New York Review of Books Review

I HAD THE WRONG IDEA about beach books. It came from "Goodbye, Columbus," where Neil Klugman tells Brenda Patimkin that his cousin Doris always has "War and Peace" by the pool: "That's how I know it's the summer, when Doris is reading 'War and Peace.'" Pool and beach being the same to me back then - an idiot kid forced to sit outside with no TV, uncomfortable with my shirt off as my grandfather paraded around to show off he still had a body - I didn't see that Philip Roth was mocking Doris, and so for years protected myself from the water and sand I resented and feared by lugging along a classic. This is how I read "Swann's Way" at the Mamaroneck Beach Club as a guest of Uncle Marty and Aunt Lee. It took many visits. Here I would like to thank them personally. But I was ahead of the curve, too. Beach books have gotten bigger, thicker and whompier, no longer such a disposable genre that we're expected to chuck them in the waves until the day the sea gives up its wretched books. Today, we accept that dark and cursed thrillers, even those suffused with the wintriest of premises, are not antithetical to lying on stolen hotel towels and bragging about where you were accepted to college but decided not to attend. Happily, this summer there are a couple of destined-to-be classics, somewhat fresher than "Buddenbrooks": Mo Hayder's "Wolf" and Jo Nesbo's "The Son." WOLF (Atlantic Monthly, $26) is Hayder's 10th book, her seventh to feature the remarkable Detective Inspector Jack Caffery and her fifth to include the enigmatic vagrant she calls the Walking Man. Hayder will write the occasional stand-alone novel but keeps doubling back to Caffery, not unlike the way Jack himself keeps returning to his life's defining event: the disappearance of his 9-year-old brother, Ewan, years earlier, into a pedophile ring. "He would now be mid-40s," Jack thinks. "Maybe he'd look the way Jack does now, maybe not. Somehow Jack thinks Ewan would be heavier - stockier and taller. He tries to imagine Ewan doing this in a similar mirror in a similar car somewhere and finds he can't." Over time, Jack has determined that the Walking Man's only activity is combing the Somerset countryside in expanding circles whose perimeter he marks with crocuses, their center the spot where the Walking Man's daughter was abducted years ago. "When he finds an immovable object in his way - a road, a house, a city - he assesses it. If it was there before his daughter went missing, he skirts it. If it was built afterward he does what he can to tear it away and check it hasn't been built over a grave. He doesn't care how often he breaks the law to achieve this." What links Jack to the Walking Man is that both are unable to bury their dead, or their pasts. But when the Walking Man allows Jack to discover his campsite, it is to seal a bargain: If Jack will find the owners of a stray dog with a note reading help us taped to its collar, the Walking Man will provide an important puzzle piece about his brother. Doing endless door-to-doors - "Do you recognize this dog?" - Jack becomes his own walking man, eventually chancing across a home invasion that might connect to the community's "Wolf murders" years earlier (when 60 feet of intestines were removed from teenagers trapped mid-sex, then used "to decorate the trees above the corpses in the shape of a heart"). "So I did some research," one home invader comments later, "and what I discovered is that some people are unnaturally attached to the sight and smell and feel of viscera. They love the slime and the blood." That same gentleman carries an antibacterial spritz everywhere in the huge house they've invaded, because "he could smell the accumulation of months and years of badly wiped surfaces." It should be clear this book gives good grizzle, but it can also be swiftly hilarious. We laugh because we bleed. Anyone who finds the story repugnant is too easily repugged. Hayder's work and characters are worth the unending nightmares they will inspire. Every bit as intricately disturbing is Jo Nesbo's THE SON (Knopf, $25.95), with its creepy, sinister, purgatorial cops and crooks in an extravagant universe you keep waiting to see light poking through. The characters pour forth in a Dickensian torrent. And as you'd expect from the Norwegian crime author of the moment - perhaps the crime author of the moment, period - Nesbo presents Oslo as a dwindling star that disappoints its Oslovians. The city reflects their private miseries. Of Chief Inspector Simon Kefas, the ostensibly moral center of this stand-alone novel (a break from the esteemed Harry Hole series), it is said that "he loved Oslo in the summer holidays ... when it returned to being the slightly overgrown village of his childhood where nothing much ever happened and anything that did happen meant something. A city he understood." Even the director of the local rehab center suffers from unthinkably Norwegian "compassion fatigue" - until she meets an escaped prisoner named Sonny, anyway, whose