THE COLOR OF NIGHT
By David Lindsey
Warner Books, $25
Eleven months after the death of his wife in an auto accident, retired American spy Harry Strand tries to get his life back to normal by devoting the majority of his time to his thriving art business. Into his life steps a client, Mara Song, an attractive young woman whom Strand has seen swimming at the local health club. The mysterious Song has valuable drawings to sell, but the relationship quickly deepens into something more personal. Strand’s feelings are in for a jolt, however, when he discovers a shocking videotape in her apartment. The tape shows the final moments of his wife’s life and proves without a doubt that her car was deliberately pushed over a cliff by another car.
In the meantime, we learn that Strand controlled an espionage ring during his undercover days, and that in his last months as a spy he and his colleagues ripped off slimy German financier Wolfram Schrade. Schrade wants revenge and his money back, and he begins to kill the members of Strand’s group of spies.
David Lindsey’s status as a topnotch writer of espionage novels was confirmed long ago with books like “Mercy” and “In the Lake of the Moon,” and his latest adds to an impressive oeuvre.
THE MARCHING SEASON
By Daniel Silva
Random House, $25.95
In Daniel Silva’s latest, a small group of radical Protestants calling themselves the Ulster Freedom Brigade sets out to scuttle Northern Ireland’s Good Friday peace accord by going on a terrorist rampage. Chief among the targets is the new ambassador to Britain, retired U.S. Sen. Douglas Cannon. Worried about Cannon’s safety, his son-in-law, Michael Osbourne, also comes out of retirement to work for the CIA as a counterterrorism expert.
What follows is a fairly predictable cat-and-mouse story, with Osbourne simultaneously trying to protect Cannon from the brigade as well as his wife and children from the deadly assassin October, who escaped Osbourne’s clutches in Silva’s last book, “The Mark of the Assassin.”
Given Silva’s sterling record as a suspense writer, the plot is surprisingly predictable and, at times, not very believable. It’s hard to imagine the CIA bringing back an agent whom it basically ran out of the agency and then assigning him to protect his father-in-law. The story moves along briskly, but this one is pretty much by the numbers.
MAN OF THE HOUR
By Peter Blauner
Little Brown, $24
The notion that no good deed goes unpunished could be the basis for this thriller about a high school teacher whose life is turned upside down by doing the right thing.
When David Fitzgerald keeps his students from entering a bus that blows up seconds later, he is hailed by the press and the mayor as a hero. But faster than you can say “the Atlanta Olympics,” Fitzgerald is made a suspect in the bombing, which resulted in the death of the bus driver. Fueling these suspicions is a newspaper reporter eager to turn Fitzgerald into an attention-seeking nut.
The real culprits, however, are Nasser Hamdy, a former student of Fitzgerald’s, and Youssef, the leader of a Muslim group that is waging a holy war against the U.S. Adding to the tension is the fact that Hamdy’s sister, Elizabeth, is a star student in one of Fitzgerald’s classes.
The book’s chief virtue is Peter Blauner’s depiction of his main character as a man divided: Part of him knows his public image as a hero is circumstantial and somewhat undeserved, but another part of him plays the role for all it’s worth. He soon learns the downside of notoriety, as he is suspended from his job and hounded by the press, and finds suspicion everywhere.
There’s not a great deal of tension in this one, but it’s still an engaging study of how quickly heroes can get turned into targets.
TAKING LIVES
By Michael Pye
Knopf, $23
As villains in thrillers, serial killers have fallen out of favor over the last few years, which makes Michael Pye’s unusual variation on the theme all the more intriguing.
Martin Arkenhout is a Dutch teen on holiday who discovers that taking on the identities of the people he kills is a quick way to get around the world and have new experiences. He decides to follow this practice when his traveling companion is killed in a hit-and-run accident on a backwoods Florida road. Stealing his identity (and capitalizing on the fact that the two bear a passing resemblance), Arkenhout goes to school in the dead boy’s place. When it appears he’s going to be found out, he moves on to the next victim and a new life.
This goes on for 10 years, until Arkenhout chooses the wrong victim, an art professor named Christopher Hart, who has stolen some valuable paintings from a museum. Hart is being tracked by the book’s narrator, John Costa, a museum curator who is in the midst of uncovering some painful family secrets. The two settle in a small Portuguese town, establishing a tenuous relationship, though neither understands what is actually being played out.
A highly unusual psychological thriller–topped off by a gripping meeting with Arkenhout’s real mother toward the book’s conclusion–this novel requires patience and a willingness to be led into a dimension of suspense of which most writers in the genre are not even aware.
BURNOUT
By Jeannine Kadow
Dutton, $23.95
When Lacie Wagner was a young girl, she was badly burned in a car accident that killed her father and left her hands horribly scarred. Since then Wagner, now a rising anchorwoman divorced from her husband, has been plagued by nightmares in which a menacing figure whispers threats while setting her body on fire.
Wagner’s life is turned upside down when her daughter, Skyla, is kidnapped while visiting her father in New York City. Phone calls and a videotape arrive from the abductor, who speaks with the same voice and in the same words as the figure in her dreams.
Growing frustrated with the police for their lack of results, Wagner hooks up with Jack Stein, a rogue FBI agent who specializes in finding the murderers of children. Together Wagner and Stein begin to unravel a secret from her father’s past.
This one scores high on the gore scale, and the setup is genuinely disturbing. Less successful is Jeannine Kadow’s follow-through, which gets more incredible and bizarre with every page. Still, there are some ingenious twists in this revenge story, and on some level you have to admire the author’s willingness to take this material over the top. If you’re faint of heart, don’t even go near this one.
