Alias Emma – Ava Glass
To start, a crackling British spy caper.
Emma, a young agent in a secret department within the British secret service, is tasked with guiding the adult son of a former Russian agent to safety before a Russian death squad can liquidate him. The catch is the Russians have tapped into London’s security network and are able to track many of Emma’s movements. And they may have placed an agent at the top of the security service, preventing her from calling for help. This leads to a thrilling chase through the tunnels and underground rivers of the city. Naturally, when all seems lost things work out.
What I especially enjoyed about this book was how British it was. Not in the almost impenetrable way Mick Herron writes his Slow Horses series. But rather how it does not attempt to be an American thriller in any way. Emma doesn’t have a gun, nor do any of her fellow agents. When she does kill a Russian agent who attacked her, she is worried about what the man she is trying to protect will think of her. American spies never show remorse or self-consciousness about killing bad guys!
I also appreciated how Glass put little moments of sexual tension into the story, but never lets them boil over. It reminded me of the movie Out of Sight a little, and how there was that underlying tension between George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, but they never acted on it. Sometimes that is sexier than letting the characters give into their attraction to each other.
American Kingpin – Nick Bilton
I missed some things in the years I was concentrating on raising my kids, driving them around, coaching their teams, etc. It didn’t help that all that coincided with when I began paying far less attention to whatever the biggest news stories of the day were. Thus, somehow, I totally missed the whole Silk Road thing. I never knew a thing about it when it was an active presence on the Dark Web. I didn’t know a thing about the arrest and trial of its creator, Ross Ulbricht. Hell, I didn’t know that our current president had just pardoned Ulbricht a few days before I read a blurb about this book and checked it out.
So I was not prepared for what a wild ride the book would be. As always, you grain-of-salt parts of Bilton’s writing. But if even a fraction of what he writes is close to what really happened, this is an insane story. His brisk writing style turns it into a page-turner that feels more like a novel than an accounting of a criminal empire. The tedious, methodical way the Silk Road empire was investigated and then pulled apart by law enforcement was fascinating.
One thing that struck me about the book was how many characters, both Ulbricht and the people in various government agencies who chased and eventually caught him, hated authority. Agents in Homeland Security, the DEA, and the FBI all ignored their bosses’ commands because they didn’t feel like anyone should have authority over their actions. Ulbricht’s entire motivation was to advance his hyper-libertarian view that all drugs should be legal and the government had no right to tell people what they can and cannot put into their bodies.
What becomes obvious is that all of these people also rarely take responsibility for their actions. The law enforcement agents are seeking to protect Americans and bring a criminal to justice. Ulbricht is just helping people get the things they have a natural right to. The ends always justify the means with these people, and any harm that comes to others is regrettable, but not something they spend much time worrying about or feel responsible for. Free will and all that.
At its height, massive amounts of illegal drugs were delivered to people all over the world thanks to the Silk Road. There’s no telling how many overdoses were caused by it. How much crime was committed to pay for the drugs. How much other damage was done by people who used these drugs. Ulbricht was, indirectly, one of the biggest drug dealers in the world. Again, he received a presidential pardon about a month ago. In doing so, our Great Leader called the legitimate law enforcement agents who brought Ulbricht down “scum.” Remember all of that the next time he either rails against drug kingpins in other countries, yells about illegal drugs pouring into our country, or acts like he supports the police.
Creation Lake – Rachel Kushner
I had given up on Kushner books. I’ve read two of her previous novels. I enjoyed, but did not love, one; the other I found a bit tedious. This was on many Best Of lists last year, then I saw it recommended by two other people I trust, so I decided to give it a shot.
I’m regretting that decision.
This wasn’t terrible. The core story is about a disgraced former Federal agent who freelances for whoever will pay her to infiltrate protest groups. A different take on corporate espionage. In this case, she assimilates into a commune in rural France with a different mission: pushing them to turn their protest into an attack on a government minister her employers – who are never identified – want neutralized.
That all is kind of cool. What is less cool is how roughly half of the story is this agent reading through emails of the spiritual head of this agrarian rights group. Much of that dives back into the origins of man, where Homo Sapiens separated from Neanderthals, they from Homo Erectus, and so on. I may have that order wrong, but you get what I’m saying. There’s lots of stuff about caves and fossils and what not. Not the most engaging reading material.
The point of all that is to establish the group’s ideology, and the protagonist’s discovery that she models her life around similar principals. I just found it all, again, dull. My complaint about Kushner’s The Flamethrowers was that it was too artsy. This book gets into that same territory. Maybe I’m just not cut out for artsy novels.