One Was a Soldier, by Julia Spencer-Fleming ($15)

We jump forward several months from Julia Spencer-Fleming's last book. Her unusual protagonist, Episcopal priest/helicopter pilot Clare Fergusson, has just returned from a stint in Iraq as a pilot to her diocese and life in Miller's Kill, New York.

As far as I can tell, it's 2002 and many of the book's characters have returned to normal lives after their abnormal experiences away from Miller's Kill. They meet in a veteran's therapy session that postdates Clare's return by about five months. When one of the group's members dies, it hits the group hard, not only because there could be malfeasance associated with the death but also because it forces acknowledgement that nowhere is safe.

There are actually two books in one, the first dealing with the mystery surrounding the death and the other about Clare and her fellow damaged souls. It is the latter story that is deep, rich, human and worth telling. We learn how each member deals with the mental and physical injuries he or she has acquired away from home.


How can Clare care for her congregation if she won't acknowledge her alcohol and pill problem? How can she enter into a more serious relationship with Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne if she can't be honest with him? How can she unravel the mystery of her fellow member's death if she won't acknowledge that maybe she can't provide the solutions to everybody's problems all the time?

Spencer-Fleming plumbs human emotions very well. Her main characters suffer from conflict and confusion and helplessness. It is the illuminating journey forward that makes half of this book a cut above.

As the Crow Flies, by Craig Johnson (hardcover, $25.95), set to be released on 5/15/12

It's fine if Johnson wants to hightail it up to the philosopically elevated heights of the Big Horn Mountains every once in a while (Hell Is Empty), but the people and country of As the Crow Flies is where Sheriff Walt Longmire belongs. Actually, he belongs in Absaroka County, Wyoming, but he's slumming it in Montana on the Rez, getting ready for his daughter's wedding to his deputy's brother. (The small-town interlocking relationships stretch all the way to Philadelphia, where Cady and her fiancé live.)

I love the way this book starts. It's full of Craig Johnson's trademarked humor and snappy white man-red man dialogue. It gets a rollicking book off to a great start. Despite the sometimes bizarre circumstances in which the characters find themselves in the eight books of his Longmire series, there is a naturalness to Johnson's writing. It's hard to believe his characters aren't real. If wishes were fishes, I'd be swimming alongside Walt, best friend Bear, more-than-just-a-deputy Vic, just-a-deputy Saizarbitoria, daughter Cady, predecessor Lucien, and dog Dog.

It's just Walt's hapless luck that he should be planning his daughter's wedding in Montana when he stumbles across a murder, drug dealing, a trap set by federal agents, a peyote ceremony, a grumpy reservation police chief, and bad truck karma.

Speaking of bad truck karma, this passage doesn't really have anything to do with either of the main stories, but it's a shining example of Johnson's enveloping humor. This is Walt trying to get Henry Standing Bear's recalcitrant truck, "Rezdawg," to start:

I climbed out, unhooked the rubber straps behind the grille, pinched my finger into a blood blister with the hood latch, and finally got the thing open long enough for it to close onto the back of my head. I pushed it up again, with more effort and a little anger this time, reset my hat, and stood outside its jaws long enough to make sure the hood would stay up. 

Relatively sure I wasn't going to get snapped again, I wiggled the corroded positive clamp on what had to be the original AUTOLITE STA-FUL battery and thought I'd be happy if the damn thing just STA-CHARGED. The greenish-white buildup on the lug fell away just enough for the worn bare part of the cable to turn and rub against the inner fender and shoot sparks around the engine bay, my hand held in an electrified death grip.

Johnson knows how to tell us a (tall) tale, and better than anyone else except James Lee Burke, he knows how to end it. He brings us to our sentimental knees at the end of his stories without bowing at the twin altars of schmaltz and ham.


Craig will be visiting us this summer (yay!). Look for him on Tuesday, June 19, 7:00 p.m. 

House of the Hunted, by Mark Mills (hardcover, $26)

Mark Mills' books are very polished and suave. This book, from our modern retrospective viewpoint, feels like the encapsulation of an aesthetic from a time decades past. A time when spies played at clever games and had to think on their feet, a time when technology hadn't taken over. The story is set on the brink of World War II and is a prelude to the Cold War. Mills' characters dance through layers of subterfuge to define the shifting alliances and allegiances of the countries or causes they represent.

