Dreams of Justice

by Dick Adler

  In the end, “The Enemy” is a book about loss, not a slick explanation of future behavior. Aided in great measure by a very interesting young black female MP named Summer, Reacher does his job and puts together the pieces of a puzzle linking the dead general and the murder of a tough veteran Special Ops officer who had to hide his sexuality. But there is no glory for Jack in the victory, because his life as a soldier is effectively over. “Both of my families were disappearing out from under me, one because of simple relentless chronology, and the other because its reliable old values seemed suddenly to be evaporating. I felt like a man who wakes alone on a deserted island to find that the rest of the world has stolen away in boats in the night…”

  THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA, by Jamie Metzl (St. Martin’s)

  Not to burden Jamie Metzl’s first book with too heavy a load of literary ancestors, but the political power and poetry of Graham Greene (“The Quiet American”) and Charles McCarry (“The Tears of Autumn”) pervade this superlative thriller set in the chaos of Vietnam and Cambodia. There’s also a strong sense of “The Death and Life of Dith Pran ,” by Sydney Schanberg, which became the film “The Killing Fields.” Add to this a rare talent for making characters determined to change the world quickly win our sympathies in spite of their occasionally irritating self-righteousness, and you have a potent package indeed.

  Metzl, who worked as a United Nations Human Rights Officer in Cambodia and is now running for a Missouri Congressional seat, introduces us to a young CIA desk officer named Morgan O’Reilly. In 1971, Morgan—whose own early family life was strained and stiff—is put in charge of an unusual project: to round up a gang of Cambodian street orphans living rough in Phnom Penh and turn them into useful spies against the increasingly powerful communist forces known as the Khmer Rouge. Four years later, as Vietnam and Cambodia crumble, O’Reilly is forced to leave the boys behind, using his remaining influence to get them out of the capital to a city nearer to the Thai border—where they might at least have a small chance of escaping.

  But Morgan has formed a strong bond with one of the boys, a 14-year-old expert pickpocket named Sophal, and at the moment of departure he gives the boy his own American passport, doctored with a new picture and a changed name. Then O’Reilly goes through a hellish escape of his own, finally getting out of Cambodia and returning to his increasingly depressing intelligence job in Washington.

  What sends Morgan back to Cambodia in 1979 makes up the rest of Metzl’s imaginative, heartbreaking story: political manipulation at a very high level; the search for a surrogate son thought lost forever; the presence of young Americans committed to helping correct what they see as the wrongs of history. Once again, this sounds like a heavy load for a thriller to carry. It is, but Metzl adds enough old-fashioned excitement to pull it off.

  TERMINAL ISLAND, by John Shannon (Otto Penzler/Carroll & Graf)

  How much punishment can Jack Liffey take? John Shannon’s morose, fussily introspective, absolutely riveting private detective is already having trouble recovering from the collapsed lung and mental breakdown he suffered in his last outing, “City of Strangers”—not to mention the reminders of such previous injuries as “a metal plate in his head, a rib with a titanium peg in it, a star-shaped scar on his shoulder, and a bad Frankenstein stitch down one leg”—when he goes against his doctor’s (and his shrink’s) orders to take on a new case which starts, like all of Liffey’s bad trips, with a child in trouble.

  Fortunately for us, the boy in question—kidnapped and bound by a mysterious ninja, who leaves cute Japanese playing cards as warnings—lives in San Pedro, that spiky working class Los Angeles neighborhood which is the city’s last bastion of 1930s radicalism. Jack grew up there with the boy’s father as well as with the disgruntled cop on the case (whose prized model railway is soon destroyed by the ninja), and Liffey’s racist father

  Declan still lives there, cursing anyone who isn’t white.

  San Pedro and its blighted seaside industrial offshoot called Terminal Island are the real stars of the story, bringing back some memories which Jack would prefer to leave behind as well as some of the supremely gifted author’s most telling descriptions of a city whose past history is short but grim. “Then there were the shipyards and the dark glamour of Beacon Street, the tattoo parlors and mission hotels and a bar named Shanghai Red’s, where men had once actually been shanghaied,” Liffey muses with remorseful affection.

