April has been heaven for book readers. However, I’ve found it a struggle adjusting to electronic books as opposed to page-turning paperbacks. As I spend my life seeking answers or instruction from the written word I confess any novel I relax into requires action and explosions. A touch of intelligent writing helps. When I read, as opposed to binge-watching Netflix, the book must pass the litmus test of gripping me sufficiently to keep me awake. With these caveats here are my top three for you to consider reading in May. And joy of joy, paperbacks will clutter the rural mailbox once more.
Missions by Marc McGuire
Published by Black Rose Writing, 16 April 2020
It’s September 2002, and a deadly attack on a restaurant in Paris has the world worried that jihadists have struck again. The explosion launches an international investigation that propels Doyle O’Gara, a computer scientist at a technology supplier to the CIA, from the periphery of the new war into its moral nerve centre and toward a disastrous miscalculation that transforms his life. Missions is the debut novel of international business lawyer Marc McGuire.
"Just how I like my thrillers." San Francisco Book Review.
War-on-terror thrillers saturated bookshelves soon after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, but it’s unusual to find one written today. Missions makes use of what we have learnt in the interim about how terrorist cells work while exploring the dangers of confirmation bias in the surveillance field. Fast-paced and crisply told, Missions is also a sharply observed morality tale.
The Black Art of Killing by Matthew Hall
Published by Penguin, 2 April 2020
Leo Black served the SAS for 20 years with distinction. Now an adored lecturer destined for tenure at Oxford University as a military historian he faces difficult decisions when the friend he fought alongside is killed in Paris trying to prevent the abduction of a young British scientist. Oxford has never employed anyone like him before. Does he put his long career as an SAS operative behind him? Forget the training, the loyalty, the service and be the man the university wants him to be . . . Or remember that not so long ago, he was a truly exceptional soldier. Before long he’s flying a team into Venezuela on the trail of an organisation determined to change human behaviour for ever.
“Breathlessly enjoyable.” The Times
“An edge-of-the-seat thriller . . . should come with a health warning.” Irish Independent
The King of Warsaw by Szczepan Twardoch
1937 Warsaw, two years before Nazi Germany invaded is a place of factions and corrupt government officials. Traditional Zionist Jews against Christian fanatics. Fascist against socialist. Rival gangs, S&M brothels, farmers, small tradesmen, all with a bone to pick and an underworld patch to protect. In the midst of this social soup a 17-year-old Jewish boy becomes the unlikely sidekick of a boxer-turned-gangster, Jakub Szapiro, a brutal and charismatic enforcer for a notorious crime lord; he is also the killer of the boy’s father.
“I didn’t want to be scrawny little Bernsztajn any more, watching Szapiro drag my father out of our apartment by the beard. I wanted to be Szapiro.”
The 17-year-old narrator tells us 50 years later when he is a retired Israeli general called Moshe Inbar. Inbar is trying to make sense of why the boy he was long ago in prewar Poland would make a hero of his father’s murderer.
“Almost everything about The King of Warsaw is gripping . . . Mix The Godfather with Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, Leon Uris’s Exodus, and maybe a touch of Rocky, and the result will still not give the full picture of the powerful page-turner.
In reality, The King, is about love, guilt, and the way we try to control our memories. It should be required reading for the right-wing Poles today who still insist that their countrymen were never fascists or anti-Semites and that everything was the Germans’ fault.” Fran Hawthorne. New York Journal of Books.