Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Thrillers Book List

Want something that will get your blood pumping? Check out this book list...




1) "The Traitor's Emblem" by Juan Gomez-Jurado

Spanish author Gómez-Jurado’s third outing (Moses Expedition, 2010, etc.) offers a redeeming love story set against the unlikely background of extreme violence in Nazi Germany.

The story opens with a Spanish sea captain saving the lives of four strangers he finds lashed to a raft in a raging storm. After risking his own to bring the four on board, one steps forward and gives him a golden emblem, which the captain then passes down to his own son. Later, a man who tries to buy the emblem tells the son how the emblem came into his father’s hands. This is the meat of the novel. The story begins with Paul Reiner, who along with his mother, Ilse, lives with his cruel and calculating aunt and her husband, a baron. They have two sons, one who has gone off to fight for Germany in World War I, and the second, Jürgen, who is slightly older than Paul. Paul reveres the kind older brother, but the younger is a vicious child, who delights in tormenting his cousin and aunt, who both work as servants. Paul’s greatest sorrow is that he knows little of his father, who died when he was an infant. All he knows is his father has been called a traitor, but his mother worships her dead husband and still mourns him. When Jürgen attacks Paul after Paul defends the honor of a young Jewish girl, Alys Tannenbaum, both Paul and his mother flee for their lives. They move into a boarding house where Paul strikes out to find a job to keep them from starving and, against the background of a growing Nazi threat, eventually reunites with Alys, setting in motion a series of events that brings the evil Jürgen back into their lives.

The author tells a riveting love story, spoiled only by the unlikely incorporation of Freemasonry into the plot and a villain so evil he makes Hitler look like a pretty nice fellow.



2) "The Thin Man" by Dashiell Hammett

A good tale but not much of a mystery. The story of the search for a missing lover of a dead woman involves smart society and New York night life.




3) "House of Sand and Fog" by Andre Dubus III

In an enthralling tragedy built on a foundation of small misfortunes, Dubus (Bluesman, 1993, etc.) offers in detail the unraveling life of a woman who, in her undoing, brings devastation to the families of those in her path.

It was bad enough when Kathy Lazaro stepped out of the shower one morning to find herself evicted from her house, a small bungalow to be auctioned the very next day in a county tax sale; bad enough that her recovering-addict husband had left her some time before, and that she had no friends at all in California to help her move or put her up. Then she also had to fall for the guy who evicted her, Deputy Les Burdon—married, with two kids. Sympathetic to her plight, Les lines up legal counsel and makes sure she has a place to stay, but his optimism (and the lawyer’s) hits an immovable object in proud ex-Colonel Behrani, formerly of the Iranian Air Force, who fled his homeland with his family when the Shah was deposed and who has struggled secretly in San Francisco for years to maintain appearances until his daughter can make a good marriage. He’s sunken his remaining life savings into buying Kathy’s house, at a tremendous bargain, planning to reinvent himself as a real-estate speculator, and he has no wish to sell it back when informed that the county made a bureaucratic error. Hounded by both Kathy and Les—who has moved out, guiltily, on his family and brought his lover, herself a recovering addict, back to the bar scene—Behrani is increasingly unable to shield his wife and teenaged son from the ugly truth, but he still won’t yield. Then Kathy tries to kill herself, and Les takes the law into his own hands.

No villains here, but only precisely rendered proof that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.



4) "Room" by Emma Donoghue

Talented, versatile Donoghue (The Sealed Letter, 2008, etc.) relates a searing tale of survival and recovery, in the voice of a five-year-old boy.

Jack has never known a life beyond Room. His Ma gave birth to him on Rug; the stains are still there. At night, he has to stay in Wardrobe when Old Nick comes to visit. Still, he and Ma have a comfortable routine, with daily activities like Phys Ed and Laundry. Jack knows how to read and do math, but has no idea the images he sees on the television represent a real world. We gradually learn that Ma (we never know her name) was abducted and imprisoned in a backyard shed when she was 19; her captor brings them food and other necessities, but he’s capricious. An ugly incident after Jack attracts Old Nick’s unwelcome attention renews Ma’s determination to liberate herself and her son; the book’s first half climaxes with a nail-biting escape. Donoghue brilliantly shows mother and son grappling with very different issues as they adjust to freedom. “In Room I was safe and Outside is the scary,” Jack thinks, unnerved by new things like showers, grass and window shades. He clings to the familiar objects rescued from Room (their abuser has been found), while Ma flinches at these physical reminders of her captivity. Desperate to return to normalcy, she has to grapple with a son who has never known normalcy and isn’t sure he likes it. In the story’s most heartbreaking moments, it seems that Ma may be unable to live with the choices she made to protect Jack. But his narration reveals that she’s nurtured a smart, perceptive and willful boy—odd, for sure, but resilient, and surely Ma can find that resilience in herself. A haunting final scene doesn’t promise quick cures, but shows Jack and Ma putting the past behind them.

