JB

In the aftermath of 9/11, a young security analyst is sent, as he writes, “from one stricken city to another” to interview Thomas Jefferson Danforth, an elderly man who claims that his experiences may help young Mr. Crane’s department keep the country safe in the face of new enemies. Crane is dubious but Danforth asked for him, so, on a snowy night in NYC, the men meet.
"But in the still-settling dust of the Towers' collapse, every corner was being searched, every source, no matter how remote and seemingly irrelevant, gleaned for information. The gyroscope at the center of our expertise had been struck by those planes - so the thinking went - and it had wobbled, and now all its movements had to be recalibrated."
The story swivels from their present to Danforth’s past as he relates his involvement with a group of ‘agents’ in the days before Europe is engulfed in WWII. One of these agents is Anna Klein who is being trained to be sent to Europe to help build the resistance to the Nazis. Danforth is a true novice to all of this, even with his extensive background of travel and an ease with languages. But he's impelled to be involved in the intrigue and to be closer to Anna, a mysterious, quiet and assured young woman. He is unprepared for his emotions: "It was a feeling he found curiously new and faintly alarming, like the first sensation of a narcotic one knew one must henceforth avoid." Ah, but he can't and won't avoid it and it will rule the rest of his life, his quest..”
As Danforth relates the events of six decades in the past, it becomes clear that Crane (and we) are in for a heady evening of philosophizing on love, death, duty, responsibility and, ultimately, revenge. How does an individual stand up to treachery – how does a country? In Danforth's case, by never giving up the search, never giving up his quest.
Tom Cook is a fluid and mesmerizing writer, as an Edgar-winner should be. He’s woven a dazzling narrative that moves through the decades toward events no one – not Danforth, not Crane and not us – can predict. As with the finest fiction, the story and the characters evolve during the course of the book, adapting and growing to fit the events and the story, even young Mr. Crane who is little more than a recorder of the story until…well, let me leave it at ‘until’.
"I had learned by then that Danforth strolled in and out of his story rather fluidly, as a man might drift from one room to another in a sprawling house. There was no fanfare attached to these transitions, nothing to signal a new chapter save a sudden play in his eyes, a tiny light going on or off. Anna seemed always a lingering presence in everything he said, a ghost that followed him no matter where he went. Or was he following the ghost, shifting here or there whenever she beckoned him with some gesture only he could see?”
We're all guided by our ghosts - as individuals, as a nation - all of us. Thomas Cook has given us a breathtakingly rewarding and cautionary story of the benefits, demands and costs of following our quests.

By now you’re heard quite a lot about Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts (Crown hc) and let me tell you that not only are they all right – they may not be saying enough about this book. It is a stunning work, both timely and timeless.
A brief recap: Roosevelt’s new ambassador to Germany in 1933 was an academic named William Dodd. He arrives in Berlin as the Nazis are consolidating power. Hitler isn’t in complete control but he will be by the time you finish it. As the country sinks further and further into his power, Dodd’s reports to the State Department and to the President are clear and alarming but he’s discounted by the professionals in the government.
From our perspective, you read his warning with growing alarm because you know what is coming and you can’t believe that no one’s paying the attention that is deserved. Larson’s genius is that though you know what is coming, he’s created a growing sense of panic and tension even though you know what is approaching. No simple thing.
There are a few things that I did find new and interesting:
One was as Germany slides into madness, the planet begins its descent into a drought period and as Berlin and DC swelter in the heat the conditions of the Dust Bowl take hold. I had not thought about that as not only a metaphor for the coming horrors but also as a mirror image of it all.
Larson questions just why it was that the United States didn’t speak out more against the violence of the Nazis and their treatment of the Jews. He posits that the Nazis were ready with the defence that the US was being hypocritical – treatment of blacks was just as bad. It is a persuasive argument.
It is heartbreaking to read the thoughts of Berliners and foreign diplomats who were stunned and astonished that the Nazis were even in power to begin with and their unwillingness to speak out – their fear was well justified as the 30s wore on but may have made a difference early on – and their assumption that a government of such lunatics would certainly not last. How wrong they all were!
And, of course, it has never been a secret about how much anti-Semitism there was in the US and other countries and how much that played a part in the world not stepping in to stop the Nazis. But the naked, virulent anti-Semitism exhibited by the State Department is really something to behold.
This is a smooth tour through evil with some entertaining guides. Even if you think you know all about this period, I’m certain you’ll be enlightened and enjoy your time spent with Dodd, his family and the people they knew in Berlin before the lights went out.

