Genre: political thriller

Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Last Mandarin by Louise Penny and Mellissa Fung

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Last Mandarin by Louise Penny and Mellissa FungThe Last Mandarin by Louise Penny, Mellissa Fung
Narrator: Eunice Wong
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: political thriller, suspense, technothriller, thriller
Pages: 400
Length: 13 hours and 16 minutes
Published by Minotaur Books on May 12, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A standalone thriller co-written by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Gamache series and an award-winning journalist.
In a fast-paced, all-too-real thriller co-written by #1 New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny and award-winning journalist Mellissa Fung, global politics become personal for two unlikely heroines. Alice Li, a first-generation Chinese-American, is an erstwhile food blogger who has lived in the shadow of her mother, Vivien Li. A Chinese dissident who escaped China after Tiananmen Square, Vivien is now a globally recognized human rights activist and passionate advocate for a free and democratic China.
When security and fire alarms go off simultaneously all around the world, setting off a panic, the signal is traced back to China. As world leaders scramble to respond, Vivien and Alice are called to the White House in hopes Madame Li can decode the Chinese intentions.
While it makes some sense that the President would turn to Vivien, since she regularly advises world leaders on the actions of today’s Chinese government, what isn’t clear is why they’d want to talk to Alice.
After looking at the evidence, Vivien says that the only thing worse than the Chinese government being behind it, is if they are not. It would mean, she explains, that some clandestine element within China is calling the shots. That the President of China has lost control. And an unstable China cannot be good for anyone.
Or perhaps that’s exactly what the shrewd old politician wants everyone to think.
Caught up in the chaos, Vivien and Alice are uniquely placed to stop the next, cataclysmic attack. But there are forces deep within both the American and Chinese governments intent on stopping mother and daughter. The estranged pair, who excels at misunderstanding each other, must figure out how to work together.
The increasingly frantic search for answers takes the women from the Oval Office to an office building in Akron, Ohio, from the noodle shops of Hong Kong to the necropolis of the first emperor. Along the way they must decode an old legend, and an old language invented by women, for women.
The Last Mandarin is an electrifying study of absolute power and voracious greed, political terror and personal conviction. But it is also, as to be expected from the minds of Louise Penny, beloved author of the Gamache novels, and Mellissa Fung, an acclaimed international journalist, an intimate examination of choice, of sacrifice, of memory and myths, both cultural and personal. It is the story of a mother and daughter, as well as a compelling international thriller about the precarious balance of power across the world, and within a family. And what happens when both break down.

My Review:

The Last Mandarin is a bit of a “six impossible things before breakfast” kind of story. Then again, our perspective on the frequently insane events of this tale is named Alice – and she often doesn’t believe what’s happening either, even while she’s in the midst of experiencing it.

Especially while she’s experiencing it.

The story begins with food blogger Alice Li in the restaurant of one of Washington D.C.’s premier hotels, watching resentfully as seemingly everyone in the room sidles up to the table to pay homage to her mother Vivien. Vivien Li, a refugee from the People’s Republic of China just after the 1989 protest and massacre at Tiananmen Square, has made a name and reputation for herself in the U.S. as a renowned human rights activist, an outspoken speaker against the communist regime that continues to control and suppresses the people of her homeland and an expert on the politics and history of the country she fled.

Alice has spent her entire life in her mother’s shadow, never measuring up to whatever unspoken plans and ambitions her mother had for her. Alice is still standing in Vivien’s shadow, dragged along in her mother’s wake, when every single alarm and warning system on the entire planet – and the space surrounding it – goes off at once. Everywhere, all at once.

And Vivien – with Alice in tow – is dragged from the hotel to the White House to speak to the members of the President’s inner circle about the source of what can only be considered an attack. Because whoever did this, however they accessed every warning system everywhere, including the space station in orbit and literally all the civilian and even military ships at sea, did it from somewhere in China.

Not that the country of China was exempt from what happened. Only that someone there must know something. And that Vivien – or one of the President’s advisors – should have seen it coming. But they didn’t.

All they have is one last text from one of Alice’s old college friends. She thought Liam was just a fellow food blogger, but his message was clearly more – and so was he. Whether he was a spy, a double agent, or merely an agent of Vivien Li’s own private spy network is something yet to be determined.

But Alice Li is determined to find out what really happened. As well as with figure out who, and what, her mother really is. It might make more of a difference than either Vivien or Alice can imagine if Vivien can manage to look past her own hubris to understand who her daughter really is, and what she’s really capable of, as well.

Before it’s too late.

Escape Rating A: This story is more than a bit of a wild ride. It’s the kind of story that the late Tom Clancy used to right, filled with paranoid plots, insane situations, mutually assured destruction brinksmanship, and the potential end of the world as we know it. (That Clancy is both dead and still publishing new books fits right in, as that’s just as impossible as much of both his – and this – story.)

But the impossibilities are in the details, and in the characters who find themselves thrust into the position where they are the only ones who CAN save the world. Even as the people who believe they are the powers-that-be gibber in paranoia and delusions and paranoid delusions that might even be partially true, worrying about vast hidden conspiracies and whether or not they’ll be blamed for the destruction.

The idea that the world is much more vulnerable than we think it is, and that world leaders are simultaneously afraid of each other – with reason – and have more in common with their enemy counterparts than their own people, can be, and probably is, both counter to what we believe AND entirely true. (That concept comes straight out of old Cold War espionage stories, where the enemy agents in the same situations understood each other better than the folks back home understood them – and vice very much versa.)

Again, even if the details of this story seem over-the-top. Which they mostly are.

At the same time, it’s easy to see co-author Louise Penny’s fingerprints all over the way this story works. There’s an ongoing thread through her beloved Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries in regards to hidden, deeply rooted, long buried, patiently waiting gigantic conspiracies. And that’s exactly what’s at the heart of this story – even if their motives are different from Gamache’s usual run of antagonists.

Because the story here combines human and political plausibilities and possibilities with the implausibility of its heroes and historical antecedents which careens hard into Dan Brown and the arcane, hidden historical meanings and implanted codes of, well, The Da Vinci Code.

And it’s that juxtaposition of the likely with the quirky and otherwise downright impossible that readers will either fall into in fascination or bounce off of hard and fast.

I fell hard, for the most part. I loved the conspiracy theories and the historical underpinnings. The strained relationship between Chinese dissident turned civil rights activist Vivien Li and her resentful adult daughter Alice grounded the story in the real even more than the plot wrapped around the real-world bogeyman of artificial intelligence run amok in cyberspace.

The way that the new conspiracy is steeped in the myths and legends of Chinese history will either captivate readers or push them out of the story. I love those kinds of details, but reading mileage definitely varies.

Readers who set aside their disbelief, or at least let it rest for a while, will enjoy The Last Mandarin a great deal. It’s the kind of espionage thriller that we don’t see nearly as much of as we used to. In that sense, and in its choice of foci and protagonists, it reminds me a bit of The Silver Fish as well as both Clancy and several of M.L. Buchman’s series, particularly his Miranda Chase series.

It’s also a story that is even better in audio. I listened to Eunice Wong’s narration – she’s a great reader for Alice – and got so caught up in her reading that I was up until 3 am finishing the audio instead of switching to text and wrapping up in a single hour. It was worth it.

So if you can wrap your willing suspension of disbelief around this combination of implausible heroes and not nearly as insane as we’d like them to be conspiracy plots, The Last Mandarin is a fascinating and fantastic read. In multiple senses of both words!

