Short Review Death of a Spy by M.C. Beaton and R.W. Green

 

Death of a Spy by M.C. Beaton and R.W. Green

Snuggle up by the fire with a glass of good single malt and check out the most recent Hamish Macbeth murder mystery.  The Scottish background is enticing and the pairing of an American agent named Bland with good old Macbeth can’t be beat. These are short books and there are almost twenty of them. Hamish Macbeth is the main sleuth and though he is often funny and a perfect boob with the women in his life, he is a shrewd investigator.  Another plus is that you can polish off one of these good-humored novellas in an evening.

Though Macbeth’s home base is a fictional northern Scottish town, the places he visits are often real. In this outing Macbeth and his visiting CIA sidekick are looking to put a long running Russian spy ring to rest and that means finding the mole who is trying to eliminate all the rest of the players in the cell he created. Along the way you roam the landscapes and lochs of Scotland and find excitement from flooding rivers, wild pub brawls, and a high stakes conclusion in the middle of a British Military Firing Range.

Beaton and Green are aiming for escapist entertainment and they clear that bar easily. I’d recommend having one or two of their yarns on your library shelf just waiting for those days when all you want to do is kick back.  

 

Book Review of The Exchange by John Grisham

 

I recall reading and enjoying John Grisham’s THE FIRM (and the movie made from it) a long time ago. When I saw that The Exchange was a story of Mitch and Abby McDeere fifteen years after their youthful adventures with the Bendini firm, I was eager to find a copy of it.  I found out that Mitch was now a partner in a major international law firm based in New York City and his wife was editing and publishing cookbooks. They had a fancy apartment overlooking the park and two sons in a selective private school. For all the world they were Mr. and Mrs. Successful in the rarified world of high-level Wall Street lawyers.

I was pleased with the couple’s success, but still feel you may want to exchange The Exchange for some other title.  It has a tired overused central plot that cannot make the wonder world of mucho-money and international intrigue seem enticing.  For the record a mysterious cabal of terrorists kidnap a young lawyer from Mitch’s firm and demand an outrageous ransom or they will kill their hostage. After 200 pages of private jet travel, splashy hotels, fancy meals at Michelin starred restaurants, chauffeured black limos, and committee meetings with stuffy partners who appear only marginally less venal than the villains, the dough is raised and the bad guys are paid off. We never know who they were and what they were really angling for. Maybe that’s the point—the rot is everywhere. I remain perplexed that all that money and access can’t manage to find out anything about a group that can seemingly track countless highly personal details and blow up things in cities around the world without leaving a trace. The hostage is kept in a series of hovels and caves in the remote Libyan Sahara and yet can be miraculously delivered alive and spiffed up to the Cayman Islands a day after the ransom is paid.  The cracks in the plot are wider than the Grand Canyon. I wish it were not so, but this is not Grisham at his best.         

Quick Review of a Loser

 

Dorment, Richard.  Warhol After Warhol

I picked this up on a whim as it looked like I might learn a bit more about Andy Warhol and the modern day art market.  Although the jacket promised an exciting read full of action and miscreants, I found it started to get tedious quickly.  The prose plods, the constant meetings, texts, and restaurant tete a tetes with moneyed dolts and venal Warhol executives left me with a bad taste for artists who phone in their work, the critics who are eager to exploit it,  and the people who have too much money who buy it.  If you should see it on a library shelf, leave it there.   

 

A review of FROM A FAR AND LOVELY COUNTRY by Andrew McCall Smith

 

Andrew McCall Smith is up to his old tricks again with this, his twenty fourth, No 1 Ladies Detective Agency novel.  All of the familiar characters are present from Mma Ramotswe to Grace Makutsi, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and Mma Potokwane. The arch villain Violet Sephotho does not appear, but still has a prominent function in the plot. With a deftness that comes from long experience, McCall Smith sets up a series of life’s problems and then ties them together in a satisfying conclusion that once again bespeaks the need of human beings for love and forgiveness.

The first problem is that several important people seem to have forgotten Mma Ramotwse’s birthday.  A more serious one emerges when the daughter of one of Mme Potokwane’s house mothers is victimized at a local singles club. A third complication and the title reference comes in the form of an American woman who arrives in Botswana to find, in Alex Haley fashion, her lost uncle’s African roots.

Along the way McCall Smith continues to sprinkle nuggets of wisdom like cherries on an ice cream sundae. I loved the humor when J.L.B. Matekoni went on an extended metaphor linking types of chocolate to the varying viscosities of motor oil. On a more serious note comes an observation about the nature of home. “We all have somewhere that we think of as our place-and that place stays with you, I think, all the way through your life.  We all have history in our veins.”  When things get really serious, Mma Ramotswe puts things back into balance by observing that lamenting and blaming wastes the time that might be better used to find solutions or at least minimize the damage. “There are always going to be problems”, she says.  “They are a natural background to human affairs.” 

Nearing the end, Mma Makutsi laments that there are just too many “extra low-grade people in the world” and McCall Smith has Mma Ramotswe agree that there are “many people indifferent to the feelings and interests of others, who behave with nastiness and selfishness, and who simply do not care about the effect of their actions.” She goes on to admit that these people are often “. . . conspicuously successful. They even get into high office, sometimes even the highest of all offices, and while they were there continued to lie and cheat in the way that they had always lied and cheated.”  I don’t normally think of McCall Smith as a political writer, but it’s hard not to see a contemporary politician who might fit to a tee that description.

The ending remains as usual, upbeat. There can be no life without trust and without trust no real friendships. When you have found your special friends, you have indeed found your home.

    afrika

          africa  africa           

     africa  africa  africa

                                                                      africa  Africa

                                                                            africa

               I give this a solid 4.5 of 5