Annie Jacobsen’s Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base is one of those books that comes out only after decades of secrecy. Like the raft of books on MI5, the Ultra Secret, or the CIA’s ‘family jewels’, it is full of fascinating stories of what really went on during the early decades of the Cold War. Such stories are finally revealed due to two reasons: the secrets are declassified after a proscribed period of time (say, 50 years) and/or the people who were involved are too old to give a damn about repercussions and want to get the story out before there’s no one left alive who can. Sometimes the curse to live in interesting times is made up of from the revelations of the past.

Let me get this out from the start: the story Jacobsen writes never once includes extraterrastrials but that only gigs up the weirdness. Stick with her story. It will keep you buckled into your seat just as the test pilots who flew out of Groom Lake were the new weaponry was tested. Here you get the birth of Stealth, the Hortons and their designs, Operation Paperclip and miles of irradiated landscapes.

This is a book of serious, hard Cold War, of science and technology, of destruction in the name of preservation and, in many cases, of people doing horrible things in the name of the highest calling. Jacobsen will detail the events not only of Area 51 but of many of the other areas, all helpfully laid out on a map.

She will tell you what crashed at Roswell. And what she reveals will be even more unsettling than the little green men you expect. You’ve been warned! [We won’t be stocking the book but will be happy to order you a copy]

Guinn not only gives readers fine sketches of all of the participants - all of the Earps, not just the law men - on both sides of the fight and the people of the town, he gives you the social,economic, political and personal dramas that lead up to that violent 30 seconds. What I found most interesting were, for me, revelations of the political machinations of Wyatt, his ambitions for higher office that were continually thwarted by events, and that, implied by Guinn, Wyatt was not the best know Earp when the brothers arrived in Tombstone - that was Virgil, the eldest who had been a lawman in Prescott. Guinn gives the impression that while folks may've heard of Wyatt, no one was scared of him or in awe as popular culture has promoted. He also makes it clear how compressed the time frame was and how quickly it turned violent and how rare that violence really was. This is not the Gunfight of Hollywood. It is the gunfight that happened. And it is far more interesting than what we all think we know about it.

It is an old story, as old as the country: local control vs. federal control, the rambunctious denizens of the range vs. the quiet workers of the town, the Democrats (the cowboys, the ranchers, the rustlers and robbers who didn't want to be told what to do - the Rebels from the Civil War) vs. the Republicans (the shop keepers, miners and power-brokers who wanted the bad news to stop). Guinn also makes clear how much is not known of those days. Much of what he details is deduced from events and other records of events but his conclusions are clearly explained and backed up by the known facts. He also provides the story of The Story, how different people's writings began the canonization of Wyatt Earp, and the sanitation of the gunfight and the Earps, and how that canonization and sanitation have robbed the story of its depth and dimensions. And it is a story of great depth and dimension. And Guinn's story is an education and epic entertainment.

The Outlaw Album is his latest volume. It’s an accumulation of twelve stories collected from various sources and published as a book for the first time. They’re full of the sorts of characters we’ve come to expect and appreciate from Woodrell: vets, lost souls, people puzzled by the lives they find themselves living, people who are both loyal to others as well as aiming for vengeance. In short, like the rest of humanity but with frayed clothes and different accents.

