Library Limelights 316

 

Patrick Worrall. The Partisan. New York: Union Square & Co/Sterling Publishing, 2022.

Ah, it's been a while since a spy novel of such brilliant execution arrived. Meet Greta, a Lithuanian, and—Israeli assassin in her prime. At age seventy-seven returning to her homeland, she has unfinished business regarding a memorial for her wartime childhood Jewish friends. During the 1940s Greta had fiercely protected them ‒ living and fighting like Baltic forest brothers; later she excelled at dispatching escaped Nazis during the Cold War. In Moscow, 1961, young Yulia Forsheva is coming to attention as a world class chess player, but her parents rate equal notice: Mom Anna, an important administrator close to Stalin, continues to hold his successor's confidence; Dad Sergei is a brilliant scientist, somewhat of a dissenter, who mysteriously disappears while Yulia is in England at a chess competition. The same year, Michael Fitzgerald enters Cambridge University; by chance he is sent to the same chess event as Yulia.

Michael plus Yulia means love at first sight and a clandestine evening of uproarious fun in London. Only happening because her Soviet minder Vassiliy encouraged it, unbeknownst to the second bodyguard Oleg. In order to see her again at the next chess meet in East Germany, Michael is coerced into two missions: (for the Brits) listen carefully among the Russians for any references to "Rhinemaiden," and (for the Lithuanians, including Greta) discover the location of Maxim Karpov, their defense minister. It's a big order for an amateur whose mind is mainly on bringing his girlfriend permanently to this side of the Iron Curtain. The dissolute Karpov is a kill target for more than one opposition group, while he slyly undermines Anna Forsheva's favoured position. The fathers of our young lovers also figure behind the scenes in their own conspiracies. Political currents run deep: rivals for government power, corrupt practices, kidnappings galore, questionable loyalties, international double crosses, personal revenge—a parade of humanity's lesser attributes.

One thing: be sure to note the year of each chapter's period; they shift elegantly from one location to another. Engrossing is the best word—an epic worthy of a latter-day War and Peace. Worrall's novel is deeply gripping with clarity of the times, the paranoid ambience, the richness of contemporary locales, and not least of all, his vivid characters. Vassily is ubiquitous among them. Politicians and spies and the occasional love affair, intertwining allies and enemies, cause considerable layers of deadly mayhem that outdo any breathless chess game. Five stars if I had stars.

WORD (I've been neglecting them): gnomic = curt, elliptical, responding with pithy ambiguety

Greta, and her circle

▪ "I have been authorized to carry out an executive order issued by the president of the state of Israel. Do you understand why I have come to you?" (2)

▪ "We were not related by blood, but I am the last of the Three Sisters. I killed the men who killed them." (9)

▪ "Don't get too comfortable. Someone is on your trail, little vixen." (19)

▪ "She is one of the few survivors of a Baltic resistance network—brave men and women who fought against the German occupiers, then stayed out in the cold to fight Stalin's invaders too." (164)

▪ "This is the sea I swim in. Cheat me in any way, and I will find both of you. I will eat his heart in front of you." (168)

▪ She was still shouting when she pushed the point of the stiletto into the back of his neck, just under the occipital bone. The Russian made a flapping, gurgling noise with his tongue. The Lithuanian men stared at him, stunned. (189)

▪ Boys, she thought as she walked out. I need men and all we have left are boys. (190)

Vassily, of many circles

▪ "You know that I never let them take anyone. I might shoot you myself, but I never give anyone up to them." (125)

▪ "Why else would she invite me for a nightcap at exactly the moment when our Bulgarian friends drop in?" Vassily lamented. (204)

▪ He was expecting some kind of showdown outside Russia, but it was impossible to figure out exactly what Sergei was trying to engineer. (251)

▪ There were too many variables here for a normal man to calculate, too many branching possibilities. A chess column in a newspaper read by millions. (251)

▪ She led Vassily a few yards away, then turned back to Karpov and the others. "The palace immediately, please, gentlemen. There is important news." (277)

Karpov

▪ "Cherkezishvili and the rest of the clown show," Karpov muttered, looking off into the distance and apparently talking to himself. "The Red Army couldn't plan a coordinated attack on a gypsy camp, let alone something on the scale of Rhinemaiden." (91)

▪ "He gets a lot of exercise beating the shit out of people I don't like." (103)

▪ "And then he set about making himself indispensable. He designed the nuclear weapons program and it would be hard to make it work without him now." (108)

▪ "If it was good enough for Hitler, it's good enough for Karpov, eh?" (119)