#BookReview: Perun’s Hammer by Ian Heller

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Perun’s Hammer by Ian HellerPerun's Hammer: A Novel by Ian Heller
Format: ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: political thriller, science fiction, technothriller, thriller
Pages: 324
Published by Menlo Park Press on April 6, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Better World Books
Goodreads

What if you received a video showing exactly what happened to Amelia Earhart?

And then similar videos of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Tulsa Race Massacre? What would you do if historians and experts verified every detail, and none of the videos showed traces of CGI?

If you’re Rich Penton, lead reporter at the investigative news show, RECON, you’d try to figure out who made the videos, who sent them to you and what you’re supposed to do about them. The only thing you’d know for sure is that the existence of the videos is absolutely impossible.

For humans.

But when the RECON team receives a video showing Chicago destroyed by an asteroid in the near future, they decide they’d better take it seriously. That’s when they feel the full force of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, which clearly don’t want RECON involved in whatever mess this is, and the Russians send an assassin to ensure that anybody who tries to broadcast the videos winds up dead.

Perun’s Hammer blends exciting and contemporary AI, foreign intrigue, murder, historical mysteries, hazardous asteroids, undercover agents, a bizarre cult, and a mysterious intelligence that seems to be able to see through time.

My Review:

It begins with the impossible delivery of an equally impossible video – even if all that Rich Penton and his crew at RECON are certain of at that point is that the delivery shouldn’t have been possible. The video looks like REALLY good CGI of a meteor crashing into downtown Chicago. RECON is a successful, award-winning news magazine TV series (sorta/kinda like 60 Minutes was back in the day) but based in Chicago and set in the mid-2020s.

Meaning that the team at RECON is used to getting unusual pitches for stories. And that they know all about cutting-edge CGI. But it also means that their network security is state-of-the-art, a state that means that videos should not be capable of ‘magically’ appearing in anyone’s email without getting checked. And it certainly means that once such an email is deleted – it STAYS deleted.

The painted picture on this bison hide shows the battle of the Little Bighorn, where the Plain Indians fought Lieut. Col. George Custer’s troops. By Cheyenne artist – Museum of the American Indian

Except this video isn’t behaving the way it’s supposed to.

Not that they can do anything with it or about it except for the security breach. There’s nothing attached to tell them who sent it, how it was filmed, or what the purpose of it might be. They assume it’s a pitch for something – they get those all the time, but usually with a lot more information than this.

Then the second video arrives, just as mysteriously as the first. A video that seemed to have been taken at the Battle of the Little Big Horn as it was happening. In 1876. A video that checks out in every particular except one. In spite of repeated attempts to figure out how it was made, there is ZERO evidence of it being CGI. It seems to be authentic right down to facial recognition of even minor characters – even the angle of the sun and shadows is not just internally consistent but consistent with the date, time and location of the battle.

Tulsa Race Massacre aftermath, June 1, 1921

Which is when Rich and his team at RECON start to really, really dig. Because one way or another, this is one hell of a story. But as videos keep coming in, from Amelia Earhart’s ultimately fatal crash in 1937 to the horrors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to the tragic 1945 bombing of three German ships, the Deutschland, the Thielbek, and the Cap Arcona, filled to the gunwales with Jewish concentration camp inmates who were either killed by British bombs, or from being clubbed to death by Nazi soldiers and sympathizers waiting for the few survivors to wash up on shore.

As each of the later videos gets a YES in the column for historical accuracy and a NO in the column for being provably some sort of advanced CGI, it brings questions about the purpose of that first video of a meteor or asteroid striking Chicago, into terrible focus. If all the other videos are real recordings of historical events, then what was that first video? Was it a warning?

And if it was a warning – can they get the right people to believe in something so seemingly impossible in time to change the future before it becomes the present?

Escape Rating B+: First of all, in the interests of full disclosure, I received this book in a “friend of a friend of a friend” situation. Which I was honestly a bit salty about as I’m not all that fond of being committed to things by proxy.

Howsomever, (knowing this will completely undercut any and all arguments with the friend who got me into this), I’m not at all sorry about the whole thing. In fact, I’m pretty damn pleased with the result now that I’ve finished the book – and in spite of the quibbles I’m going to throw in near the end.

I had a damn good time reading this. Seriously. It was a thrill-a-minute ride from beginning to end in the best sorta/kinda SF movie thriller tradition. Movies like Armageddon, and Deep Impact.

What made Perūn’s Hammer just a bit different, and a whole lot more fun from this reader’s perspective, is that the story is set recognizably in Chicago. Not New York, not Washington DC, but Chicago. As someone who lived in Chicago for several years, I could picture all the scenes in the story AND just how big the devastation would be.

Which leads directly to the second fun thing. In most disaster movies, the disaster has either already happened or is past the point of no return. A big part of the plot and the point of Perūn’s Hammer is that those videos represent a future that ‘might’ be, not a fixed point in time. The worst of the crisis could be averted – if humanity can get its act together in time.

So the story isn’t the dystopia that comes after, or even the planning vs. panic scenario of an inevitable onrushing catastrophe. Instead, the ticking clock that drives the action is the investigation to figure out the nature of the message and then the mad scramble to act BEFORE it’s too late.

Neither of which could possibly be the job of a single human being – so even though parts of the story are told from Rich Penton’s first person perspective – which admittedly cuts the tension a bit because we know he survived otherwise he wouldn’t be around afterwards to do that telling – much of the story is told from a third person overview in order to follow the workings of the stellar team that make the show – and this story – possible.

Their team dynamic is absolutely top-notch. Each person is at the top of their respective game, and they each do their part to solve the mystery. It’s going to be up to Rich to convince the powers-that-be to put a multibillion dollar asset into space in the hopes of knocking the object off course. But he needs their collective very able assistance to put it all together and the investigation in all its many facets is a joy to follow.

Unfortunately, this is where my two huge quibbles with the story come in, and together they were enough to knock this from an A grade to a B+. Because I was compelled, but also extremely annoyed at this part.

In order for the reader – and the team – to truly appreciate just how high the stakes are in this story, one of the team members had to die. That’s the way thrillers like this work and it wasn’t exactly a shock for the reader when it happened. Especially considering that as far as solving the mystery goes, this particular team member had already completed their role. The problem I had with this was not the death, but the choice of character to die. The team member who was killed was the only gay person in the central cast, and the only character who was not or did not become part of a romantic couple. The “Bury Your Gays” trope is basically a cheap shot that did not need to be part of this story. Or, for that matter, any story.

It also leads directly to my other issue with the story, and that’s ‘villain fail’. There is a villain here. They’re not the ones who launched the object, but they are the ones trying to take advantage of it. In the international political climate of the past few years, the idea that the Russian Federation might be gleeful about an interstellar object flattening Chicago isn’t quite out of the bounds of plausibility. That Russia would engage in a campaign of misinformation and bribery in order to prevent the US from launching countermeasures in time is also not that far-fetched. Nor is the idea that they would have agents in the U.S. working to protect such a plan. However, the idea that all of that happened AND that the specific agent involved embodied all the worst possible racist, homophobic, sexist, psychopathic, sociopathic, violent and outright ‘bwahaha’ villain characteristics that have ever been assigned to a negative portrayal of an enemy agent in a single person put the whole thing way over the top and tripped my willing suspension of disbelief completely. To make a long harangue into a short sentence, the character of the villain of the piece slipped WAY over the line from CHARACTER into CARICATURE.