  Shannon in his seven books about Jack Liffey has created a truly unique vision of Los Angeles. It’s a place where strange, never fully explained visual images roll across the landscape: a pair of giant, escaped pigs elude cops and shut down a freeway offramp; a Rose Bowl-type float turns out to be a tribute to dead gang members. His eye is as dark as any writer’s, but it’s also one tinged with a wry chuckle of constant amazement.

  ECHO BAY, by Richard Barre (Capra Press)

  The wounded hero—physically, mentally, spiritually—has become such a cliché of the mystery/thriller genre that it takes a brave and talented writer to keep us reading. Luckily, Richard Barre has both qualities to spare. And his first stand-alone novel—a break in his splendid, Shamus Award-winning Wil Hardesty series—has another great advantage. It’s set in and around Lake Tahoe, that magical body of water which straddles the California-Nevada border and is dark and deep enough to make it the perfect breeding spot for Loch Ness-type legends.

  Was there really a luxurious lakeboat called the Constance, which after 40 years of delight and decay was scuttled in Tahoe’s Echo Bay by its lumber tycoon owner in 1940? Barre certainly makes us believe there was, dropping his Shawn Rainey into a pitched battle to finally raise the boat using new deepwater techniques.

  Rainey is an unwillingly returned Tahoe native, once a prodigiously talented skier who blew out his knee just before the Sarajevo Olympic trials, now a failed father whose children are being held hostage by his former slimeball public relations employer in return for Shawn’s involvement in the scheme to raise the Constance. Against him stand a larger collection of formidable opponents than anyone outside a video game should be expected to handle: the lumber tycoon’s powerful daughter, who wants the secrets of the past to remain several hundred feet underwater; a drunken old friend now married to Rainey’s increasingly desperate childhood lover; a local cop who can never forgive Shawn’s involvement in the death of Rainey’s much-admired older brother who was the cop’s best friend. Fortunately for Shawn and readers who might find all this angst too much to swallow, his working class father offers terse support while a sexy bartender signs on for other kinds of succor.

  But the heart of the book is Lake Tahoe itself. “At the base of the slope ending at North Lake, Tahoe stretched on its 22-by-12-mile axis toward South Shore,” Barre writes with the sense of wonder that captures almost everyone the first time they see it. “Even at this distance, Harrah’s and Harvey’s and Caesar’s and whoever else by now had convinced the powers that tall was better reflected back at him. And, in between, the most impossible water he’d seen before or since, a shifting palette of emerald sliding over into blue and, finally, indigo where the real depths, the 1600s, began.”

  EARTHQUAKE WEATHER, by Terrill Lee Lankford (Ballantine)

  Terrill Lee Lankford’s sharp and subtle new mystery is marinated in the brine of the movie business. It’s no coincidence that the screenplay for Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” is one of the literary sorbets which “development boy” Mark Hayes uses to cleanse his palate after workdays spent reading garbage for his boss—a nasty, successful producer of action shlock named Dexter Morton. “Sunset Boulevard” has the same kind of sinuous love-hate relationship with moviemaking as Lankford’s book: Hayes knows he’s up to his shoulders in a very distasteful enterprise, and can’t wait to get in even deeper.

  “Earthquake Weather” begins explosively with a gripping account of the deadly 1994 Northridge quake: Hayes’s apartment in the San Fernando Valley is badly damaged, so he
joins a hitherto unmet neighbor for a pot of coffee. This caffeine samaritan turns out to be a former hotshot film and TV writer named Clyde McCoy, who plays an important part in the ensuing action. The vicious, easily recognizable Morton winds up dead in his own swimming pool after a big birthday party, and McCoy—who knows where several of the producer’s shadier deals are buried—becomes a leading suspect.

