Tag Archives: corruption

Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead*****

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The Ray Carney mystery series is among the most exciting new series to emerge during the past decade, and that is hardly surprising, given that it’s written by Colson Whitehead, who has two Pulitzers and a host of other prestigious awards to his credit. The first in the series is Harlem Shuffle, which came out in 2021. Crook Manifesto is his second. I was unable to get the galley this time, but happily, my son bought it for me for Mother’s Day. I mention this because it’s rare that I pursue a book once I’ve been denied the galley. In this case, it was worth it!

Ray Carney, when we met him first, was a man who’d sometimes been known to bend the law in the past, but as a family man, it was important to him to lead a straight, steady life now. Carney owns a furniture store, financed by money his father had socked away before he died. Ray politely refused to deal with the sort of merchandise that, you know, fell off a truck. That had been a big part of his father’s life, but it wasn’t his.

The place is, of course, Harlem, in New York City; the time is the 1970s.

Ray’s dad had lived on the wrong side of the law. Decent, above board jobs were hard for a Black man to come by in Harlem, so when something needed to exchange owners, or a decrepit building needed to be set ablaze, Mike Carney was your guy.

But not Ray.

I seldom read a book printed on paper anymore, so when I do, I put it in the bathroom. No novel that remains in the bathroom from start to finish can have five stars. In the case of Crook Manifesto, it emerged immediately, but after a few chapters, it went back in, and it managed to stay there until an electrifying moment at the 78% mark, when I sat bolt upright and dragged the book over to the bed.

It all starts out with a corrupt white cop who forces Carney to accompany him on a shakedown. There’s the carrot, and there’s the stick. On the one hand, he can give Carney tickets to see the Jackson 5 live in concert; Carney’s daughter has a birthday coming up, and would give a great deal to see that concert. Tickets are impossible to get, but the cop has some. And then there’s the stick; the cop can make Carney’s life very, very difficult. And so Carney has no real choice.

But among all of the wrongdoings occurring in Harlem, there’s an arson that nearly kills a boy, puts him in the hospital. Carney is obsessed with this. It’s over the line, and he wants to find out who did it and make them pay. And in the process, which involves side business and some interesting new characters, he is forced to reckon with exactly how his own father managed to support his family.

And so that whole middle section of the story, which is atmospheric but relatively low key, is the calm before the storm, but oh honey, that storm is coming. Believe it!

I cannot wait for the third book in the Ray Carney series to come out. When it does, I’ll be ready. If you love this genre, you should start with Harlem Shuffle, then advance to Crook Manifesto directly. Highly recommended.

Blind Fear, by Brandon Webb and John David Mann*****

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Blind Fear is the third book in the red hot series by former Navy Seal Brandon Webb and concert cellist turned author, John David Mann. When the two of them collaborate, the pages jump. My thanks go to Net Galley and Random House for the invitation to read and review; this thriller is for sale now.

In Cold Fear, the second in the series, our protagonist, Finn, is on the run. He’s a SEAL for the U.S. Navy, an elite combat diver, but corrupt elements have framed him for the slaying of his closest team members, and until he can prove his innocence, Finn needs to be invisible.

He’s good at it.

Now he’s moved on from Iceland to Puerto Rico, and he’s been renting a room from Zacharias, an elderly man that supports himself and his two grandchildren by running a café. He works in the café in exchange for room and board. But now there’s trouble; his two grandchildren haven’t come home. Zacharias would go and look for them, but Zacharias is blind.

There’s nobody better at ferreting out secrets than our man Finn, but doing so puts him at risk. He’s deliberately stayed clear of the city because there are so many military people stationed there. The hinterlands have been safe, and until he can come forward with the proof he needs to save himself, the hinterlands are where he belongs.

But then…what about the children?

Like those before it, this is a taut, tense thriller with multiple massive emergencies weaving in and out of one another. We have Finn’s need to avoid discovery yet, find the missing children; now add a serial killer known as El Rucco who’s left grizzly human remains all over the island and a major hurricane, and friend, this is not your bedtime reading material. Read this one sitting up and with the lights on. Just trust me.

Through all of this, Finn also deals with personal baggage that he tries to ignore, but which comes to him in dreams. He has blocked out a large portion of his early life due to trauma, and he has “questions that had hung over him for thirty years like a kettle of vultures.” This is no soap opera and so we see and hear very little of it, but the snippets that intrude during Finn’s unguarded moments heighten the suspense and the reader’s sense of dread.

