SUMMER THRILLERS

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The Fixer, by Joseph Finder,  Dutton 2015

Looking for the next Robert Parker, having worked my way through all of John Sanford, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Lee Reacher thrillers, was hoping that Joseph Finder was the guy.  Not quite - his literary sense, wordsmanship is nowhere near Parker's elegant and spare diction, but his plot development and movement is a movie.  In fact, two of Finder's works have been translated into film - Paranoia and High Crimes.  

Boston readers will recognize the opening scene - a deteriorated Victorian just off Harvard Square.  Other locations from Marblehead and the Lynnway appear as our protagonist, a recently laid off journalist now camping out in his father's study surrounded by squirrelly nighttime noises and the trash left by squatters,  the house's only inhabitants in the years since his family left eight years before.  It's a wreck, unsafe and unsettling, but ejected from the high living of his previous life, Rick Hoffmann figures he will secretly make do, until, that is, he hires his childhood and next door neighbor Jeff to perform some pre-sale fix-ups.  When Rick and Jeff follow the sound and smell of rodents up to the attic, and Jeff takes a sledgehammer to a hidden storage space, what Rick finds - and quickly tries to hide - is a tarp-covered pile of hundred dollar bills that disrupts what remains of his high life.  There's just no hiding $3.5M of Ben Franklins, and their origin, his stroke-victim father's shady legal dealings, and all the characters that come with it, are now part of Rick's new life.  

The book's not perfect, but the movie should be great.  Boston readers will love Finder's use of the Big Dig tunnel high jinx, the seamy side of Boston politics, and the chase scenes.  Rick Hoffmann gets more than he ever hoped for, but first, he has to pay the piper...

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Cold Betrayal, by J.A. Jance, Touchtone 2015 

J.A. Jance readers will be pleased to dive into this latest in the Ali Reynolds series, perfect summer reading.  This time Sister Anselm finds herself drawn into the primitive and anti-female world of a cult called The Family.  When a young pregnant woman is hit by a car on a remote road near Flagstaff, Arizona, Sister Anselm, a taser-toting nun, rushes to the victim's bedside.  Soon enough the young woman's identify is discovered - she is a runaway from this polygamous sect, and because no one is allowed to leave The Family, her safety is still not ensured.  Other characters appear as Jance leads us through a plot that leaves no turnings clear until the the book's final gun-filled resolution. You've got AK47s, the subplot of The Family's illegal human trafficking activities, Ali's new domestic situation, and various friends and hangers on. 

All is not clean and tidy however, despite the happy removal of one more dangerous cult - "We lit the fuse on this," Sister Anselm said quietly.  " We didn't mean to, but we did. Our getting involved caused all those deaths."   A contemporary lesson in good and evil, where the victims are women and kids, and the good guys stand up, as we'd hope, to take on the bad guys, summer readers will enjoy Jance's latest tale of Sister Anselm and her colleagues' best work.  ,   

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But Enough About You (essays), by Christopher Buckley, Simon & Schuster (paperback), 2015

Yes, Christopher Buckley is the only child of THAT William Buckley, schooled as one would expect a scion of this distinguished and brilliant family.  Fortunately I discovered this treasure of outrageous humor, side jokes, funny images, and irony just as I was preparing for what turned out to be 9 1/2 hours of breast cancer surgery - a lost day, really - and this book helped.  Not to say that the general anesthesia and chest block, thank you Dr. Sharma,  followed by a two days of oxycontin were not what I also needed at the time, but Christopher Buckley deserves a short thank you note for providing me with something better than pharmaceuticals.  I was hooked by page one of Chapter One, although even the Preface is funnier than anything his Dad would have attempted: "Freighter Days":

Call me Whatever.  At eighteen I went to sea, not in Top-Siders, but in steel-toed boots, as a deck boy aboard a Norwegian tramp friehgter.  My                                         pay was $20 a week, about $100 today...The final leg - Colombo to New York around the Cape of Good Hope - was                                         thirty-three days, longer than expected owing to a Force 12 gale in the South Atlantic.  In such seas, the ship's autopilot cannot function; the steering has to be done manually.  I took my turns at the helm in a state of barely controlled panic at the thought that thirty-one lives depended on my ability to steer a shuddering, heaving 520-foot ship through mountainous seas.  When  the next man relieved me, my hands shook so that I couldn't light a cigarette.  Even some of the older men, who'd seen                 everything in their time, were impressed by this storm.  Arvid winked at me.  "Maybe we sink, eh?"

I like a man who can laugh later about terrifying events.... Reminds me of the surgeon drawing cut marks on my chest with his orange-capped Sharpie, later, a light-hearted  gift to me - "Here, you keep this!" in remembrance of this $140,000 and growing hospital experience, now a too-big and overly pervasive life milestone.  Cancer wasn't on my bucket list. .  