Amelia Earhart standing under nose of her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra. Gelatin silver print, 1937 by Underwood & Underwood

Very much on my other, and much more fascinated hand, I loved the deep dive into the historical incidents that were part of the vetting process for the videos. I wanted to say ‘happy’, but that’s the wrong word in this case. The historical analysis read as in-depth and extremely well done, which is something that I always love to see. However, I think it is important to note that all of the historical incidents with the exception of Amelia’s Earhart’s most likely sad end, were all true events that were horrifying in the extreme. They were also outright brutal tragedies of human inhumanity to other humans that were swept under the historical carpet because the victims were considered “other” from the perspective of the powers that be at the time.

A lot of the SFnal aspects of Perūn’s Hammer have been done before, in stories that reach as far back as Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer through Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series and all the way up to last year’s When the Moon Hits Your Eye by way of at least two of the Star Trek movies (TMP and IV) as well as those disaster thrillers I started with.  Those familiar SFnal elements blend into a story that will keep readers on the edge of their seats, whether the parts that appeals are the historical mysteries, the technical breakthroughs, the political shenanigans and the spy games, or the surprisingly open-ended conclusion.

In spite of my quibbles, I had a grand time with Perūn’s Hammer. I think those quibbles hit so hard BECAUSE I was having such a grand reading time and those flaws disappointed me in a book that was otherwise really terrific.

All of which means that I’m glad that the author has already promised a sequel, tentatively titled Perūn Rises. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Grade A #BookReview: Air Force One by M.L. Buchman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Air Force One by M.L. BuchmanAir Force One (Miranda Chase NTSB #16) by M L Buchman
Format: ebook
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: action adventure, political thriller, technothriller, thriller
Series: Miranda Chase NTSB #16
Pages: 358
Published by Buchman Bookworks on October 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads


Brace for the ultimate plunge!

The seemingly invincible Air Force One suffers a catastrophic engine failure. When it plummets into the Atlantic with the U.S. President and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff aboard, the world dives toward a peace-shattering crisis.
Enter Miranda Chase, the high-functioning autistic air-crash genius, and her extraordinary NTSB team. Faced with an impossible deep-sea salvage operation of the 747, Miranda must rely on her unparalleled intellect and her diverse the fiercely loyal Holly, methodical Mike, brilliant Jeremy, and resilient Andi, along with the enigmatic Taz.
This meticulously researched, hard-hitting, and suspenseful thriller unveils a deep-seated conspiracy that threatens global stability and challenges the team’s very definitions of loyalty and survival. Can Miranda’s and the team’s skills help them survive exposing the truth before the world unravels?
(Can be read stand-alone or in series.)
"Miranda is utterly compelling!" - Booklist, starred review“Escape A. Five Stars! OMG just start with Drone and be prepared for a fantastic binge-read!” -Reading Reality

My Review:

The story kicks off with a bang, and a whimper, and a plummet toward disaster – all at the same time. Miranda Chase, on her honeymoon, gets a call from a dead man. Not a recording, not a premonition, not a ghost. Instead, an acknowledgement that the die has already been cast and there’s nothing that anyone can do to turn back the clock.

Air Force One, with the President, the First Lady, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff aboard, is going down after a catastrophic failure of all four engines, over the Atlantic Ocean, 200 miles off the Eastern Seaboard. The plane will not reach shore, and everyone aboard knows it. General Drake Nason can’t stop it, and neither can Miranda Chase.

But Nason can give his friend Miranda one final order. To do what she does best, and figure out who killed them. Because it wasn’t pilot error, and it wasn’t mechanical failure. It was clearly sabotage, and Miranda is the best in the business at figuring out who or what caused a crash.

She already knows that this time it’s definitely not a ‘who’, and she’s determined to solve this crash, wherever the investigation takes her and her team – along with all of those mourning for those they lost.

The meat of this story is, as has always been fantastically true in this series, the recovery of the plan and the investigation of the crash. The recovery is a true nail-biter, as the seas are rough and the plane is in a precarious position. The wrong move, or merely a change in the weather, will send the downed jet to the bottom of the Atlantic. Wind and waves don’t care that Miranda and her team need every scrap of debris to figure this one out. But the Coast Guard does deliver – with only a bit of damage to their ships.

Which highlights one of the terrific things about this series. Not just that Miranda and her team are the best at what they do, but that the people who surround them are also the best at what THEY do. It’s always a pleasure to read about excellent people doing their jobs excellently while facing challenges that test them to their limits.

Once the plane has been secured, it’s not a difficult job at all to figure out the ‘what’ of this crash. With all the pieces of the puzzle, the method used to crash the plane is obvious.

But Miranda doesn’t do the ‘why’ of crashes. She’s not good with human factors, and motivation is all about human factors. It’s up to her team to figure out the ‘who’ in whodunnit, with the help of the allies and frenemies around the world that they have made and saved over the years.

That the last pieces of the puzzle come from the most unlikely of sources, who need to be rescued in the most bizarre and dangerous of ways, is a typically atypical part of the chills and thrills that have kept this reader on the edge of her seat for six years and now sixteen books in the series.

This final chapter in Miranda Chase’s saga turned out to be a somewhat sad but ultimately fitting ending for a tremendous series. It’s been a glorious ride, every step and book of the way. I just wish it wasn’t over.

Escape Rating A: I’ll start with this. The blurb is a bald-faced lie. Not the whole thing, just the ending. Because whoever had the bright idea that this FINAL book in this compelling AND complex long-running series can be read as a standalone, well, I can’t even with that because it’s just not true. At all.

For this reader, the fact that the books in this series are intertwined and build on each other was part of the point of the whole thing. Also part of the reason I started this last book, set it aside for 24 hours, and then went back because it took that long for my need to know how the rest of it ended to win its struggle with my need not to go through the depths of grief right along with the characters.

In a long running series like the Miranda Chase series, part of what keeps me coming back book after book, isn’t just the pulse-pounding plot. It’s about the characters. I return, over and over, because I want to see how they’re doing, how their world is doing, AND exactly what kind of mess they’ve gotten into this time around.

This book STARTS with the dramatic, catastrophic loss of three of the important secondary characters, and it’s a loss that resonates throughout the story and even afterwards. As much as this is the investigation to end all investigations – literally – and as much as the motives display so much of the author’s uncanny prescience about events in the real world that are a bit too close to the plot of the book, it’s the grief of all the characters that drips from every page.

A lot of series endings, at least for this reader, fall into the gulf between crying because it’s over but smiling because it happened. I’m still stuck at the crying part. This series ender wraps up what it needs to wrap, and marks a point in the lives of the characters where it is right and proper that this chapter of their lives comes to a close, but I’d have personally preferred a more unequivocally happy ending. It is as triumphant as I’d ever hoped, but that triumph is muted by loss. Which may be the way of the world but it’s that world I come to books to escape from for a bit.

That’s not to say that the story of Miranda Chase’s last investigation for the NTSB isn’t an absolute page-turner of a thrill ride, because it definitely is. As has been every single book in this series, starting with Drone. But be warned, that the more deeply you get into this series – and I promise you will – and the more you fall in love with Miranda and her ‘Scooby gang’, the harder it will be to see it end.

A- #BookReview: Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Where the Axe is Buried by Ray NaylerWhere the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, dystopian, political thriller, science fiction, technothriller
Pages: 336
Published by MCD on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end.
In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.
As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere.
Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buried combines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom.

My Review:

I picked this up because I adored the author’s debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, very much liked his later novella, The Tusks of Extinction, and was hoping for more of the same. Which I sorta/kinda got, but not in ANY of the ways that I was expecting.

