isn't about being a woman in the service. The plot is complex without being confusing, and while you can see the train-wreck coming, the ride is still worthwhile. Overall, not bad, I'd read more, but definitely not the omg-I'll-never-be-able-to-match-this that I thought on first exposure.
Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity - I read this because everybody and their dog had been talking it up, and as is often the case, I found myself seriously wondering what everybody and their dog were thinking. Starting out a novel with the first-person narrator caving under fairly mild duress, at least compared to what she described others resisting -- I'm not spoiling anything here, that was the first page -- does not create a character I particularly sympathize with. In fact, it makes her pretty contemptible, and that's not somebody I want to spend a novel's worth of time with. The writing style's not bad, but I trudged on only because I hate not knowing how a book ends; it took me weeks to get through the first half.
Then I read the second half in one sitting. By the end, I was crying. The beginning was redeemed, everything that was hinted at or seemed like a missed opportunity at the time was explained, and all of it was woven through with an understatedly-compelling backdrop of people shooting each other, making sacrifices, and living in fear, all for what seems like a not very good reason to be tearing up rose gardens. Damn. I don't know as I'd like to read more -- "like" isn't exactly the word for how I felt about this -- but I will approach any future books from Wein with wary respect.