Tom Nash was a spy in the Soviet Union for Great Britain. He was a trained killer and infiltrator. Until he gave it up. After a short burst of storyline in Russia, we next see Tom sixteen years later on the south coast of France, living in bucolic happiness, retired from the spy business, awaiting a celebratory reunion with some of his nearest and dearest friends: Leonard, a former fellow spy and current bureaucrat; Venetia, Leonard's wife, and Lucy, Leonard's stepdaughter; Yevgeny and Fanya, art dealers; and Barnaby, an old schoolmate. With the addition of a few new acquaintances, they are the assortment of louche, disappointed, ingenuous, dissembling, beguiling, and weary characters of Mills' play.

Then someone tries to kill Tom in his own home, and the game is back on.

Tom Nash has given up his cold spy persona for that of a warm human being and worldly ex-pat Brit, so the murderous attempt throws him. Soon after, he must attend a dinner he is hosting:

Tom struggled to engage with any of it, a stranger at his own feast, almost an impostor, only there because he had somehow managed to cheat his destiny less than twenty-four hours previously.

It is Mills' overlying, constant quiet tone that keeps it from being labeled a "thriller" or a "spy adventure," even though there is quite a lot of action. It feels as though this book might have been written in the 1940s or '50s. At the same time, there are some characters, e.g., Lucy, who are clearly cinematic -- added for the benefit of any future movies, perhaps. While I can't say that it was a surprising book, it is thoroughly entertaining, the characters are well-described, and I now desperately want to vacation at La Rayol. There are clever flourishes and sincere moments. 

Cf. Tom Gabbay's "The Tehran Conviction" and Barry Unsworth's "Land of Marvels."

Shadow Pass, by Sam Eastland ($15)

This is the second in Sam Eastland's books about Special Investigator Pekkala, nicknamed "The Emerald Eye."

As a young Finn, Pekkala was brought to Russia to train as a soldier. He was singled out by the Tsar and trained further to be his special investigator. The badge indicating his special status looked like an emerald eye.

After the Romanovs were killed, Pekkala was sent to Siberia. There he endured terrible hardships. If it weren't for bad luck, as the song says, he'd have no luck at all. Pekkala was brought back from the verge of madness by Stalin to solve the murder of the Romanovs. After that case (The Eye of the Red Tsar), Pekkala remained as Stalin's investigator and the holder of a rare honor, the "shadow pass." Like 007's license to kill, Pekkala has the authority to go anywhere and do anything to solve the cases put forward by Stalin.

Pekkala is helped by the effervescent Major Kirov, who turns their office into a garden and offers kumquats to Pekkala like jewels.

In Shadow Pass, the two investigators must find out how Colonel Nagorski, the head of a top-secret department that is working on a top-secret tank, was killed. An accident? Possibly. The body was discovered under the colonel's favorite tank. It might have slipped out of gear when the colonel stepped out of the tank. Suicide? Possibly. He was given to moodiness. Murder? Most emphatically, especially when a bullet is discovered in his head.

Pekkala is a somewhat mystical character. Metaphorically risen from the dead, having survived exile and ostracism, he now somehow survives Stalin's infamous temper. Although an assassin previously shot at him at point blank range, there was not a mark on him, making him a legend in Moscow. No longer the young man who was a confidante of the tsar, he has learned many lessons the hard way over the years. He's tough, wary, smart, and has great reflexes.

The time period and setting that Eastland has selected are ripe for stories of intrigue and danger, and he does a great story-telling job, but it is the creation of Pekkala that is Eastland's best feat. There are flashbacks to Pekkala's time with the tsar, the crazy tsarina, and even crazier Rasputin. That is when Pekkala's character seems most human. He has not yet learned the loss and deprivation that future years hold for him, and has not yet walled off his emotions.

Not a spy story in the tradition of Le Carré or Furst, nor a political detective thriller like Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, nor a political picture of a difficult time like Tom Robb Smith's books, nor a straddling of disparate ideologies like in J. Robert Janes' books, Eastland's works are primarily about one person. Don't think about the unlikelihood that a man could work for both the tsar and Stalin. Don't think about how Stalin sounds almost rational at times. It is easy to warm to Pekkala and Kirov as they make their way through the political minefield of their time.

Sam Eastland is the pseudonym of Paul Watkins, an American author. His biography says that he is the grandson of a London police detective. Good credentials, wot?