There are other praiseworthy attributes I could discuss; as we are introduced to the setting, we have brief but meaty passages that serve to inform us about the injustices that are meted out to this lovely but impoverished nation, and the way that the U.S. government has kept its boot on the necks of the people that live there. But all of this remains secondary to the story itself, and the focus is tightly maintained. The research is meticulous, and the organization is stellar. The development of the protagonist is outstanding; the secondary characters, particularly Zacharias and the older grandchild, Pedro, are visceral and memorable, and I would be delighted to see them again.

Highly recommended to all that enjoy a true thriller.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang, by Marcel Theroux*****

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“How did someone created by one reality begin to operate by the rules of another?”

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang is an excellent work of literary fiction by novelist Marcel Theroux. This is the first time I’ve read his work, but it will not be the last. My thanks go to Net Galley and Atria Books for the review copy; this book is for sale now.

I am drawn to this novel initially because of its setting. Nobody sets a book in North Korea! I am fascinated. Then I learn that the author is the son of Paul Theroux, the veteran travel journalist whose work, by chance, I have only just recently found and read. So there are two reasons for me to start this book, but once I begin, I realize that in the future, I will read whatever this author writes, regardless of where it’s set or who his relatives are.

The author’s notes indicate that Theroux has experience in North Korea, and this informs his work here. This book, remarkably enough, is based on a true story.

Our protagonist is Jun-su, a child growing up in poverty in rural North Korea. He and his parents believe the official explanation for the widespread poverty and malnutrition, which is that the blockade imposed by the United States and other Western nations has created the situation. Children in Jun-su’s class sometimes fall asleep at their desks, because they are starving. Part of the school day is also spent doing hard labor for the State. It doesn’t occur to Jun-su, or to anyone he knows, to question the misery imposed upon him, because it’s happening to everyone in the village, and they don’t go anywhere or see anyone outside it, so they assume the whole nation is suffering in the same manner.

Then comes the day when Jun-su falls ill with rheumatic fever. He misses a lot of school, and his teacher, Kang, visits him at home, bringing acupuncture needles to help with the pain. It is during this time that he is introduced to a game his teacher calls “The House of Possibility,” but which is actually Dungeons and Dragons. This game will be both a blessing and a curse to Jun-su for the rest of his life.

Because the illness permanently damages his heart, Jun-su cannot participate in labor with his classmates, and so instead, he becomes a poet, and he wins a contest and briefly meets the Dear Leader. He is sent to study at an elite institution far from home, and his eyes are opened in a number of ways. Soon he sees that not only is not every North Korean impoverished, but some live lives of unimaginable luxury. The corruption has been part of his entire life, but he can only just now see that.

Theroux does a fine job of developing Jun-su, but he does an even better one with setting. We can see what a hall of mirrors is involved in living in a Stalinist nation, where no civil liberties exist and unspoken, unwritten rules prevail alongside those that are codified. For example, the Dear Leader is so exalted that a person can be in big trouble if their home burns down and they don’t rescue his portrait (and that portrait WILL be hanging in the house,) and likewise, someone that sells hot food had better be sure there are no pictures of the Dear Leader in the newspaper he uses to wrap fish.

My one concern is that the story might degenerate into an anti-Communist diatribe, but that doesn’t happen. This is an outstanding novel, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to you.

Scorpions Dance, by Jefferson Morley****

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The Watergate burglary’s fiftieth anniversary has passed, and Jefferson Morley, a longtime journalist and political biographer, has written a history of that event; the focus is Richard Helms, the man that ran the CIA and had to walk a tightrope between the demands of President Richard Nixon, and what best served the CIA. This book is for sale now.

If you are searching for just one book to read about the Watergate debacle and/or Nixon, this isn’t it. However, if you are a hardcore Nixon buff, as I am, or if you are a researcher, looking for specific information for academic study, you can hardly do better.

My thanks go to Net Galley and St. Martin’s Press for the invitation to read and review.

Helms was a slick operator, walking a tightrope as he sought to protect the reputation of the agency while maintaining cordial relations with Nixon and those around him. For some of this, there’s a heavy irony involved here; how can anybody ever make the CIA look less than sleazy? But of course, leftists like me are not the ones Helms wanted to impress in the first place.

As the administration sought to damage political enemies that might prevent Nixon’s reelection for a second term, its shady dealings—hiring thugs to ransack a psychiatrist’s office in search for dirt on an opponent, and planting bugs in the office of the Democratic Party in the Watergate Hotel—proved to be the president’s undoing.