There’s much heartache in these stories. A father still yearns for his duaghter’s return even though eleven deer seasons have passed. He’s sure someone from the town took her, maybe more than one and wonders “How much of our world is in on this?” A cow is pushed over a cliff by a storm and is left stranded in a tree with no hope of rescue and the owners can only view it as a cruel waste: “Ma said, ‘That cow’s money lost now.’” A man becomes a pariah in his small town after defending himself in an odd confrontation one night: “Pelham came awake one night to find a naked man standing over his bed, growling.”

These stories are gems, vignettes of hope and desire and loss and despair, honed by a master craftsman. If you’ve only experienced Woodrell through the movie adaptation of Winter’s Bone, you’ve not really experienced him at all. But do, he’s wonderful. I’ve read all of his books and am really looking forward to shaking his hand and thanking him in person.

Other Titles:

Winter’s Bone

Tomato Red

The Bayou Trilogy - an omnibus of his first three novels: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing and The Ones You Do, which deal with the three men in the Shade family – two sons and the father – in St. Bruno Parish, Louisiana.

JB recommends:
As has been stated a few times over the years, we all work so closely together that we start to read the same things to the point where we lack the bredth of knowledge and experience and can only recommend a too-narrow slice of the books here from what we all read. Sometimes, I’ve stopped reading I liked because someone else was a big fan and I’ve thought I should go on to other authors someone else hasn’t read.
Back in 1999, I read and enjoyed John Connolly’s first book, Every Dead Thing, the beginning of his series with private eye Charlie Parker. I always meant to get back to the boopks and continue reading them but first Tammy was a big fan and then Fran joined the circus and has pushed them, so I thought I should read others. But now and then you hear your colleagues talk a certain way about a book and, that’s it, you have to return to the fold.
So I’ve spent the last eight weeks reading my way through all ten books and it was worth every millisecond.
I’d forgotten what a lush writer John is, how well he captures the seasons, the views and the people. Like the finest writers, he will sketch out the character of a character in a single line.  “His face creased, wrinkling like a ball of paper that had just been squeezed hard, and even in repose, Earle’s face already resembled the last walnut in the bowl a week after Thanksgiving. “ He’ll slip in a sly social comment, too, like a thin blade between the ribs: “You could still order a Miller High Life at the Sailmaker, and PBR was drunk without a shot of irony on the side.”  And like the finest writers, no one is two-dimensional, no one is 100% ‘good’, though many of the bad guys are 100% evil.
Before the series begins, Parker has lost his wife and young daughter to a sadistic killer. Part of the story of the first book is his search for the Traveling Man. There are things about Charlie and his past that are alluded to – his father’s death, his problematic relationship with his mother – that give Parker both mystery and pathos. And that’s just the beginning.
As the series goes on, it starts to become evident that there is something else going on. Charlie is not only emotionally haunted by the death of his family, he seems to be physically haunted as well. Is this real or is it just in Charlie’s head? There are intimations that the evil in one book is connected to the next, that killers from before have been in touch with new killers, even that there is a larger, wider form of evil that knows about Charlie. He refers to it as the ‘honeycomb’ underworld.
What is most fascinating, and what I’d love to talk to John about, is how he returns to bits of stories and themes from past books and developes them further, making them into broad undercurrents that alter and deepen the series.  How far in advance has he been planning to develop this or that storyline? Did he know he’d return to this character or that event? Was it luck that he had left himself enough room and vagueness to be able to return to fragments left from earlier books, or is just that awe-inspiringly talented? For instance, in the 8th book in the series, he returns to the puzzling death of Parker’s father from the first book, and the series opens up to an all-new level, where Parker is but one little piece of what is going on. And it is creepy. There is no small bit of the supernatural in these books, but it is balanced by a fine black humor and questions of beliefs and sanity.
John is the creator of some of the vilest villains you’ll ever encounter. Rev. Faulkner, the Black Angel, those spirits that whisper from that odd little box, Mr.Pudd…yuck. But then there are his friends Angel and Louis - lovers, men of action, and masters of sarcasm, loyal to Charlie and behind him whenever he’s in a tight spot. He’s created not only a complete world with its own heartbeat, but the cosmology in which it exists is as real as any I’ve ever encountered. Frighteningly real.
Years ago, I used to talk about James Lee Burke as being the only author who dealt with personal and society evil in an honest and humane way. I realized that I had to broaden that statement to include Dennis Lehane a few years later. Now that must be a trio by the addition of John Connolly. 
Start with the Shamus winner Every Dead Thing and don’t stop reading John Connolly until you’re done. Really.