  So does Hayes—and part of Lankford’s talent is the ability to keep us wondering if Mark is being completely honest with us about his investigation into his ex-boss’s death. The other part, which makes his novel especially compelling, is the way movie metaphors shape and color everything. Natural disasters are “star-studded events. An Irwin Allen Production made flesh.” Hayes’s apartment is near the site of the legendary La Reina theater, “one of the most famous movie palaces in the Valley…” A mysterious neighbor looks “like Catherine Deneuve in her glory days.” And my favorite: a fictitious film written by McCoy called “Student Chainsaw Nurses” gets three and a half stars from real critic Leonard Maltin due to its “drive-in purity on a global scale.”

  IN THE MOON OF RED PONIES, by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster)

  Is there any crime writer better than James Lee Burke at evoking the rhythms and geography of American myth? His Civil War novel “White Doves at Morning” is a perfect literary time machine, as is his piercing story of a young miner set in Appalachia in the 1960s, “To the Bright and Shining Sun.” It’s all but impossible to think of the Louisiana bayou country without conjuring up scenes from his Dave Robicheaux books; and his latest series, about former Texas Ranger turned lawyer Billy Bob Holland, shows on every page how the legend of cowboy justice lives on. Even though a district attorney says to Billy Bob, now based in Missoula, “Montana isn’t the O.K. Corral anymore,” he—and we—know that’s not quite true.

  In his fourth book in the Holland saga, Burke involves him with the psychological problems of two very different men. Johnny American Horse, a Gulf War veteran and frequent drunk, raises horses, tries to keep oil companies from drilling on sacred Native American land, and has visions like the ones his purported ancestor Crazy Horse was famous for. He’s also caring on an affair with the daughter of a right-wing U.S. Senator. When two hired thugs with guns attack him, Johnny fights back with a hatchet and knife, killing one of them. “Later, he would not recall with any exactitude the struggle that followed,” writes Burke, with the singular power of his lyric prose. “But he knew the blows he visited upon the intruders from an industrial city on the shores of a great lake were more than enough to ensure they would not present themselves to him again, at least not outside the bright edges of his sleep.”

  Johnny becomes Billy Bob’s client, as the plot snakes off into a tangled forest of politics and greed. The other damaged character—a true psychopath named Wyatt Dixon, the rodeo clown from “Bitterroot” who buried Holland’s wife alive—is out of prison on a technicality and ready to raise more hell in spite of his professed conversion to religion and decency. Dixon, one of the most believably frightening villains in living memory, is also one of the most interesting—a fact that plays a large part in the unpredictability and satisfying shapeliness of Burke’s latest book.

  THE MONGOL REPLY, by Benjamin M. Schutz (Five Star)

  The only thing more frightening than Benjamin M. Schutz’s acid-etched portraits of lawyers who specialize in divorce and child custody is how easily they are to believe as they cheat, lie, steal and destroy lives during the course of their daily work. Albert Garfield keeps on the wall of his Washington, D.C.-area office a copy of a letter from a Mongol general named Subutai to Genghis Khan which tells the warrior leader what he is doing to the Persians he’s attacking. “Where we have found them we killed them all, man, woman and child,” Subutai writes. And in an off-the-cuff aside, Garfield then reflects that the Persian leader, when captured, would have molten silver poured into his eyes and other orifices.

  What Garfield has in mind for a sad, hapless young former model named Serena Tully is only slightly less dramatic. Hired by Tom Tully, an absolutely vicious (and also quite credible) ex-football star to strip his wife Serena of their children, all her money and credit cards, and whatever shreds of a life she thinks she retains, Garfield does everything in the realm of nasty-but-legal to achieve his client’s wishes. (In fact, the second most frightening thing about Schutz’s book is how much the legal system actually helps this monster out.)

  Serena has flaws, but she is a loving mother—baffled into near-madness by what’s happening. Luckily, she has been assigned the services of Dr. Morgan Reece, a children’s advocate with a major sadness in his own heart. There’s also one decent old lawyer who seems to think there’s something wrong here. The fact that Tully has been doing some dirty work for his local mafiosi only serves to add one more brutal ingredient to a strongly-written legal thriller by an Edgar-winning author who has been absent from the writing field for too long.