I’m every bit as wowed by Axe as I was the other two, but that’s a feeling that I came to in the end even as I muddled a bit through the middle. Which is also very much like both of those previous works. Which is where that ‘sorta/kinda’ qualifier comes in.

There are three distinct locuses (loci?, focal points?) for this story; deep in the Russian Federation, the fringes of the halls of academia in England, and the halls of Parliament in a former Soviet Republic on the fringe of both the European Union and the Federation but currently part of neither.

In a near-future more-or-less dystopian world that may, or may not be on the fringe of multiple states of collapse. Whether that state is the cause of, or caused by, an artificial intelligence takeover of the reins of power is subject to interpretation.

Lots of interpretation, pretty much everywhere.

In the Russian Federation, one man plans – and has so far succeeded – in ruling forever through a process of uploading his consciousness and downloading it into a new host as each of his bodies fail. Or when the apparatus of the state determines that it is a good time for a crisis and a cleansing.

In the West, human governments have come under the control of artificial intelligence created ‘Prime Ministers’, whose mandate is to govern in humanity’s long-term best interests, no matter the short term consequences. The idea was that an AI wouldn’t need to have its wheels or its palms greased, wouldn’t be hungry for power for its own sake, and wouldn’t have a personal agenda or a need to get itself re-elected once it’s been voted into power.

But this isn’t a story about process, although process laid the groundwork for it. It’s a story about people. And that’s where things get interesting even as they fragment across multiple fault lines.

Because, of course, neither system really works – if by work you mean actually function for the good of the greatest number of its citizens. Not that the system in the Federation EVER even gave lip service to that particular idea.

However, the one thing that both systems, the Federation’s quasi-immortal President and the AI PM so-called Rationalization policies do, in their varying ways, is cement a status quo in place. Which is not nearly as good for anyone as the respective powers-that-be would want people to believe.

That’s where our widely scattered group of protagonists – or at least points of view characters come in. An old resistance fighter imprisoned in the Russian taiga, a government functionary in that former Republic, the partner of a cutting edge AI scientist in Britain, and that AI scientist, locked in a prison of her own making back in the Federation, desperate to complete her magnum opus of quantum entanglement.

Each is both observer and observed, acting on their own little piece of a world-spanning puzzle, not even aware of the puppet master pulling all of their strings.

And the puppet master themselves, the spider in the center of the web, whose motivations are not certain, even at the end, whether their goal was to give humanity a chance to try again – or merely to burn it all down.

Escape Rating A-: I have to admit that, at first, I was wondering how this was all going to come together. Then again, I had the same reaction to The Mountain in the Sea so I should have expected it.

The different points of view are worlds apart – which I realized at the end was absolutely the point. Each of the characters represents one of those fabled blind men looking at the elephant in that they can only see a tiny piece of the whole picture.

One of the difficult bits to get over, or past, particular for those of us who live in the West, is that the situation under so-called “Rationalization” isn’t all that much better than the repressive regime in the Russian Federation. No one is actually free, it’s just that the cages in the West are a bit more comfortable and one is considerably less likely to get murdered by the state.

What seems to be driving the story – at least for most of its length – is the story of that genius AI scientist Lilia. She comes back to the Federation to see her father one last time, gets trapped and goes on the run. Much of the drive of the story is wrapped around her, the shadowy figures chasing her, the ones who pretend to be helping her, the ones who are chasing them, the endless cells within cells of resistance and/or state security whose goals are never clear even to themselves.

But she’s a stalking horse – as are all the other human agents on all the possible sides – as the story gets really big and then comes down to one human who has been pulling all the strings – including their own. And that’s the point where it all suddenly made sense as all the systems come crashing down and the metaphor of the title becomes clear.

Even as the ending, in the end, feels like it isn’t. The puppet master has given humanity another chance to get it right. Or at least better. But the closing scenes lead the reader to see that, while things may be better in the short run, over the long haul the humans are gonna human, that the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves, and that we have met the enemy and he is us.

A- #BookReview: Wedgetail by M.L. Buchman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: Wedgetail by M.L. BuchmanWedgetail (Miranda Chase NTSB #15) by M L Buchman
Format: ebook
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: action adventure, political thriller, technothriller, thriller
Series: Miranda Chase NTSB #15
Pages: 316
Published by Buchman Bookworks on December 14, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads


Is an attack on the greatest shipping choke point in the world, the Strait of Malacca, a move for economic control…or something worse?

A Wedgetail, the most powerful surveillance airplane in the skies, goes down—hard. Miranda and her team race to investigate, unwittingly placing themselves in the crosshairs.
From the world’s greatest shipping chokepoint at the Strait of Malacca to the Malaysian wilderness, from the Australian Outback to the halls of power in Southeast Asia, survival becomes the greatest challenge.
Can Miranda and her team unravel the crisis before it destroys global shipping and kills them all?
"Miranda is utterly compelling!" - Booklist, starred review“Escape A. Five Stars! OMG just start with Drone and be prepared for a fantastic binge-read!” -Reading Reality

My Review:

I just re-read my review of the previous book in this awesome series, Gryphon, and re-discovered that this book, Wedgetail, was originally supposed to have been published over the summer. With this series, it’s definitely a case of better a bit late than never, as I’m always up to get caught up in another of Miranda Chase’s edge-of-the-seat thrilling adventures.

This one turned out to be a bit more edge-of-the-seat, at least Miranda’s literal seat, than most, as someone is taking shots at her, her team, and the plane they happen to be flying in. While they are flying over the GAFA (that’s the Great Australian Fuck-All, the Australian Outback, in a very dry indeed dry season. On what was supposed to have been a vacation.

Their previous attempt at a vacation, in Osprey, nearly started World War III and temporarily broke up the team. They’re ALL still recovering from the second part of that equation. Someone really should have known better. Actually, Holly Harper, currently an integral part of Miranda’s team but once upon a time a member of Australia’s Special Air Service Regiment absolutely did know better. Or at least knew that she had zero desire to take her teammates back to the place she left in her rear-view long ago and never intended to return to.

But it’s Holly’s skills, both from her childhood traveling in and around the Bush and the survival skills drummed into her by the SASR, that are going to keep her team alive and off the radar of whoever it is who is literally out to get them.

While it’s Holly’s job to get everyone to safety, it’s up to former teammate Jeremy Trahn back in Washington DC to help a surprisingly high-level group of Miranda’s friends, allies and frenemies – including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of the CIA, and the sitting Vice President – along with a high-level Malaysian official who knows a whole lot more about what’s going on than she really ought to – figure out who’s targeting Miranda and what it might – or might not – have to do with Miranda’s last investigation.

An investigation of the crash of a VERY expensive, extremely high-tech piece of the Australian Air Force’s fleet of airborne early warning and control aircraft, the titular Wedgetail, that was shot down by another extremely high-tech infrared laser in mid-flight over the Straits of Malacca.

Miranda never answers the “why” question, but her analysis of the other “W’s”, what, when, where and above all, how, have put her in the crossfire of someone playing a high-stakes game for the basest motives of all.

Escape Rating A-: The opening of this 15th entry in the Miranda Chase series is utterly heartbreaking in a “you are there and you wish so badly you could help them” kind of way. The story of the last moments of this particular Wedgetail are absorbing and heartbreaking and they are all so heroic and they so deserve a better fate than the book demands for them and I had to stop for a bit and catch my breath as they went down.

It’s impossible not to feel for that crew – and also for Miranda’s crew as they arrive to bear witness to the devastation of the crash. A crash which Miranda figures out relatively easily thanks to the sheer, cussed determination of the Wedgetail’s last pilot as he wrestled the plane down to land ON LAND where everything could be recovered and investigated even as he died of horrific laser burns.