Wrenching, as befits the grim subject matter, but also tender, touching and at times unexpectedly funny.



5) "Iron Lake" by William Kent Krueger

Cork O’Connor is a man beset with troubles, some of them of his own making. But he’s a bend-not-break man: an admirable man. And he needs to be, for it’s winter in hardscrabble Aurora, Minnesota. The blizzard that buries the small lakeside town also buries some ugly things with it. Like nasty secrets—and brutal murder. So here’s Cork, who used to be sheriff, who used to have a wife who loved him, who used to have a purpose to his life, sort of stumbling into situations that bewilder him to the nth. There’s the apparent suicide of Judge Parrant. Suicide? Judge Parrant? Not that cantankerous old misogynist. There’s also a missing boy, a good and responsible boy, with no reason in the world for him to have run away. Then there are the murky goings-on over at the casino, where gambling is producing so much wealth for the Native American population that they’ve begun calling it “the new buffalo.” And finally, there’s the windigo, a spirit so malevolent that it can unnerve even those who don’t actually believe in it. Almost despite himself, Cork is soon behaving like the lawman he no longer is, looking for answers that are very hard to find. And yet he does find some. Some of those he discovers, though, he soon wishes he hadn’t. Minnesotan Krueger has a sense of place he’s plainly honed firsthand in below-zero prairie. His characters, too, sport charm and dimension, although things start to get a bit shaky toward book’s end. Still, this first-timer’s stamina and self-assurance suggest that O’Connor’s got staying power.



6) "The Faithful Spy" by Alex Berenson

A thriller worthy of le Carré, beginning with an improbable premise—namely, the infiltration of al-Qaeda by an American agent.

John Wells is a former college football star, unrepentant about having broken a Yalie’s leg on the field of battle. Now, in a real war, he’s a devout Muslim with a long beard and access to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. But is he really a fundamentalist promoting terror? That’s the lingering question of this taut tale by New York Times reporter Berenson (The Number, 2003), who deftly imagines the international shadowland where spooks and assassins ply their trades. In doing so, Berenson avoids the perils of caricature; his bad guys are legion, but they are also recognizably human, and if some of them are a shade evil (“The thought of attacking America always excited him”), others are not completely on board with the whole slaughter-the-infidel program. Wells, as it happens, works for the Great Satan; he’s a “singular national asset,” but one who likes to play by his own rules. Still, has he been turned? The bad guys seem to think he’s one of them, for they’ve sent Wells home to enact a chain of events that will end with the detonation of a dirty bomb somewhere in New York. There are moments in all this that beg for the willing suspension of disbelief, but Berenson doesn’t belabor them; neither does he overwork the formulas (rogue agent falls in love with beautiful but hard-bitten agency handler; bad guys make murderous mayhem), though the book is full of genre conventions. The payoff is tremendous, and there are standout episodes that hint that the fundamentalists know how to work American decadence—as when one terrorist recruits a patsy by telling him that it’s all part of an audition for reality TV.

Well done throughout, and sure to be noticed. After all, Keanu Reeves has already expressed interest in playing Wells.



7) "Terminal Freeze" by Lincoln Child


Furry prehistoric beast thaws, then makes up for lost meals with human victims.

Paleoecologist Evan Marshall leads a group of scientists into “The Zone” in northeastern Alaska. Working out of a small base known as the Mount Fear Remote Sensing Installation, his team from Northern Massachusetts University is doing research on global warming. The only other humans around are a small number of Native Americans, Tunits, to the north. Beneath the ice floor in a cave, the team spots a frozen creature, two fist-sized yellow eyes surrounded by black pupils—perhaps, as the team believes, a saber-toothed tiger. When Usuguk, an elder of the Tunits, arrives to warn the team of evil and advise them to leave, Marshall politely but firmly refuses. Meanwhile, in Virginia, Dr. Jeremy Logan discovers some ominous, though unspecified, information about Fear Base in top-secret documents from the 1950s. More turmoil rocks The Zone with the arrival of brash Emilio Conti, an executive producer with a documentary film crew, big as Marshall’s and twice as boisterous, that promptly sets up a makeshift adjoining camp. The only respectful filmmaker is attractive producer Kari Ekberg. Marshall tries to oust Conti and company, but the producer’s smug announcement that the film has financed the entire expedition effectively neutralizes any objections. After Conti sets about melting the block of ice, the creature inside proves much larger than a cat, though it disappears before anyone gets a good look. Then the tastefully depicted carnage begins. As the body count rises, an ice-road trucker named Carradine boldly drives most of the cast to safety while Conti prepares to film the beast and Marshall seeks help from the Tunits.

Child (Deep Storm, 2007, etc.) depicts his frigid setting with greater authority than his characters, diminishing his thriller’s impact. Far from a classic, but a minor-league Jurassic.



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