I was a big fan of Charlie Newton’s debut crime novel, Calumet City when it came out in the Spring of ’08 and was hoping that he’d put out something else someday. The wait is over and has been worth it. Start Shooting is also set in the mean streets of Chicago. It tells the story of the Vargas brothers, both Chicago cops, both caught up in forces larger than them. The older, Ruben, is a homicide cop who may or may not be dirty. Bobby, his younger brother, works narcotics. They find themselves in a morass of politics, paranoia and violence when a drug bust results in the death of a new cop, the wounding of a cop who is the son of a powerful bigshot, the ambitious state attorney general begins showing up and the screws are tightened to help win the city a bid for the Olympics. Not only do the characters not know who they can trust, we don’t know who to trust either.

Add to this mix a tabloid exposé that is targeting the brothers, allegations of corruption, an errupting gang war, IAD apointments, possible infiltration by the Feds, and a story of lost love that goes back thirty years – man, and that’s just within the first 150 pages!

Characters are drawn with fine and telling lines. “Jo Ann Mercia introduces herself as the US attorney for the Northern District of Illinois and sits down uninvited. Seeing her here and in person at pushing midnight is so out of line I have to rub my eyes and remember to breathe…Mercia studies me like the motionless, ghetto pit bulls do when you’re about to step into their yard. She’s famous for putting cops and politicians in prison, and for ‘thirty-two-degree eyes that don’t blink when children die.’”

Every small section brings a new surprise, a new ratcheting up of tension and mistrust. At any moment you expect anything could happen because it does – hell, it did and it will. Call it noir, call it hard-boiled, call it impressive and call it great.

William Landay has been a favorite of the shop’s for years. His debut Mission Flats (Dell, $7.50) was a memorable book for its twists and turns. It tells the story of a small town sheriff from Maine who gets drawn into a strange case of a dead Boston DA. The Strangler was the story of three brothers in Boston who are all on different sides but are drawn together when the city’s famous serial killer begins his reign of terror.

Landay’s latest Defending Jacob (Delacorte hc, $26 – signing Wed, Feb 7, noon) is another tricky story: a Boston prosecutor faces the worst possible case – his own son is suspected of murdering a fellow student. Andy Barber of course refuses to believe it but the case begins to cause cracks within the family – between him and his son, as well as him and his wife.

The story hinges on actual, cutting edge law: can such a thing as a ‘murder gene’ be introduced in a defense case? Barber’s father and grandfather were killers, something Barber has never told his wife. He himself has always struggled with violence but never came close to killing. Could there really be something genetic that predisposed his son to kill?

Landay is himself is a former prosecutor, and a father, and says that this defense is starting to be played with. It is too soon to know if it will be upheld or will last – or where actual biology will take the law – but Landay plays it out in fiction and the results will astonish you.

While I admit to not being objective about her books – her first two were also brilliant, audacious and astonishing – this one deserves those words in bold, italicized caps. The trick is that I cannot tell you much about it. Fran’s right – it is pretty much a ‘trust me’ book.

Nick and Amy had both lost their jobs in NYC and moved back to Nick’s hometown in Northwest Missouri to help care for his dying mother. They’ve been there a couple of years at the start of the story and their relationship has withered. On the morning of their 5th wedding anniversary, Amy vanishes. There are signs of a struggle in the house. As the cops investigate, they’re frustrated by Nick’s inability to explain much and how his answers don’t add up. These chapters are told by Nick.