Miranda’s team is still exhibiting plenty of damage of their own after the events of Osprey and Gryphon, and the scar tissue is still pretty raw. Everyone is treating everyone else – but especially their neuroatypical leader Miranda, with gentle kid gloves. The investigation of the crash itself is easy for Miranda, at least, because that brave pilot did such a damn good job in his ending.

But Miranda doesn’t deal with the “why” questions of her investigations – at least not the why questions that go beyond equipment failure and pilot error to more strictly human motivations. She’s not even good at her own human motivations, dealing with those of strangers is simply outside her wheelhouse as well as her purview.

What makes this particular entry in the series interesting, even as it blunts some of its impact, is in those human motivations. On the one hand, the danger that Miranda and her team have been forced into is very real and potentially very deadly. Without Holly’s skills as well as her local knowledge, they’d all have died either because they did something obvious and got caught by their pursuers – or simply because they couldn’t reach water in time.

It’s up to others, in much safer circumstances, to figure out whodunnit and why it was done, and we don’t get as much of that part of the investigation as this reader would have liked. And what is discovered is that, for all of its cost in equipment and above all, human lives, as badly as things could have gone on the political front as fingers started pointing and blame began being apportioned – rightly or wrongly – the motivations were utterly base to the point of what could have been very costly stupidity verging on outright idiocy.

Then again, that’s humans all over. But Miranda’s investigations usually end up having higher political stakes than this one did. This particularly game was far from being worth the candle.

Very much on the other hand, Holly’s takedown of the jackass responsible was utterly righteous. Evil got its just desserts with bells on so loud it could be heard by all the interested parties even without the satellite phone she had in her pocket.

As always, I’m looking forward to the next adventure for Miranda and her team, whenever it crashes into my TBR pile. If this is your first introduction to Miranda Chase, and if you like thrillers, if you love adventures built around great teams, and if you miss Tom Clancy’s world-spanning political thrillers but wish they’d been a bit more tightly edited, start with Drone and be prepared for a wild and compelling ride!

A- #AudioBookReview: Earthlight by J. Michael Straczynski

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Earthlight by J. Michael StraczynskiEarthlight by J. Michael Straczynski
Narrator: Erik Braa, Pete Bradbury, Jonathan Davis, William DeMeritt, Robert Fass, Jeff Gurner, Ryan Haugen, David Lee Huynh, Mars Lipowski, Saskia Maarleveld, Kathleen McInerney, Brandon McInnis, Sean Kenin Elias Reyes, Stefan Rudnicki, Salli Saffioti, Kristen Sieh, Christopher Smith, Marc Thompson, Will Watt, Michael Ann Young, Beka Sikharulidza, Stephanie Walters Montgomery, Robin Atkin Downes
Format: audiobook
Source: supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: audiobook
Genres: military science fiction, political thriller, science fiction
Length: 2 hours and 54 minutes
Published by Penguin Random House Audiobook Original on July 9, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

International tension is rising as the Russian military forms an Eastern Alliance to create a new age of Russian supremacy. The rest of the world is scrambling for a united response.
Enter Project Earthlight.
Earthlight is a NATO operation under U.S. command based in the ultimate military high ground: space. A group of the best fighter pilots is handpicked from around the world to fly the first generation of advanced planes capable of maneuvering in the vacuum of space and inside the atmosphere.
Learning how to fly experimental planes while learning to trust their new squadron, our pilots are plunged into a high-stakes life-and-death mission with everything at risk. Can Commanding Officer Colonel Scott Dane get the other pilots on the same page in time to prevent World War III?
With cutting-edge soundscapes and an action-packed plot, EARTHLIGHT will keep listeners on the edge of their seats from start to finish.

My Review:

Even when there is something that pretends to be peace on Earth – there’s brinkmanship and stepping up to the terrible line that leads to World War III. So far, we’ve always stepped back – but someday we won’t.

The story in Earthlight posits a near future – possibly too damn near – when the U.S. and its NATO allies step up to that line because a post-Putin Russia is already there. What makes Earthlight just a bit different from similar stories by Tom Clancy and M.L. Buchman is that the brinkmanship takes place – not somewhere on Earth, or at least not exclusively somewhere on the planet – but in space.

Not “outer space” but somewhere a LOT closer to home. Specifically Low Earth orbit – or LEO. Far enough out to see an entire hemisphere of the planet – and close enough to strike anywhere on it – especially from planes that can go faster than MACH 20.

Those planes have the advantage – the literal high ground – as long as they don’t overshoot their targets.

Project Earthlight is a secret – because of course it is. And of course it’s been leaked – because big secret projects are incapable of staying secret for very long – especially once they go into production.

And Project Earthlight – and its space-borne aircraft carrier, the Alexander – is very much in production, on-line, and waiting for its first mission and its first squadron of pilots. Which is where this story begins, as Colonel Scott Dane of the U.S. Air Force is on a recruiting mission to sign the best, the brightest, and the most out-of-the-box thinkers from ALL of the NATO forces to fly the first planes assigned to the Alexander.

He hopes they’ve got time for all the training they’ll need – but he knows they don’t. Because those plans did leak, and the Russians have a space carrier of their own – the Gagarin. And they have a bunch of fanatics in the Kremlin – all promising a return to Russia’s glory days.

The path to which leads straight through a NATO allied Eastern Europe, and to a head to head dogfight with the Alexander for the highest stakes of all.

Escape Rating A-: There’s a whole lot of SQUEE in this review because WOW what a ride.

Although I have to admit that for a good chunk of the story, as much as I was totally caught up in it I was desperately worried that it was all a tease. There just didn’t seem like enough time left in the recording to come to anything like a satisfactory ending. (I was half-heartedly looking for the reading equivalent of ‘coitus interruptus’ because it sure seemed like the story was heading that way.)

But fear not, Earthlight does come to a satisfactory conclusion – although it is still more than a bit of a tease as most listeners will want to know what happens afterwards. At least the story certainly does make clear that there IS an afterwards and that’s a gigantic relief.

The elements that make up the story are familiar to readers of military SF. There’s a recruitment phase, a training phase, a getting-to-know-each-other phase, and there’s the inevitable potential romance that runs into the military frat regs (shades of Stargate).

The process of the squad pulling itself together is jam-packed and doesn’t give all the characters the time needed for readers – or their squadmates – to really get to know them. And of course the characters who are mostly reduced to (admittedly well done) accents are the ones that get lost early.

But in spite of that necessity, we do get a good feel for the leaders, and we do feel like “we are there” because we’re not just reading this story – we’re in the thick of it by listening to their distinct voices.

Laid on top of the military side, there’s also the side that gives us the historical and political side. The part that’s going to remind lots of listeners of Tom Clancy or M.L. Buchman because the shenanigans, including the brinkmanship, the short-sightedness, the glory-seeking to the exclusion of common sense and the epic levels of paranoia are all out of the political thriller playbook.

That part of the story works, even with a bit of necessary shorthand for the length, because we’ve seen them before – even in real life. That part of the story feels entirely too plausible.

This listening experience is edge-of-the-seat, you-are-absolutely-there, nail-biting compulsion filled with a surprising number of crowning moments of awesome. There were plenty of moments when my heart was literally in my throat even though I knew the worst-case scenario couldn’t possibly be the ending.

So the story of Earthlight, taken as a whole, is a fantastic experience even if many of the elements that make it so compelling are also just a bit familiar. It’s a great three hours of listening – I just wish there were a hell of a lot more.