Two of the ugly characters in service to Nixon were in charge, for example, of interviewing candidates for a “riot squad” of counterdemonstrators to oppose the anticipated throngs of antiwar demonstrators that were anticipated in Washington. “One of them was Frank Sturgis, whose reputation for violence preceded him. ‘The men were exactly what I was looking for,’ Liddy rumbled in Will, his best-selling memoir. ‘Tough, experienced and loyal. Hunt and I interviewed about a dozen men. Afterward Howard told me that between them they had killed twenty-two men, including two hanged from a beam in the garage.’”

The burglaries had too many moving parts to be kept completely under wraps, and consequently, the president and his top advisors were soon looking for scapegoats below themselves, men that could be packed off to prison while the country regained confidence in the administration that had supposedly brought them to justice. At one point, they had Helms in their sights as a possible fall guy, and the former CIA director, McCord, who was retired, caught wind of this and was having none of it. In a letter, he said, “If Helms goes and the Watergate operation is laid at the feet of the CIA where it does not belong, every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert. The whole matter is at the precipice now.”

There are moments when I wonder if the ghost of Richard Nixon haunts the White House, cackling with glee to see a former president in far more trouble today than he himself experienced when he was there. Who knows what the old dog would have thought about the political machinations unfurling today?

Morley has a conversational narrative tone that works wonders. Because I had fallen behind, I checked out the audio version from Seattle Bibliocommons, and narrator John Pruden does a fine job bringing it to life. But the most impressive aspect of this book is the research behind it, with treasure troves of primary documents and brilliant integration of data from multitudinous places. The endnotes are impeccable, enabling other researchers to trace back the facts to their original sources if they need or desire it.

For a niche readership of researchers, this is a five star work, but I suspect most interested parties will be of a more widespread readership; for them, this is still a fine read at four stars. Most satisfying.

Invisible Child, by Andrea Elliott*****

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I was invited to read and review this book by Random House and Net Galley, and immediately I accepted, because it’s right in my wheelhouse. However, I also understood that it would be a painful read, and I postponed it for months, because 2021 was already a terrible year, and I wasn’t feeling brave. So my apologies for the delay; at the same time, this book is not quite as wrenching as I expected, and the research and writing are stellar. It’s for sale now.

Dasani Coates is the firstborn child of an impoverished, disorganized African-American mother with few marketable skills.  She is named after the premium brand bottled water, because her mom thinks it’s a beautiful name. (Wait till you see what the next baby’s name will be!) They live in Brooklyn, and not long after Dasani is born, she has a sister. And another. And another, and then eventually a brother and a couple of step-siblings. None of them are the result of poor family planning; all are planned and wanted. But at the same time, they have very few resources, and the slender safety net provided by relatives doesn’t last forever; and the city fails to protect its most vulnerable denizens.

As a retired teacher that worked in high poverty schools, I have seen families similar to this one, and the children suffer the most, every stinking time. I’ve also seen children take on the role that Dasani assumes without ever planning to do so, that of the adult in the house (when there is a house,) caring for a large group of tiny people when the actual adult isn’t adulting. If you watch closely enough for long enough, it can eat you alive; as for the far-too-young surrogate parent, I have seen them cope admirably, right up until they become adults themselves, and often, it is then that they fall apart. I don’t know whether that holds true for Dasani, because we don’t see her as an adult, but I can well imagine.

Elliott, a Pulitzer winning journalist from The New York Times, follows this family closely for eight years, sometimes sleeping on the floor of their house or apartment. In her endnotes, she explains her methodology, her relationship to the family during this project, and the parameters determined by the paper, for whom she originally did this research. Dasani was the subject of a front page series on poverty in New York which ran for five days. Elliott’s documentation is impeccable, and she can write like nobody’s business.

Because I am running behind, I check out the audio version of this book from Seattle Bibliocommons, and I want to give a shout out to Adenrele Ojo, the narrator, who is among the very best readers I’ve yet encountered. Though I continue to use my review copy at times, I like Ojo’s interpretation of the voices for each of the large number of characters so well that I find I prefer listening to reading.

As I read, I become so attached to Dasani that I skip to the end—which I almost never do—because if she is going to get dead, I need to brace myself for it. I’ll tell you right now, because for some of you, this might be a deal breaker, and I’d hate for you to miss this important biography: it’s dark, but not that dark.