  ABSENT FRIENDS, by S.J. Rozan (Delacorte)

  S.J. Rozan isn’t the first writer to use what happened to New York on Sept. 11, 2001 as the background for a crime novel. But the images of pain, loss and fear on every page of “Absent Friends” are so strong that the book will probably be remembered for them, rather than for the intricate and heart-breaking story of her characters—a group of friends who grew up on Staten Island in the 1970s.

  “Everyone was like this now,” says a criminal lawyer named Phil Constantine (a latecomer to the friends’ circle and a definite outsider who does their dirty jobs but is treated roughly, especially by the women) suddenly caught up in a TV news item involving a client. “Every siren, every subway delay, every unexpected crowd as you rounded the corner made your heart speed, your palms sweat…” And the sense of the city’s vanished crystaline beauty comes through like an arrow in the heart: “In New York now, beautiful days were suspect, clear blue skies tainted with an invisible acid etch.”

  At the center of these absent friends (even the ones who survived paid a terrible price of loss of hope for the future) is Jimmy McCaffery, a heroic fireman who died in the towers. While most of the others remained in their peaceful Staten Island harbor, Jimmy left 20 years ago for Manhattan, where he became a captain at a firehouse near the attack. But why did McCaffery really leave—over a failed love affair, or because of his involvement in some secret payments to the family of a mob-connected man who died in prison?

  A once-great newspaper reporter, now mired in booze and self-pity, thinks he has found the answer, but his body falls from a bridge to Staten Island before his story is finished. His young, idealistic lover is determined to find out why. Constantine the lawyer and other friends of McCaffery would rather let it all sink beneath the water and ash.

  Rozan, who has justly won every mystery award going for her series about Bill Smith and Lydia Chin, knows how to balance their pasts and their presents without trivializing anything that happened on 9/11. Her performance—a dance in front of the burning towers—takes guts, brains and heart, and all are present in abundance.

  REVOLUTION NO. 9, by Neil McMahon (HarperCollins)

  As everyone from Thomas Harris, begetter of Hannibal Lector, and Dan Brown (whose only failure in “The Da Vinci Code” was the heavy you could spot crunching through the literary woods a league away) can attest, creating a believable villain is the hardest work in the artistic world. How many recent thrillers have been spoiled—or almost derailed—by a character who won’t come alive on the page, or who immediately goes over the top into the credibility gap?

  All of which makes Neil McMahon’s success with one of the main characters in his fourth book about Dr. Carroll Monks—a doctor who just can’t stay out of trouble—so stunning. McMahon pulls off the virtually unthinkable here: he creates a terrorist so authentically motivated that he quickly becomes touchingly real. Freeboot, as the leader of a band of drugged-out, deranged outlaws who live on an isolated tract of land deep in the mountains of Nort
hern California calls himself, is a true lunatic of epic dimensions, a “macho speed freak who dominated his followers, made allusions to Machiavelli, and hinted at the grandiose importance that he would enjoy in the eyes of history.” These things are necessary but not sufficient to explain the immediate fascination we have with Freeboot, nor the unmistakable shiver of sympathy we feel when we hear him speak.

  When Freeboot’s 3-year-old son becomes seriously ill, Dr. Monks’s own long-estranged son—a member of the terrorist tribe who has chosen the Beatles song of the title as their anthem—suggests kidnapping the medical man to treat the child. The little boy turns out to be in a dangerous diabetic condition, and Monks’s first chore (aside from staying alive during periodic flashes of violence with his son and other terrorists) is to treat his illness and then find a way to get the child to a hospital.

  Since Freeboot and his followers have actually begun their bloody revolution, by massacring some leading citizens and scattering their stolen objects among the homeless, the terrorist—who thinks of himself as a leader born with the quality of “virtu” (which Monks knows has nothing to do with “virtue in its usual sense… rather, it was the power to govern effectively, requiring a combination of cunning and ruthlessness”—appears irrationally afraid that letting his son go to a hospital could derail his revolution. Dr. Monks, his brilliant, troubled son already lost to him, is equally determined to keep the little boy alive.

  In McMahon’s assured hands, the duel between the rational, scientific doctor and the fascinating, frightening Freeboot—who fizzes with rampant electricity like a short circuit—is an absolutely riveting read.