But OMG I wish there was a text for this thing.

I NEED a text so I can hunt for quotes AND have a full list of characters, how their names are spelled and who played them in the audio. Because the cast was outstanding – every single one.

It is a pet peeve of mine that full cast or even multicast audio productions don’t generally tell the listener exactly who played whom – and I always want to know. But in this particular case, that lack of a list led to a bit of serendipity. To my ear, the political officer aboard the Russian ship sounded a LOT like the Romulan officer Tomalak in a couple of Star Trek: Next Gen episodes. When I checked out who portrayed Tomalak, I discovered that the character was played by the late Andreas Katsulas – who embodied Ambassador G’Kar on the author’s beloved TV series Babylon 5.

One reviewer opined that Earthlight could be seen as a very, very, very early prequel to B5 if one squinted a LOT. And it’s possible. Certainly it captured something of its spirit – without squinting at all. If it turns out that that spirit continues into another chapter of Earthlight – this listener/reader would be thrilled to be aboard for another mission.

A- #BookReview: This Great Hemisphere by Mateo Askaripour

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: This Great Hemisphere by Mateo AskaripourThis Great Hemisphere by Mateo Askaripour
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, large print, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dystopian, science fiction, speculative fiction, political thriller
Pages: 432
Published by Dutton Books on July 9, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

From the award-winning and bestselling author of Black Buck : A speculative novel about a young woman—invisible by birth and relegated to second-class citizenship—who sets off on a mission to find her older brother, whom she had presumed dead but who is now the primary suspect in a high-profile political murder.
Despite the odds, Sweetmint, a young invisible woman, has done everything right her entire life—school, university, and now a highly sought-after apprenticeship with one of the Northwestern Hemisphere’s premier inventors, a non-invisible man belonging to the dominant population who is as eccentric as he is enigmatic. But the world she has fought so hard to build after the disappearance of her older brother comes crashing down when authorities claim that not only is he well and alive, he’s also the main suspect in the murder of the Chief Executive of the Northwestern Hemisphere. 
A manhunt ensues, and Sweetmint, armed with courage, intellect, and unwavering love for her brother, sets off on a mission to find him before it’s too late. With five days until the hemisphere’s big election, Sweetmint must dodge a relentless law officer who’s determined to maintain order and an ambitious politician with sights set on becoming the next Chief Executive by any means necessary.
With the awe-inspiring defiance of The Power and the ever-shifting machinations of House of Cards , This Great Hemisphere is a novel that brilliantly illustrates the degree to which reality can be shaped by non-truths and vicious manipulations, while shining a light on our ability to surprise ourselves when we stop giving in to the narratives others have written for us.

My Review:

Shakespeare said it best, but the Bard said an awful lot of things very, very well, which is why we keep quoting him. In The Merchant of Venice (Act 1, Scene 3), there’s a famous proverb that says that, “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” It’s something the reader is forced to reckon with in This Great Hemisphere – even if the characters for the most part don’t have the education to recognize the phenomenon.

They’re not supposed to. That’s part of the story. In fact, a more accurate paraphrase of that quote as it applies to This Great Hemisphere would be that “the devil can WRITE Scripture for his purpose.” because that is exactly what has happened during the five centuries between our now and the future experienced by Sweetmint and her people.

As Sweetmint discovers over the course of this story, there’s another quote that applies even more, from a part of the Bible that the powers-that-be of the Northwestern Hemisphere have undoubtedly excised as part of their thoroughgoing revision of Scripture to suit their purposes. It’s the one from Ecclesiastes (1:9) that goes: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Or as it was put more succinctly in Battlestar Galactica, “This has all happened before. All of this will happen again.”

But Sweetmint and her friends do not know any of this when her story begins. It may have all happened before – in fact it has all happened before – but it hasn’t happened before TO HER and her perspective is what carries the story from hope and compliance to desperation, rebellion and tragedy. And maybe, just maybe, back to hope – or at least a brief approximation thereof.

But what is it that has happened before? Sweetmint’s story – or the story that takes place around her and through her, is just the kind of metaphor that science fiction does well when it takes an issue that is real and present – and generally terrible – and shifts it in time and space, alters just a few of the parameters – and forces the reader to see an obscured truth for what it really is.

This Great Hemisphere is set on Earth, five centuries into a future where a portion of the human population is born invisible. Because humans are gonna human, and governments always need a common enemy to class as less than human to keep everyone else in line, invisibles have been cast as a threat and dehumanized in every way possible. They are denied higher education, voting rights, land ownership, good jobs, good housing, etc., etc., etc. Denied all of those things by law and forced to live in remote villages so that the dominant population can never really know them so that they can be more easily demonized.

Sweetmint is supposed to be a “model Invisible” and has earned a place as an intern – not a servant, but an actual intern – with one of the men responsible for the creation of this system. He’s using her for the next step in his “great plan”.

But we see this broken society through Sweetmint’s eyes as the scales are removed from them. She learns that nothing she believes bears much of any resemblance to any objective truth and that the system is rotten from within – always has been and intends to always be so.

What makes the story so compelling is that even as we watch it unravel, we’re still riveted by her attempts to force a new way through. That even though it may be hopeless in the long run, there can be a reprieve in the short run – and possibly more. And we’re there for her and for it – even if the specific future she hoped for is not.

Escape Rating A-: I obviously had a lot of thoughts about this as I was reading it, and I have more. It’s that kind of book.

It does absolutely fly by. The author has done an excellent job of creating a world that is firmly rooted in the history we know and yet manages to shine a light on it from a different corner. Using invisibility as a metaphor for race allows the reader to be firmly grounded in our own historical perspective and yet provides a vector by which anyone can imagine themselves as Sweetmint because there are circumstances in which anyone can be rendered invisible.

I’m all over the map on what I thought and felt about this book, and it’s making writing it up all kinds of difficult. On the one hand, as I said, it’s compelling to read. On a second hand, I felt like the social issues part was a bit heavy-handed – but at the same time, I recognize that my own background makes me more familiar with some of the issues – albeit from a slightly different angle, and as someone whose read a lot of history the repetitive patterns are not exactly news.

From the point of view of someone who reads a lot of science fiction, this very much fits into the spec fic, SFnal tradition of exploring an all too real past and present issue by setting it in either a time or place away from the here and now. Something that even the original Star Trek series did both well and badly – sometimes at the same time – and there’s an episode that’s particularly on point in this regard, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.

In other words, in yet another attempt to make a long story short and probably fail at it again, This Great Hemisphere is a compelling story, both because of Sweetmint’s originally naive perspective and because the actual political machinations going and increasing enmeshment in the consequences of them – sometimes intentionally but often not. And the ending – oh that was a stunner in a way that just capped off the whole thing while still leaving just a glimmer of possibility – if not necessarily a good one – for the world in which it happens.

Grade A #BookReview: Gryphon by M.L. Buchman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Gryphon by M.L. BuchmanGryphon (Miranda Chase NTSB #14) by M L Buchman
Format: ebook
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: action adventure, political thriller, technothriller, thriller
Series: Miranda Chase NTSB #14
Pages: 370
Published by Buchman Bookworks on January 23, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

With the rising threat of Russia, Sweden joins NATO for its own protection. But someone wants to make them pay—in blood. Sweden’s home-built, world-class jet fighters, the Saab JAS 39E Gripen—named for the mythological Gryphon—are falling out of the skies. The stability, the very existence of NATO could be torn apart, as if trapped in the Gryphon’s mighty eagle claws. Can Miranda’s team of air-crash investigators solve the crisis before the powerful lion-half shreds them asunder?