▪ "But what on earth does a genius like Sergei find to talk about with a slime like Vassily, for the whole night?" (292)

Forsheva family (Yulia, Sergei, Anna)

▪ "When you start having ideas of your own you can criticize mine." (34)

▪ "They are talking to Vassily. He is stalling them. They have come to see me!" (61)

▪ "The most powerful woman in the Soviet Union and the only one who has ever served in the Politburo, if that word means anything to you. Mrs. Forsheva is the leader of a modernizing faction who are trying to drag that country into the twentieth century without killing half the population." (152)

▪ "He is a mathematician, an architect, an engineer. A polymath, who has changed Russia in subtle and profound ways, from safeguarding the wheat harvest to putting a man into space." (152)

▪ "How dare you presume to give me orders? A little major! I am the eyes and ears of the Soviet worker." (288)

Antti Tuomainen. The Moose Paradox. 2022. Ebook download from TPL. U.K.: Orenda Books, 2023.

Imagine: Caper Castle, Turtle Trucks, Strawberry Maze, Big Dipper, Teddy Bear Trampoline, Komodo Locomotive, and much more! This is "YouMeFun," an Adventure Park for kids in Finland, full of exciting rides and buildings; i.e. full of shrieking kids which makes management happy. Henri Koskinen inherited the park on the premature death of his brother Juhani; our narrator Henri is an actuary and has found his true calling—painstakingly reshaping the park's financial position out of prior chaos, concluding that what they need to be the best adventure park in the country (and a profitable one) is a ride attraction like no other: the thrilling Moose Chute. There is only one Moose Chute in the world, promised to YouMeFun by its builder, Toy of Finland.

Until—ugly, conniving crooks suddenly take ownership of Toy of Finland. Until—brother Juhani is no longer dead, which may be explained at some point. Or not. Juhani's concept of business success is to promise everything for the park, spend extravagantly come what may, and vanish when his money lenders come with baseball bats to collect. He's the opposite of rational, number-obsessed Henri, challenging Henri's recent hard work to control their budget. Toy of Finland now refuses to sell them the Moose Chute, insisting instead they buy an aging and hazardous Crocodile Canyon at an outrageously inflated price. One could say the Park Wars have started, creating some hysterical scenes of wreckage and attempted murder among malfunctioning machines or criminals. Juhani bounces around deceiving and/or inflaming everyone he can, even trying to sell YouMeFun out from under them since no one quite knows who is in charge. As if that doesn't test Henri's mathematical principles and endless patience enough, he's at a loss to interpret unfamiliar emotions whenever the lovely Laura kisses him.

A lesser man would have seriously strangled his brother before the third chapter. Employees' heads spin, watching the siblings' internal power struggle, calculating where their benefits might lie while ever-ready to rescue kids from hot dog disaster or ice cream death. Each staff member brings his/her own well-defined absurdity to the fore. Everyone avoids the attentions of Detective Pentti Osmala who searches for missing gangsters. Rare in mysteries, true laugh-out-loud moments occur. I learned that The Moose Paradox is a sequel to Tuomainen's The Rabbit Factor—"Soon to be a major motion picture ...". Aha.

WORD: stochastic =randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely. (Google)

Bits

▪ "As you know, the situation here had got a bit out of hand. We needed a mathematics intervention." (35)

▪ "Henri, I've come back to liberate you," Juhani smiled. (36)

▪ "You're as sour as an unripe lemon and as tight as a Scotsman's purse, and you insist that everybody else is as miserable too." (72)

▪ "In some businesses," I said, "this sort of behaviour would be sufficient grounds to terminate your contract." (72-3)

▪ "You are a walking bankruptcy, one that's spawning new bankruptcies, that go on to create little bankruptcies of their own." (110)

▪ Our customers may have been short and slight, but many of them seemed to have the destructive energy of a small neutron bomb. (118)

▪ "You swapped our mother for a cake?" I spluttered, and I could almost taste the salmon in my mouth. (155)

▪ "Another factor making YouMeFun such an attractive proposal is its management structure," says Lohi. "An actuary serving as both owner and CEO." (172)

▪ I don't know how good a shot he is, but I concluded that missing me at such close proximity would require a unique level of clumsiness. (227)

▪ As I have been forced to accept several times already, even actuarial mathematics doesn't have an answer for everything. (230)

▪ Of course, Kuisma Lohi doesn't say it out loud, but he has just moved from the realm of hostile takeover to out-and-out extortion. (270)