police officer father killed himself rather than stand exposed of corruption. That suicide initiates the great trail of confession that engulfs this novel, as the strangely pacific Sonny turns to drugs and starts confessing to crimes he didn't commit in exchange for money and heroin: "Yes, I killed her. Yes, I'll read up on how I did it." (This wry tone is one of the pleasures of the book, or at least of Charlotte Barslund's translation.) Eventually, though, Sonny learns something about his father that impels him to break out and exact revenge as "the Buddha with the Sword." Buddha because he had no enemies inside - prisoners used to confess their sins to him. There is no sword. There is Sonny and another man crossing a field hearing the "furious and increasingly loud barking" of caged Argentine mastiffs : "'They think they're about to be fed,' said Fidel, but didn't add: with you." (Eventually, an answer is posited to a question I've always wondered about: What if Jesus got away?) Simon used to be devoted to police work. He even explained once to his much younger wife, Else, how "a crime scene could be beautiful" - how, for instance, "the blood spatter formed a pattern that resembled a teardrop." Now, though, Else is going blind, and that consumes him: "Last night he had dreamed that he could give up his sight for her. And when he had woken up and not been able to see, he had - for a second before he realized that it was due to the eye mask he wore to block out the early-morning sun in summer - been a happy man." We like Simon more here than elsewhere. But even this moment of grace has an underside that echoes the detective's curse: Inevitably, you are almost too willing to un-see what you've seen, yet resentful of those who can't see what you've seen for them. In a novel of elaborate, shifting father-son relation- ships - real and assumed - Nesbo's most complicated characters seek redemption by spanning their private Vaterland Bridge between old and new Oslo, and their old and new selves. Thrillers are increasingly breaking loose from their genrefication, if that's a word (and if it isn't, it should be). This progress mirrors a similar trend in television, where for years now the quality of writing has matched - or vastly exceeded - that of theater and movies. Debased, once-derided genres rule. If F. Scott Fitzgerald were drinking himself to death in Hollywood today, he'd be doing it on the staff of "Justified." Or maybe he'd be writing a thriller. Laura Kasischke, the author of mind of winter (Harper, $24.99), is not only a suspense novelist, she's also a prizewinning poet. Then again, Raymond Chandler was a poet too. "Mind of Winter" is not precisely in the classic Chandler mold; it's closer to what used to be called a "chiller," and the police don't show up until the last page. Kasischke's title comes from the Wallace Stevens poem "The Snow Man," which appeared in his first book - an achievement that will elude Holly, a failed M.F.A. poet whose tiny grant stopped her in her tracks years ago. What she can do, however, is adopt a Russian child, Tatiana, and pour her missing poetry into her. The best sections of the book take place at the Siberian orphanage where, seeing the baby for the first time, Holly grabs her husband so hard she leaves bruises. It's a good ominous mom moment. The book is gutsy enough to acknowledge that adoption is not always a gift from the angels and that parents can be as selfish as anyone. When Holly pats her husband's place in bed beside her and thinks: "Please, God, let him be gone. Let him be gone so I can have a few minutes alone to write," she is so indiscreetly repellent it's hard to dislike her. It gets easier once Kasischke starts breaking down the boundaries between reality and illusion, and Holly starts spouting lines comparing Tatty's "sweet breath" to "fruit? Fruit that had softened under a warm lamp? " It brings to mind Ezra Pound's advice to T.S. Eliot: "Son, don't get too poet-y." Well, that's what he meant to say, anyway. Coincidentally, Kasischke's novel and Hesh Kestin's the lie (Scribner, $24) both turn on the same bombshell. Kasischke's takes half of a short book to come into focus, but Kestin's, with all respect, is obvious from pretty much the first page. (My advice on bombshells: Unless they're in "She's my sister and my daughter!" country, steer clear.) The central character of "The Lie" is Dahlia, a left-wing attorney advising the Israeli police on how far they can go, legally, when torturing suspects. Their logic in asking her is clear: If she says stop, it's because she's soft; if she gives the green light, who can argue? Ho, that one really deserved a good torture! But why on earth would Dahlia take such a job, you are already asking. It's a good question, but the narrative is less concerned with that than with what will turn Dahlia. Because something will. Luckily Kestin, a Brooklyn-raised former foreign correspondent, engages us with authentic detail. Special squads of Orthodox Jews carefully comb the area after