My Review:

Like all of the previous entries in the Miranda Chase series from the very first page in Drone, Gryphon is an edge-of-the-seat political technothriller with World War III looming over every action on every page.

What makes this OMG FOURTEENTH book in the series stand out is that this is the one where all of the hyper-competent people that we have come to know and love over the course of the series so far are anything but.

Not that they don’t still manage to get the job done – because of course they do! – but rather because it’s clear from the opening page that all of the members of Miranda’s team are broken after the events of Osprey – and Miranda herself is the most broken one of them all.

It’s hard to lead anyone anywhere when your heart, your soul and your entire psyche are lying in pieces on the ground at your feet.

But time, tide, plane crashes and international catastrophes wait for no one. Even if not a single one of Miranda’s team remotely has their shit together, between them they still have enough to figure out exactly which enemy is responsible for the recent series of disasters plaguing Sweden’s civilian and military aviation.

Although Sweden doesn’t have a whole lot of enemies. Which doesn’t make Ian Fleming’s old truism any less true, that “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” It’s just that this time around they’ll have to start by identifying just who they have to stop.

Escape Rating A: Gryphon is a hard read for fans of Miranda Chase and her team. Which isn’t to say that it’s not a good read, because it oh-so-definitely is. But rather, it’s hard to see people that we’ve come to like and respect and care about act this observably broken.

It’s a heartbreaking response to the events of the previous book, but damn it hurts to watch.

But it does make it easy for someone, actually a few someones, to slip a whole lot of things past them all – because they are all very much NOT at the top of their respective games. More like at the bottom.

The crisis is a conundrum, because it only makes sense in bad ways. Either the Swedish aviation industry is having the worst luck in the universe, over and over, or someone is out to get them. And yet, the usual suspects are all quiet.

And on the third hand being held behind someone’s back, considering the current crisis in the Ukraine, blaming Russia for everyone’s troubles is a damnably easy conclusion to jump to. So it becomes a question of whether Russia has faked out literally everyone – or whether someone else is trying to make it look that way in the hopes of, what? Causing World War III? Who is crazy enough to want to ring that bell?

A question which, in its own way, is at the center of what makes this series so damn good. Because both the question and the solution in each entry in the series isn’t about the techno part of the thriller. It’s always about the human factors. Technology may make the events and crises and calamities and near-catastrophes possible, but it’s always human beings who set them into motion for all too human reasons.

And it’s the humans of Miranda’s team – pulling together and putting it all together – that have to stop the worst from happening.

Not that the tech isn’t fascinating and not that we don’t get a lot of it while following Miranda and her team – but it’s the humans we feel for and with and it’s the human cost of the disaster they’re trying to prevent that make us keep turning pages until they pull literally everyone’s fat out of whatever particular fire they’re facing this time around.

And all of that is just, well, harder in Gryphon because the humans on all sides of this particular equation are all broken, The villains are broken because the game they are playing is not worth the cost, and the ‘good guys’ are broken because they’ve been pulling separately instead of pulling together, so they’re a mess and getting messier by the day.

Whether the radical solution they come up with to begin to start fixing their broken places is something that we’ll all get to find out in the next book in this awesome series, Wedgetail. Until that comes out this summer, we’ll all just have to hope right along with the rest of the team.

Review: Osprey by M.L. Buchman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Osprey by M.L. BuchmanOsprey (Miranda Chase NTSB, #13) by M L Buchman
Format: eARC
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: action adventure, political thriller, technothriller, thriller
Series: Miranda Chase NTSB #13
Pages: 392
Published by Buchman Bookworks on September 17, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Russia teeters on the brink of collapse, spoiling for a battle to end all wars. All it needs? One thin excuse. World War I began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. World War II launched with the invasion of Poland. As for Russia's invasion of Ukraine... A Russian flyby of an American CMV-22 Osprey tiltrotor goes desperately wrong over the North Sea. Will the tipping point for World War III break the moment a favored daughter of the Oligarchy goes down in flames? When the NSA's secret military base at Menwith Hill in the UK needs specialized expertise, they call in Miranda Chase. She and her elite team of air-crash investigators must avert a crisis like none before. A crisis that unravels her past, batters at her autism, and threatens to crush her team in the ultimate grinder of East vs. West. "Miranda is utterly compelling!" - Booklist, starred review "Escape A. Five Stars! OMG just start with Drone and be prepared for a fantastic binge-read!" -Reading Reality

My Review:

Osprey, in addition to being about the investigation of a series of airplane crashes, as the books in the Miranda Chase series always are, is fundamentally the story of a woman who has based her life on a series of truths that turn out to be lies.

Miranda Chase is not merely A lead investigator for the National Transportation and Safety Board, but at this point in the series, THE premiere investigator for the NTSB. Miranda, along with her team, are the people that not just the NTSB but federal government all the way up to the President call whenever the crash is either too thorny for a regular investigator OR, as is very much true in this particular case, has the potential to start World War III and/or bring about the end of the world.

Considering the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and other countries, they are likely to be one and the same.

Which is what drags Miranda and her team out of their vacation in Yorkshire, hiking the Herriot Trail, all the way to the top secret US/UK communication and intelligence support station at RAF Menwith Hill, which is, according to Miranda’s teammate Holly Harper, the place where the world ends. Because, on Holly’s last mission for Australia’s SSAR, Menwith Hill’s sister station in Pine Gap ended Holly’s.

This time around, they’re about to end Miranda’s – even as she and her team prevent the end of pretty much everyone else’s in the whole damn world.

Escape Rating A+: This was one of those books that turned out to be a much harder read than I was expecting – even as it sucked me right in and wouldn’t let me go until the end. By saying Osprey is a ‘hard read’ I mean that in the sense that, 13 books into this series, I’ve become very fond of Miranda and her team and hate seeing any of them in serious distress. But it’s clear that this is the 13th book in the series for a reason in that it seems like all the bad luck and worse trouble in Miranda’s life comes home to roost in this one and probably won’t leave anytime soon.

Like all of the books in this series so far, starting with the marvelous Drone and continuing through ALL of the team’s compelling adventures along the way, each story pretty much has two plots. The first is the actual plot that results in the crash that Miranda and company are tasked with investigating. The second line is tied up in a particular team member’s personal circumstances, whether that’s how they become part of the team, falling in love with either a fellow team member, a friend or an enemy, or when those relationships crash and burn.

With the case in Osprey it’s a question of which will burn first, Miranda or the entire world, which makes the stakes the highest they can be on both sides of that equation.

The initial crash could have, and in other circumstances would have, been put down to pilot error combined with a bit of stupid people doing stupid things. In other words, humans just being human – unfortunately at tens of thousands of feet in the air while piloting state of the art aircraft.

The situation escalates, and fast, because the initial less-than-stellar piloting was on the part of a Russian military jet playing ‘chicken’ with a brand new U.S. craft that is capable of switching from taking off like a helicopter to flying like an airplane. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? But when the jet’s wings got tied up in the Osprey’s proprotor, everything went to hell in a handbasket and both countries, already über tense – as they are in real life – were on the brink of nuclear war.

Figuring out how that crash occurred, and the even stupider one that followed, is all in a day’s work for Miranda and her team. The President of the U.S. is thrilled to take her very expert word that the crash was merely the stuff of stupid and not a deliberate provocation to war.