They alternate with chapters from Amy’s diary, which tell you the history of the relationship, how happy they were at first but how things began to slide once they reached Missouri.

It becomes clear early that Nick isn’t telling all he knows to you, the reader, or to the cops. You want to pull for Nick but you begin to have your doubts. He’s just such a schlub: “Desi seemed the definition of a gentleman: a guy who could quote a great poet, order a rare scotch, and buy a woman the right piece of vintage jewelry. He seemed, in fact, a man who knew inherently what women wanted – across from him, I felt my suit wilt, my mannner go clumsey. I had a swelling urge to discuss football and fart.”

At the same time, you want to side with Amy but it starts to feel as if she was no peach, either. In one part, she watches from the motel pool: “I can see a blond head bobbing across the parking lot, and then the girl with the split lip comes through the chain-link gate with one of the bath towels from the cabins, no bigger than a tea towel, and a pack of Merits and a book and SPR 120. Lung cancer but not skin. She settles herself and applies the lotion carefully, which is different from the other beat-up women who come here – they slather themselves in baby oil, leave greasy shadows on the lawn chairs.”

And that is all I can tell you. There are turns you might see coming, but I sure as hell didn’t. Here is where other adjectives are needed: stunning, mind-blowing and funny come into play.

“I got nothing more than a fussy nap toward dawn, woke up an hour later with a hangover. Not a disabling hangover, but decent. I was tender and dull. Fuggy. Maybe a little drunk. I stutter-walked to Go’s Subaru, the movement feeling alien, like my legs were on backward.”

If you haven’t read Gillian, please do. These are engrossing books peopled with full-blooded characters who are both believable and familiar. Her three books are not connected, so you can start anywhere. Her first was Sharp Objects, the second was Dark Places. It is always hard to peg an author easily to give someone an idea of what their writing is like: off the top of my head, I’d say Gillian is a mix of Woodrell, Pelecanos and Lehane – edgy, honest and with the raucus dark humor of the cynic.

“He had beefed up over the years, as had his brother: they weren’t just barrel-chested but barrel-everythinged. Standing side by side, they were about five hundred pounds of dude.”

Book of the year, hands down.

Brilliant, audacious and astonishing.

And a brief bit about the new George Pelecanos. What it Was is a thin book for Pelecanos (I honestly don’t know if it is accurate to call it a novella or just a short novel at 246 pages – if it matters) and is set the past. His series character, private eye Derek Strange, was a DC cop in his 20s and this book goes back to the early 70s, just after he’s left the force to go private. It’s the story of “Red Fury” Jones, a thug who blazed out in a haze of gunsmoke and violence in the days before Watergate and 8-tracks. Strange is hired to find a missing ring and gets caught up in the police search for the increasingly bloody Jones. The ring is a real McGuffin, traveling around from one bad guy to the next. The book is full of hot tunes on the AM, flashy cars and the fashion of the day described in the street patois of the era. People don’t walk on heels, they’re on stacks, they’re trousers are belled and the ‘fros are tall. And, as usual, as masters such as Hammett or Block did before him, George sets the scene with an economy of words that let you see the people and the action. “Another one,” said Williams to the bartender, a man named Gerard who had wide shoulders and a mustasche so thin it was barely holding on to his face.” If you like your books fast and dark, full of black humor with writing and action that punch, pick up Pelecanos. This would be a good start to his work as it goes back in time to when his characters were younger. What is Was is available in trade paper or as a limited edition boxed hardcover that is signed, $35. (The publisher is out of stock on these, so don’t hesitate if you’re interested. We don’t know how long they’ll be around! No problem getting the paperback. As his characters would say, ain’t no thing.)