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The Sunken Cathedral, by Kate Walbert, Scribner 2015

If you've loved the New York of neighborhoods -  the gritty and dangerous old Meat Packing District, the bright and charming Upper West Side, Alphabet City and its brick immigrant tenements, each with its own raucous languages and rhythms, you'll be drawn into Kate Walbert's newest, The Sunken Cathedral,  This is not the old New York of her eighty-year old protagonists, Marie and Simone, but a shifting and uneasy examination of lives in a neighborhood that moves and drops around them.  The unexpected inrush of Hurricane Sandy's cold ocean waters, the streets and old buildings whose 19th century bricks were not enough to stand in place, the brief shining memories these New York lifers call up, each of these pieces speaks to loss and continuings. Walbert has managed to capture huge moments in simple sentences and six word descriptive phrases.  One Chapter, XL, illustrates her story:

Very Grand is not amused.  Who knows when the water will reach her slippered feet?  Already her toes are moist and cracked and now the water rises from the basement, entirely flooded so that the hot-water heater swirls with the washer and the dryer and the mud that once, remarkably, they packed with horsehair and straw and molded into bricks.  The mud bricks are lajyers of sludge, actually, studded with two-bit-piece coins and arrowheads.

Imagine it!  Abe had said.  These foundations laid as the Civil War raged!

The characters in this novel make the story, while the inevitable life shifts leave us grasping for some reason, some reassurance that their world and ours is not just about loss, endurance and pain, but about humor and resilience as well, as one would of course expect from this great city. 

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Small Victories, Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace, by Anne Lamott, Riverhead Books 2014

I love this writer, but I wish she'd lose those dreadlocks.  She's worn them all the way from Hard Laughter, my introduction to Lamott novels, through to her senior living Small Victories, a less toned and athletic drive through her Marin/church/friends/catastrophes/hikes neighborhood.  At the same time as I read Christopher Buckley's But Enough About You, this book was selected by our book group's anonymous decider (they always refuse now to specifically identify the selector) just as I was sucked into the tunnel - mammogram, repeat mammogram, mammogram with ultraound-guided biopsy followed by the 6-doctor 4-hour medical afternoon consult, followed by the bigger MRI with the new biopsy and more serious pathology report followed by two change direction phone calls - "it's a moving puzzle"  the oncologist smartly advised, followed by lengthy lectures on the dangers of lymphedema and cheerful tips on drain care, finally decisively sliding into a date, a tag team match when two eager surgeons scraped out the old bad tissue that over sixty years I had come to love as my own lovely and perfect pink and white breasts, to be replaced by horizontal black dots of sutures and squooshy silicone inplants.  I needed something more than pharmaceuticals to approach this, as would anyone.  A few male friends who understand the words bilateral mastectomy still shiver when they think of it - one in fact said " it's like threatening to cut off your dxxx, it's that scary." 

Anne Lamott's work deepens as she draws other victims and survivors, like her breast cancer friend Pammy who took her skiing and showed Lamott how to fall down correctly.  " I used to have a rack," Pammy said as she swooped and glided fearlessly down another expert slope.  And there's her rehab buddy who's still struggling as a single Mom, nearly cashless, rattling her way in a rusted wreck, stuck in the supermarket parking lot as Lamott leaves bearing her "Win a Turkey" Thanksgiving prize.  Lamott recognizes her friend, they both fall into tears, and Anne, as one would expect, rolls the gift turkey parcel right through her friend's open window.  Gone, 25 pounds of prime white meat, on its way to dinner and second helpings followed by four or five solid days of leftovers. It's a religious experience. 

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The Oregon Trail, A New American Journey, by Rinker Buck, Simon & Schuster 2015

What a hoot!  For a serious subject Rinker Buck - don't you just love his name! - infuses humorous reality into a nearly impossible and impossibly long and circuitous cross-country journey that could only partially duplicate the original Conestoga wagon experience.  After all, highways, no trespassing, cross-country food, state lines?  It's nearly unimaginable, and one publicist calls this trip a cross between Bill Bryson and Cheryl Strayed!  (who made considerably less than Buck's 20 - 35 miles per day on her Pacific Coast trek).  I think of it as great Summer Reading, an intentionally slow trip back to a trail that 15 years before the Civil War saw 400,000 pioneers head to the West Coast, but with humor.  And the author survived the trip.  

AND FOR LATER SUMMER READING:

Management on the Mend, The Healthcare Executive Guide to System Transformation, by Dr. John Toussaint with Emily Adams, Thedacare Center for Healthcare Value 2015

COMING UP.