But the Russian side of this equation is a whole lot messier. A mess which raises questions about just how Miranda’s parents REALLY died – because the newly discovered and always obscured – evidence makes it clear that it didn’t exactly happen the way that the world, even the CIA’s hidden world, believed it did. And that’s only the beginning of how Miranda’s world falls apart, even as the rest of the world gets put back together. At least for now.

The reader knows most of what’s coming – at least as far as Miranda’s parents’ deaths are concerned – from the very first scene, so that’s not exactly a spoiler. We know it’s going to be devastating, and we’re waiting for that shoe to drop through the entire book. It’s agonizing. It’s also not all she’ll have to contend with, but getting into that would be a spoiler.

Let’s just say that on Miranda’s personal front, this is a heartbreaking story and it’s hard to watch her even begin to go through the inevitable fallout. Howsomever, as one of the strengths of this series is the way that the characters and relationships change and grow over time, Miranda’s situation is one that I expect to see explore and change and resolve over the next several books in the series, starting with Gryphon, coming in late January of 2024.

One final note; there’s a surprising bit of a parallel to The Last Devil to Die, the most recent book in the Thursday Murder Club series. The leaders of each series, Miranda and Elizabeth, are brought low by heart-shattering personal catastrophes, and it’s up to the other members of their teams to keep the case on track even as their leader, rightfully and righteously, falls apart for an understandable bit. It’s terrible seeing those leaders stumble and fall, but lovely to watch the other members of their teams carry them and carry on.

 

Review: Nightwatch by M.L. Buchman

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Nightwatch by M.L. BuchmanNightwatch (Miranda Chase NTSB #12) by M L Buchman
Format: ebook
Source: author
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: action adventure, political thriller, technothriller, thriller
Series: Miranda Chase NTSB #12
Pages: 370
Published by Buchman Bookworks on February 28, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

As the Arctic melts, the fabled Northwest and Northeast Passages are opening. But are they opening to war?
A Chinese freighter attacked. A sabotaged passenger jet crashed in Quebec. And high overhead an E-4B Nightwatch, America’s fortress-in-the-sky, sees all.
With nations shifting to high alert, Miranda Chase lands once more in the midst of the fray. But first she must fight battles of her own. Can she conquer the emotional chaos her autism unleashes amid the loss of her past? In time to save her team? —And avert the disaster playing out under the Northern Lights?
A tale of high adventure, airplanes, and espionage.
"Miranda is utterly compelling!" - Booklist, starred review“Escape Rating: A. Five Stars! OMG just start with Drone and be prepared for a fantastic binge-read!” -Reading Reality

My Review:

The tragedy of the Northwest Passage in the 19th century was that it wasn’t there. It was so firmly believed that expedition after expedition sailed for the Arctic, determined to trace a route that would traverse the ocean north of Canada and cut shipping time between Europe and Asia. Many explorers gave their lives in search of a route that did not exist, or in search of others whose lives had already been lost in that search.

Fast forward to the 21st century, when Nightwatch takes place. Today, the tragedy of the Northwest Passage is that it IS there.That once-impenetrable passage opened to ships without the need of an icebreaker late in the summer of 2007. Its mirror-image, the Northeast Passage (AKA Northern Sea Route) in the Arctic waters off the Russian coast, opened in 2009. From an ecological standpoint, this is a tragedy. Climate change is melting the polar ice pack. The predictions of where all that water will end up is currently the stuff of disaster movies, but coastlines will be under threat in the decades to come.

But every cloud is supposed to have a silver lining – in this story it’s a silver lining that seems to contain yet another cloud within it.

With the ice pack in retreat, regularly scheduled commercial shipping over these Northern routes will be increasingly viable, and therefore profitable, shortcuts for freight shipments around the world. Cargo shippers will be thrilled at cutting miles, fuel costs, time, and personnel costs for all of their goods.

But someone’s ox is about to get gored. It is inevitable in the long run, but in the short run they have a shot at staving off that evil day. All they have to do is make the experimental attempts at northerly freight routes seem dangerous, or unlucky, or if the saboteurs are lucky – even both.

They’re not. No plan survives contact with Miranda Chase – not even a plan involving container barges and submarines. Particularly not after one of those subs takes a potshot at the plane she’s flying in.

Escape Rating A+: I’ve been a fan of Miranda Chase from her very first investigation in Drone. While her team has gotten bigger – and scattered a bit – and the stakes in her investigations have gotten considerably higher – this series is consistently among my favorite reads. This twelfth entry in the series absolutely continues that streak of winners.

This one begins in three places – which is entirely fitting as it has three tracks that eventually crash into one. Nearly literally.

A Chinese container ship is in the midst of navigating that Northeast Passage, heading for a record breaking run and a promotion for its captain, when it is forced to drop speed and sacrifice that record because one of its screws (read as propellers sorta/kinda) has developed a fault.

Actually, it’s been encouraged to fail by a missile launched from a mysterious, and mysteriously nearby, submarine.

On practically the other side of the world, near Knowlton, Quebec, Miranda’s friends and teammates Jeremy and Taz are investigating the crash of a small passenger jet that seems to have been sabotaged – by one of its passengers. Who was himself sabotaged, and just so happens to be a high-level agent for the CIA.

While Miranda and her completely stressed out partner Andi Wu are on their way to SEATAC to pick up Andi’s high powered and highly stressFUL mother – at least from Andi’s point of view. Andi’s certain that her mother is still disappointed in her for choosing a military career instead of the legal one that her family had all planned out for her.

The cargo ship’s captain and his crew are all alive but he’s rightfully concerned about the reception he’ll receive from his superiors when he finally reaches port.

Taz is both frustrated and peeved because she’s a fan of mystery fiction in general and Louise Penny’s marvelous Chief Inspector Gamache in particular. (As am I) Jeremy doesn’t understand just how badly she wants to visit all of the local sites dedicated to her favorite detective. But the more she and Jeremy dig into this crash, the less likely it is that she’ll have any time to be a tourist.

While Miranda and Andi fly back to Spieden Island with Andi’s mother Ching Wui simmering in the passenger compartment – only to see that the entire island is on fire. Miranda’s home, her private hangar, her vintage airplanes, all her mementos of her life’s journey so far – all are lost. She panics and nearly crashes the plane she’s flying in her extreme distress.

From these three very disparate starts a compelling, page-turning, supercharged story emerges. The injured CIA agent and the dead passengers lead Miranda and her team to multiple plots from the ouster of the current – and always nefarious – head of the agency to that no-longer-speeding cargo ship to a plot to scuttle a high level conference at the edge of the Arctic to discuss – you guessed it – the potential for using that Northern Sea Route in order to get around the long transit times and ever increasing prices of traversing either the Panama or Suez Canals.

But as much as this investigation turns out to be about following the money – tensions are so high that multiple countries are on the brink of war. It’s up to Miranda and her team, with a whole lot of help from her friends, allies and even one or two downright frenemies, to put all the pieces together before it’s too late.

Miranda Chase always delivers. Nightwatch is yet another compulsively readable chapter in her ongoing adventures! I’m already looking forward to her next investigation.

One final note, as much as I love the Miranda Chase series, it added just that little something extra that Taz’ part of the story was a bit of a love letter – or at least a bit of fannish appreciation – towards Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache series. Her part of the story isn’t just set in Gamache’s stomping grounds, but several of the characters, including Taz herself, are big fans of Gamache’s as will be many of the story’s readers. (For those like Jeremy who are not familiar with the Chief Inspector, the series begins with Still Life and it is marvelous and thoughtful and just a terrific set of beautiful mysteries. Just don’t judge the books by either its TV series or its movie.)