I don’t find myself feeling nearly as sympathetic toward Dasani’s mother, Chanel, as the author does, but I do think Dasani’s stepfather, who is the only father she knows, gets a bad, bad break. He jumps through every single bureaucratic hoop that is thrown at him in an effort to get some help for the seven children left in his care, and every time, the city turns its back on him, right up until a social worker comes calling, finds that they don’t have the things they need, and takes his children. This made me angrier than anything else, apart from a few boneheaded, destructive things that Chanel does.

For those that care about social justice and Civil Rights issues, this book is a must read. I highly recommend it to you.  

Another Kind of Eden, by James Lee Burke****

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James Lee Burke is a living legend, a novelist who’s won just about every prize there is, and whose published work has spanned more than fifty years.  My thanks go to Net Galley and Simon and Schuster for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

Another Kind of Eden is a prequel to Burke’s Holland family trilogy. The time is the 1960s, and protagonist Aaron Holland Broussard is in Colorado working a summer job. He falls in love with a waitress named JoAnne, but there are obstacles to their happiness everywhere he looks. There’s a charismatic professor that won’t leave her alone, a bus full of drugged-out young people that have fallen under his influence, and of course, there’s corruption among the local wealthy residents, which is a signature feature in Burke’s work. Aaron is a Vietnam veteran, and he has residual guilt and grief that get in his way as well. He’s got some sort of an associative disorder, though I am not sure that’s the term used; at any rate, he blacks out parts of his life and cannot remember them. He also has anger issues, and he melts down from time to time; there’s an incident involving a gun that he forces a man to point at him that I will never get entirely out of my head, and kind of wish I hadn’t read.

I had a hard time rating this novel. If I stack it up against the author’s other titles, it is a disappointment; a lot of the plot elements and other devices feel recycled from his other work, dressed up a bit differently. But if I pretend that this is written by some unknown author, then I have to admit it’s not badly written at all. By the standards of Burke’s other work, it’s a three star book; compared to most other writers, it’s somewhere on the continuum between four and five. Since I have to come up with something, I decided to call it four stars.

All that being said, if you have never read anything by this luminary, I advise you to start with one of his earlier books–almost any of them, actually.

Marley, by Jon Clinch**-***

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My thanks go to Net Galley and Atria Books for the review copy of Marley, a retelling of the Dickens classic told from a different point of view. This book is for sale now.

This work of historical fiction took off with a bang, and then fizzled.

I have not read any of Clinch’s earlier work, and at the outset of this novel, I am electrified by his prose. I love a good word smith, and Clinch’s facility with figurative language is impressive as hell. I was ready for a good Christmas book, and the October release date was right on the money. I snuggled beneath my favorite fleece blanket and immersed myself, savoring the clever phrasing and rereading parts of it before moving on.

There are two aspects of this work that hold it back; one is a quibble, but one worth mentioning, and the other is more significant. The quibble is that so much of the story isn’t about Marley. We know about Scrooge. If the author wants to write about Scrooge from a different angle, then the book’s title should reflect it. Instead, Marley’s effort at winning Scrooge’s sister Fan pulls us back into the Scrooge family, and there we stay for long stretches of the book. I echo other reviewers in asking, “But what about Marley?”

My larger objection, one that took awhile to gel as I read and ultimately prevents my recommending this book, is that the entire premise, the sacred message imparted by Dickens, is ground beneath Clinch’s authorly heel as he reframes Marley as a forger, smuggler, and criminal of the highest order. Dickens, in writing the original story, took pains to demonstrate that it is possible to be a “sound man of business,” to function entirely within the letter of the law, and still be morally bankrupt. A Christmas Carol was written to let readers know that those that succeed in legally building fortunes may nevertheless be damned if they are unwilling to extend themselves, whether through private charity or humane governmental programs. Scrooge made a point of telling his nephew that he pays his taxes, after all, and that’s the end of it.

In painting Marley as a man that brings money into the partnership through a multitude of illegal practices, Clinch not only ignores Dickens’s timeless moral and social message, but torches it, leaving only so much ash and cinder.

The chains that bind Marley in the afterlife reflect the chains of human bondage in his corporal one, as he invests the assets of Scrooge and Marley in slave ships, is a lovely literary device. I wish the author had found a way to use it without laying waste to the heart and soul of a timeless classic whose message is needed more today than ever.

Not recommended.