a terrorist bombing, seeking "bits of brain, an ear, the odd finger, lest these pieces go unburied." A squadron of Palestinian gliders prepares to approach Israel from a Lebanese cliff. The phones in the police headquarters are all pink - doubtless because someone's brother-in-law had a crate to unload: I can get your antiterrorism for you wholesale! It may help to be pro-Israel to embrace this book fully. Perhaps some time spent with Matt Rees's four moving mysteries about the inherited sadness and joy of the Palestinian Omar Yussuf will provide a useful counterbalance. Even so, Kestin's image of Beirut families in apartment buildings gathered around shimmering big-screen TV's - "the Westernized equivalent of the Bedouin fire pit" - will stay with you. Television's been popping up in crime novels for years. But it was always background noise, a prop: the yakkety burbling through seedy motel walls or punks flicking channels to see if the flatfoots were on to them. But there's a specificity to the TV references in this batch of novels, which if it isn't meaningful - well, maybe it's not meaningful. But it feels noteworthy that even as we get big screens in Beirut, there's a guy in Oslo selling Sonny the Buddha a burner phone while thinking: "God Almighty. A drug dealer who said sorry and who had never seen 'The Wire.'" Or creeps on the subway who harass Sonny in their "MTV Norwegian." Israelis in "The Lie" who call their flying-bomb drones "Killer Smurfs." And in David Ignatius' the director (Norton, $26.95), a new C.I.A. director who struggles to explain his job to his sons: "This job is like 'Homeland,' for real. I can't tell you about it." Ignatius, a foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, has written impressive spy novels for 25 years - eight of them in all, including "Agents of Innocence" and (my favorite) "A Firing Offense," a newsroom book about ajournalist enmeshed with the C.I.A. that rang especially true because Ignatius is a journalist. He has probably never been a hacker, which may explain why "The Director" - about the possibility that the C.I.A.'s computers have been breached - feels more researched than lived, and vaguely cobbled together with materials from his previous, better, book, "Bloodmoney." The C.I.A. director himself, Graham Weber, is a good guy but a half-putz. His early decision to put the agency's Internet operations into the hands of a hacker called the Pownzor ("It means, 'I own you.'... You 'pown' someone when you take down his system") - well, that's dumb. Hackers hack. When we catch up to the Pownzor strutting around the grounds at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and the code breaking lads powned the Nazi's Enigma machine, we know something bad's brewing. Here and there, amid occasional hints that hackers are messianic sexual deviants, it's worth remembering that their culture originally started as a way to copy software the hackers couldn't afford. In college, I was invited to a dorm room to behold four blind kids making international calls for free just by whistling tones into a phone. It was thrilling. I wish this book had delighted me that way, but I'll still read anything Ignatius writes. Even Graham Greene didn't get it right every time. Matthew Quirk had a fratty wiseguy best seller in "The 500," and now brings its hero, Mike Ford, into a sequel, the directive (Little, Brown, $26). Quirk's been watching the wrong stuff on TV - the hyped-up "24," which always feels like a vicious parody of entertainment agents in Los Angeles: speeding around in cars screaming into cellphones while thinking you're saving the world through deal points. Mike and his brother, Jack, learned how to be con men from their dad. Mike works at a hotshot Washington consulting firm in "The 500," and in a good moment, his satanic boss gets Mike's dad sprung from Allenwood, where he's doing a 24-year bid, so that's the setup: Bad dad you love, good dad you hate. "The Directive" forces Mike to join his treacherous brother (the best character in the series) to rob this thing called "the directive" from the Federal Reserve. Not the gold there - that's the plot of one of the "Die Hard" movies - but a single number that lets traders manipulate the markets and pivot the global economy and release the Black Sox from the Phantom Zone. It's all M.B.A. fantasyland to me. Quirk is at his best writing about Mike's family psychology: "As we approached the Fed, Jack looked at me. He always projected a galling confidence, the certainty that no matter how far he went, or what he did wrong, he'd make it through unscathed. But in that moment, after all these years, it had disappeared. I'm ashamed at how satisfying it felt for me to watch it go." If any theme unites all these books, it's that we're all on the run from our fathers and our families, though if we run long enough and far enough we can meet them coming toward us. CHARLIE RUBIN is a television writer and producer. He teaches at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.