Red Rabbit, by Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy goes back in time to the early 1980s in his latest Jack Ryan novel.  America has a new president—a former actor.  England has a female prime minister and the new pope is Polish.  Ryan is 32 and just starting his career in the CIA with an assignment in London.   Ed and Mary Pat Foley are the new CIA spooks in Moscow, where Yuriy Andropov is the head of the KGB.  And, Andropov is not happy with the new pope, who has begun agitating for greater freedoms for Poland.  Andropov decides that the pope is too dangerous for communism and he must be assassinated.  Will Jack Ryan and the CIA uncover the plot before it’s too late?  This book started out great and it was interesting to return to this time period but, unfortunately, after the good beginning the book never takes off.  I was hoping for a story that built suspense as it jumped back and forth between Ryan, the Foleys, and Andropov as the assassination plot is formulated and attempted.  Initially, this happens but about half way through the book the Foleys and Andropov disappear from the action and we’re left in the dark about what’s going on with the plan.  All suspense pretty much ends at that point and the book becomes filled with too many scenes of Ryan sitting around chewing the fat with this or that unimportant character—usually repeating himself.  Tom Clancy is one of my favorite authors and I always look forward to his books but this one had a disappointing finish.

 
The First Billion, by Christopher Reich

John “Jett” Gavallan is a former fighter pilot and now heads Black Jet Securities, based in San Francisco.  Black Jet is about to take a Russian media company, Mercury Broadband, public in a two billion dollar IPO.  This will be Black Jet’s biggest business deal and Gavallan has all his assets on the line—including a 50 million dollar loan to Mercury.  With less than a week before the public offering, a report claiming Mercury is a fraud surfaces on the internet.  Black Jet has investigated the company thoroughly but Gavallan decides to send his number-two man, Grafton Byrnes, to Moscow to personally see that everything checks out with the company.  Byrnes arrives in Moscow and promptly gets in trouble and disappears.   Before he vanishes, he manages to get word to Gavallan that all is not well with Mercury.  Gavallan suspects that Byrnes is being held by Mercury to assure that the IPO will go forward—and once it does Byrnes will be no longer useful and he will be killed.  Gavallan must somehow find and free Byrnes in time to cancel the IPO—or lose his friend and his company.  I’m not a “numbers” guy but this was a terrific book with lots of action and suspense on an international playing field.  If you like the novels of Daniel Silva and Ken Follett I think you’ll enjoy Reich, too.
 

Paradise Lost, by J. A. Jance

Ms. Jance has two mystery series going.  One features J. P. Beaumont, a former Seattle homicide detective. The main character of the other series is Joanna Brady, who is the sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona.  I read one of the Beaumont books and liked it so I decided to try the Brady series.  Paradise Lost is the ninth book in the series but Jance does a good job of working in events of the past books so I was able to get up to speed on the various characters.  In the latest, a very busy week for Joanna starts out with her daughter, Jennifer, discovering a dead body while she is on a camping trip.  Then, one of the other girls on the camping trip is also found dead in what looks like a staged hit-and-run accident.  If that isn’t enough, a man Joanna had earmarked as the prime suspect in the first death turns up dead himself.  What’s going on in Joanna’s normally rather peaceful county?  Joanna must find out and at the same time try to decide whether to run for reelection.   Jance has a nice, easy style and I’d like to go back and read some of the earlier books in the Brady series to see how Joanna ended up as the only female sheriff in Arizona.
 

Rashomon Gate, by I. J. Parker

There’s no dustjacket photo but I. J. Parker is actually Ingrid Parker and she lives in Virginia Beach.  This novel is a sequel to a short story she wrote which won the Shamus Award and introduced the character of Akitada Sugawara.  Akitada is a minor official in the Ministry of Justice, working in the then capital city of Kyoto in eleventh-century Japan.  Although his family is noble, it has lost most of its wealth and Akitada has had to go to work at a job he doesn’t particularly like.  Since he is bored, he welcomes the opportunity to assist an old family friend, Hirata, who is a professor at the local university.  Hirata has mistakenly received a note intended for someone else and the contents threaten blackmail and scandal for the university.  Hirata asks Akitada to look into the problem and he arranges for Akitada to teach a law course at the university as a cover.  While he is investigating the blackmail scheme, Akidata also gets interested in the suspicious death of the grandfather of one of his students.  Akidata’s got his hands full but he’s lucky to have the help of two family retainers, old Seimei and young, reckless Tora.   He’ll need them when two more murders occur.  This was an enjoyable book that can stand alone but I hope it is the first in a new series.  I had some trouble with the lookalike Japanese names and the large number of characters but there’s a handy list in the front of the book—which I referred to so often I ended up bookmarking it.  If you’ve enjoyed the mysteries of Laura Joh Rowland with her Sano Ichiro character I think you’ll like this, too.
 

Shrink Rap, by Robert B. Parker

Let’s all join hands and say a little prayer that Robert Parker lives to be 120—and keeps writing the whole time.  Life is definitely sweeter with a new Parker novel to look forward to.  Shrink Rap is the third outing for Sunny Randall, the ex-cop Boston private eye who also paints on the side.  Sunny has been hired to watch out for Melanie Joan Hall, a best-selling Boston author, who is doing a book tour to promote her latest novel.  Joan is being threatened by her sadistic ex-husband and wants Sunny along to give her some protection.  Several incidents occur on the tour and when they are back in Boston Sunny decides it’s time to investigate the ex-husband, a psychiatrist with mostly female patients.  Before long, Sunny has stirred things up and her life is now in danger, too.  Fortunately, she has her good friend, Spike, and her own ex-husband, Richie, to help out.  You may recall that this series was conceived as a vehicle for the actress Helen Hunt and in the book there is a wonderful send-up of Hollywood with one of Joan’s books being pitched as a movie. So far, no Sunny Randall movies starring Ms. Hunt have materialized.  But, that’s ok; as long as the books keep coming I’m happy.
 
 
 

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