Review: Hang Fire by Henry Kisor

I have read all the previous books in the Steve Martinez series. Steve is a Lakota Indian working as a deputy sheriff (now sheriff) in the Upper Peninsula. I’ve also read all of Kisor’s non-fiction books and I’ve enjoyed everything immensely. This one seemed a bit off to me. Perhaps it was the absence of Gina, or the potential relationship with Sue, or that he is now in charge, I don’t know. It’s still very entertaining. It concerns the murders of several people, some apparent accidents, using relic smooth bore rifles. The killer is expert with the antiques and we get to see into the mind, such as it is, of the religious zealot, but her motivations are never very clear to me. Still, I liked the sense of place and the prosaic nature of the investigations. On to the next in the series.

Review: Swiss Spy by Alex Gerlis

Henry is on his way back to Switzerland from Britain. It’s 1939 and he’s stopped at the border before getting on his flight. Edgar, a member of the British Secret Service then blackmails him into spying for them. After some training he’s sent back to Switzerland through France where he is to wait for more instructions. In France, however, Henry circuitously and surreptitiously sneaks away briefly to meet with his Russian handlers. Turns out he’s a Russian spy and his handlers now think they control a double agent. But then we learn the British are fully aware of Henry’s relationship with the Russians. Add a Jewish woman and her daughter hiding from the Gestapo and the plot thickens beyond stew.

I love complicated spy thrillers.

Review: Family of Spies by Pete Early

Another of those must reads after watching the eponymous movie. I have this need to always find out what really happened, i.e., what verity there might be in the dramatic film version compared to real life. Some background reading revealed that John A. Walker’s achievements were monumental. The Soviets could read our communications but not break the code until Walker gave them the code cards. But that was only half of the puzzle. The North Korean hijacking of the Pueblo in 1968 gave them the machine (whether that was the intent of the hijacking remains an interesting speculation.) Why the U.S. didn’t change all its codes after the hijacking baffles me, but they didn’t, and the Soviets could read all the U.S. military traffic until 1980 when the system was changed. That was millions of coded messages. “K-mart store has better security than the U.S. Navy,” John told the author in one of his interviews.

This is the extraordinary story of John Walker who, as a Navy warrant officer, passed vital secrets to the Russians, not out of any political conviction, but purely for the money. He successfully enlisted his friends and relatives in his operation. This went on for more than twenty years. And he would never have been caught except John’s maltreatment of his wife. In fact, the FBI initially discounted Barbara’s revelations much as they ignored the information they had on the 9/11 attackers. John soon realized their ineptitude. “I began to realize that the FBI is not like it is on television. You see, the FBI doesn’t really do any investigating. It doesn’t know how to investigate. The FBI is not powerful at all because its agents are really just bureaucrats and they have the same inherent ineptitude of all government bureaucrats. All they do is spend their days waiting for some snitch to call them and turn someone in. That’s how they operate, and I was beginning to sense that.”

I have always said that the danger to an institution is more likely to come from within (this applies to computer facilities and well as American society - especially with Trump now on the loose.) Of course, that is the danger inherent in trust and it’s virtually impossible to live in a society devoid of trust so the balance between trust and openness and self-protection is a delicate one. “Perhaps it is time for intelligence experts to rethink this central concept of attitudinal loyalty, this idea that Americans don’t betray their country to foreign powers the way that Europeans are perceived to do quite regularly. We trust our citizens to an extent that is almost unknown in history and unheard of in most other countries. This is as it should be. However, we live in a society where money is no longer a mere commodity, but a sacrament. Money is power, possessions, persona, sex, and status.”

Review: Black Orchestra by JJ Toner

Lt. Kurt Muller, nephew of the infamous Reinhold Heydrich, reports for work at the Abwehr one morning only to discover the body of his colleague, an ostensible suicide. It was certainly a peculiar way to kill oneself, pointing the gun to the back of his head before pulling the trigger. Odd indeed and Kurt starts asking a few questions, wondering why the Kripo is taking such little interest in the case. He’s soon promoted to the translation section where they receive all incoming signals which are then translated and distributed. The Gestapo takes an interest in Kurt’s meddling and it’s only because of his relationship to Heydrich that he’s not shot.

Kurt is sent to Ireland, where he was born, to find out what happened to their Irish agents. There he learns of the “Black Orchestra,” originally a college chess club, to which his father (his mother was German) and several others now prominent in the Abwehr had belonged. He finds himself enmeshed in a vicious political battle to take down Hitler but also for control of the Reich’s security forces orchestrated by his uncle.

It’s often a convoluted story with a few gaps but a fun read that barrels along.

Some nice similes: :”Our conversation was like a loose clutch” i.e., slow to start and jerky.”

Review: Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty

What if you suspected that an ostensible suicide was really a murder, but one of the “locked room” variety and it might have been cleverly designed in a way so that you, as a detective inspector who had already solved a different locked room puzzle, would never considered the new murder as a locked room riddle because the real world likelihood of being faced with two such enigmas was completely improbable. |

And yet, according to Bayes’ Theorem which describes “the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event,” the fact that you knew of the previous locked room investigation might influence how you view the current one. Whew.

McGinty comes through once again with an excellent addition to the Sean Duffy series, this one #5 read by a favorite reader Gerard Doyle. Lily Bigelow’s death seemed to be a suicide; no other solution appeared possible and yet the forensic evidence pointed in a different direction. But who would want to kill her? And why?

Duffy’s tenacity pays off in his usual sardonic and winsome manner even as he has to inspect underneath his car for an IRA bomb. It’s 1987 and there are the usual tensions between the police and everyone else although they aren’t as prominent as in others of the series. Several of the books have darkly hinted to being the last of Sean Duffy and this one is no exception (fortunately there is a #6).

Excellent read, but four stars instead of five because I felt it wasn’t quite as compelling as the previous books in the series, but I eagerly await diving into the sixth (Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly.) Note that this one stands alone better than the first three of the series.