Harkaway, Nick. Karla’s Choice.

NY: Viking. 2024.

I will say first that while I enjoy espionage novels — some of them — my tastes in that regard are pretty specific. James Bond is pure comic book. That stuff makes for exciting movies, but it bears not the slightest resemblance to real world intelligence work, and never did. Tom Clancy is not much better, frankly. Graham Greene and Eric Ambler and Len Deighton and Mick Herron are quite good. But John Le Carre is several heads and shoulders above all of them. He gets down into the nuts and bolts of the secret Cold War, a very gritty, cold-blooded and psychologically enervating world indeed. I’ve read every book and novella he ever wrote, and all the Smiley books at least twice each. And I always emerge with newly-discovered nuances and understandings. So this engrossing tale is custom-made for me.

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Beene, Jill M. Kill Girl.

Np: Beene, 2016.

Elayna Miller is a very professional assassin, trained by the CIA, but she went freelance after six years — which she says the Company actually likes, because they can put additional distance between you and them but still employ your skills. She has a rather personal approach to her work, though. She only hits the Bad Guys. And she spaces out the jobs she’s paid big money for with pro bono hits: People who got away with things because of money and connections, cases where the police and everyone else knew they were guilty but couldn’t find the necessary evidence to prosecute, not to mention drug dealers, human traffickers, and the like. She also has a small crew of specialists — a hacker, an electronics near-genius, a redneck explosives expert — and they’ve become like family.

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Weir, Andy. Artemis.

NY: Random House, 2017.

Andy Weir has become one of the better hard SF writers working these days, and his success with his debut novel, The Martian, showed him what approach to take to get there. Every science fiction story is built on “what if” ideas, sometimes far-fetched, sometimes not so much. Andy’s background is in engineering, and his “hobby” is orbital mechanics and relativistic physics, so his approach is a very practical one. He asks, “Could this really be done? And if not yet, what would it take for us to be able to do it?” Well, the Moon is the nearest other world to ours and we’ve already been there a few times. What would it take for us to go back? And to stay there permanently? Why would we want to do that? How would it be paid for? And could a permanent settlement on the Moon (not just a sponsored “colony”) become self-supporting?

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Pavone, Chris. The Expats.

NY: Crown, 2012.

This book was recommended to me by a friend who knows my reading tastes, and who refused to provide details. (“I don’t want to spoil it, just read it!”) The title made me think of American or British retirees stretching their pensions by moving abroad and relaxing on a beach somewhere, but I wasn’t even close. Kate Moore and her husband, Dexter, both in their thirties, live in Washington, D.C., with two very young sons in a small house that needs work. She has what sounds like a rather boring job doing research and writing position papers for some unnamed government agency and he’s a computer nerd who designs security systems for banks in the field of online transactions.

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Chu, Wesley. The Lives of Tao.

Nottingham, UK: Angry Robot, 2013

For me, what separates a superior science fiction yarn from a merely readable one is almost always the degree of originality the author can bring to the story. This one, which was shortlisted for the Campbell Award, has bags of originality, beginning with the eye-opening premise. Basically, . . . there are aliens among us. No, wait. Not like that.

Tao was one of the Quasing, wispy, gas-like beings, on a galaxy-traveling ship that ran into trouble in the neighborhood of our solar system and attempted a landing on Earth, which was only marginally successful, in that a few thousand of his kind survived. All the rest died when their vessel exploded in the atmosphere. Now, this was sixty-five million years ago (“Yes, we killed the dinosaurs,” Tao says). . .

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Barnes, John. Gaudeamus.

NY: Tor, 2004.

This is one of those books that makes you drive your friends and family nuts because you keep pestering them by reading passages out loud to them. I mean: “For a guy who puts that much science into books, you don’t remember it very well.” “Actually, the problem is I always remember more than I ever knew.” Or: “So, call me a wimp—” “Wimp.” “Call me a coward—” “Coward.” “Oh, god, call me a cheap slut sex poodle, that’s my favorite.” Just tell your spouse to ignore you howling in the other room.

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Harrison, Kim. The Turn: The Hollows Begins with Death.

NY: Gallery Books, 2017.

Kim Harrison hit the big time with her urban fantasy series about “The Hollows,” set in the present day, mostly in and around Cincinnati, but in an alternate universe where a tiny portion of the population is made up of non-humans — vampires, elves, weres, witches, pixies, and other species, plus demons in the Other World — but they’ve always lived in secret for their own protection. And their numbers are slowly shrinking due to human incursion. It’s also a world in which the biological sciences were developed instead of the physical ones, so genetic engineering has been a thing for a century and there’s no atomic energy (and no space program).

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Le Carré, John. Silverview.

NY: Viking, 2021.

Le Carré (whose real name was David Cornwell) published more than two dozen novels in his long career, most of them having to do with spies and the activities of the British Secret Service during the Cold War and after, and I’ve read every one of them, beginning with the publication of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, when I was in college in 1964. He has been one of my “automatic” authors ever since, and this is his last book, completed just before his death less than a year ago at the age of 89. He grew up in the space between the elite gentleman’s world of public schools and the University of Bern and the London underworld (his father was a con man and an associate of the Kray twins), and all those experiences came out in his books, aided by his absolute mastery of English prose.

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Osman, Richard. The Man Who Died Twice.

NY: Viking, 2021.

Osman’s first novel, The Thursday Murder Club, was hugely popular, and justifiably so. I’m happy to say this second account of the Club’s adventures may be even better. The four members of the Club, which meets in the Jigsaw Puzzle Room of the upscale Coopers Chase retirement community in Kent, include Elizabeth, ex-MI-5, and the ringleader of the group; Ron, a gruff but softhearted labor organizer who revels in pissing off anyone in authority; Ibrahim, an Egyptian-born psychotherapist and general nerd who has always lived a very careful life and now rather regrets it; and Joyce, a grandmotherly but very astute retired nurse whose diary entries are a hoot and a half.

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Marsh, Ngaio. A Man Lay Dead.

NY: Sheridan, 1934.

This was the first of Dame Ngaio’s “Golden Age” detective stories featuring DCI Roderick Allyn of the Met, and it’s not bad, though the style isn’t quite as smooth as her fans grew used to in later volumes in the 32-novel series. It’s the classic “country house party” setting (which nicely limits the pool of suspects) and the story is mostly recounted by young newspaper gossip columnist Nigel Bathgate, who has been invited down for the weekend to Franstock, Sir Hubert Hendesley’s country estate, because his cousin, Charles Rankin, is a regular at these events.

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