Charlie Huston’s The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, is the sort of modern-day noir that is both refreshing and familiar. His characters never end up where they start at the beginning of the book which is one reason I like his writing. Too often the people involved in crime stories have their lives interrupted but it all goes back to what it was. Not in Charlie’s universe.

Web is a guy whose life has been off its rails for a year now and he’s alienated everyone around him. His roommate and best friend gives him an ultimatum – get a job, get a life and get a job. He goes to work for a small outfit that cleans up after people die, whether that is by violence or not. Needless to say, this new gig will lead him into trouble.

Web is a true wise-ass, which is part of his problem but also part of his charm. Whatever situation he finds himself in – watching someone murdered with a telephone, for instance, in his apartment and then having to clean it up – he’s so wholeheartedly irreverent that you can’t help but like him. Soon he’s up to his eyebrows in stolen nuts, a possible femme fatale, a war between cleaning outfits and the desire to reattach himself to humanity even while he’s trying to puzzle out just what went wrong in his life. Actually, he knows, but it takes him awhile to grasp it.

If blood and maniacs don’t bother you, if you like cool, crisp writing and a pitch-dark sense of humor, read Charlie Huston.

There are many books coming out these days on the assassinations of the 60s, as well as other events from that era, and actions of the US government. One of the reasons is that so much is beginning to have its secrecy lifted. Enough time has passed and enough of the actors have died that keeping it under covers makes little sense. What these books have in common is that they give us a much richer view of what was going on around us during those tumultuous days.

The Awful Grace of God by Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock is one such book. The subtitle is “Religious Terrorism, White Supremacy, and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr”. Their aim is less to try to solve the crime as much as it is to place it within the context of the racial violence that took place four decades ago – and then to tie it to religious and racial violence that still takes place.

First, concerning the assassination of King, the authors do a fine job laying out the questions that linger over the shooting of Dr. King. They do a good job laying out the case for Ray being part of a conspiracy, perhaps as a patsy, perhaps as a lower level flunky caught up in fast-moving events and abandoned as the convenient ‘gunman’. Ultimately, they make no concrete claim but write about how the government needs to reopen this case and give it the investigation it deserves.

One aspect that needs clarification is James Earl Ray’s finances. Time and again, the authors write about how he was a known cheapskate, how he guarded his money carefully, yet he traveled widely in the months before the assassination and seems to have spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on various deals, enterprises and trips. Where’d it come from? They don’t adequately address the issue of his finances before, or after, Memphis.

What they do provide is a vivid and complex story of how advanced and continental in scope the white supremecists were, and how unsuspecting the authorities were about its tactics and abilities. The authors bring up notorious cases – the Birmingham Church bombing and the “Mississippi Burning” murders - not as isolated cases but as battles in a much larger war. They trace other attempts on King and successful attacks on others, like Evers, and show the breadth of the fight that the far right/lilly white/christian extremists were waging. And what is most strange and frightening about all of this is that these yahoos were convinced that they could start a religious/racial holy war in which they would be proven to be the superior people, God’s chosen.

Sound like anyone else who has been in the news in the last decade? (I kept waiting for them to invoke Helter Skelter, but Charlie Manson didn’t get mentioned.)

While the authors do make trenchant analogies to the battles being fought against Islamic extremists, they do let slide the continuing ‘war’ between the government and violent Christian extremists: the Olympic bomber, those who shoot doctors or bomb clinics, and advocate the overthrow of the government by violent means. Then, too, they don’t point to the progression of this hate-filled ideology past the King assassination.

Out of this same vicious wing of zealots came Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations of Idaho. Recall that they supported themselves with armed robbery, at least one of which took place at a bank in Seattle’s Northgate shopping center. Into the 1980s, factions were still thinking that they could provoke a race war.
It is a fight that never ends.

But it brings to mind the Bob Marley song: “How long will they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?”

The Awful Grace of God by Stuart Wexler and Larry Hancock is an interesting book if you’re looking for the dark history of our nation and how we got to where we are today.