Bookage for the Book Age

Spy books on sale in the U.S. often focus on the work of U.S. or British agents thwarting the world's baddies, be they individual criminals or megalomaniacal creeps who want to take over the world so they can make it safe for pools of cuddly, lackey-disposing piranha. The Cold War offered plenty for those agents to do, and lately they've been able to get their secret agent groove on against terrorists of several stripes. Daniel Silva, though, has chosen to chronicle the career of Israeli clandestine operator Gabriel Allon, who also works as a restorer of Renaissance paintings. In The Defector, Allon must determine whether or not a Russian general he worked with in Moscow Rules has re-defected back to his homeland or was kidnapped. Silva pictures the Israeli secret agency as more ruthless than some of its counterparts in other nations, and Allon's origins in this work as an assassin make him more capable of brutality than most. He keeps the action humming and plots plausible, well away from Bond-style taking over the world stuff. Silva also gives his characters some depth, weaving their relationships with each other into the action and showing how it affects what happens.

*****

Joe Pickett is a Wyoming game warden who has a knack for running across mysteries, killers, assassination plots and other assorted unpleasantness as he patrols the parks and back roads of that rugged state. C.J. Box writes Joe as a family man, in this outing wondering about the amount of time he has to spend away from his wife and daughters. His guilt mounts when his oldest daughter starts getting text messages from someone who says she is the foster daughter the Picketts cared for several years ago and who was thought killed when the white supremacist compound where she'd been taken was blown up. Whether the messager is who she says she is or not, she's definitely linked to some people driving across Wyoming doing some very bad things. The Pickett stories are usually good reads and Box does an excellent job putting us into the scenes of the Wyoming backwoods. He also mines Joe's unfamiliarity with the world of texting -- and his daughter's exasperation with that unfamiliarity -- for quite a bit of humor. But his villains are just ludicrous. A gangster father trying to reforge his relationship with his eco-warrior son by extorting or removing carbon dioxide producing offenders? Seriously? Joe's repeated refusal to work with other authorities becomes exactly that: repetitious. Box is a good storyteller, but this is an unfortunate low point in the Pickett series.

*****

During the heyday of the Star Trek movies, Paramount's Pocket Books label published literally hundreds of books featuring the characters from the original series and its spinoffs. Unsurprisingly, many of them stunk -- partly because they were rushed into print, partly because many were written by green (inexperienced green, not Vulcan-blood green) authors who would work for cheap and partly because Paramount knew they had a core audience that would buy anything with a pointed ear on the cover whether it stunk or not. Market saturation dried up the stream of books a few years ago, and Pocket editors decided to exercise some more control over the material produced. Part of that was a conscious decision to move some of the series forward through their history -- the overstuffed and meandering Star Trek: The Next Generation series Destiny was one result. But it seems someone at Pocket also decided to put together stories about the original crew as they would have been during the span of the 1960s TV series, in stories such as Troublesome Minds. The Enterprise, entering a new star system, saves a single-person spaceship from destruction engineered by that person's own people. It seems this Berlis is a super-strong telepath in a race of telepaths and his will overwhelms any of his people who may be within his range. His people were trying to prevent that from happening, because a nearby race that had suffered the last time such a "troublesome mind" arose among Berlis' people had vowed their destruction if it happened again. Now Captain Kirk must decide how to prevent war between the two species and stop Berlis from mind-enslaving an entire planet, all the while wondering whether his trusted First Officer Spock, himself a telepath, is being influenced by Berlis as well. Author Dave Galanter has co-written some other novels in the Star Trek universe and knows the feel of a good ST yarn. This is his first original series novel and his first solo, and he does a good job of getting the well-known characters in proper voice and filling their accepted roles. Troublesome Minds doesn't make any monumental changes in the Star Trek universe or signal any watershed moments for the characters, even though they're tested to the limits in many ways. It's a good yarn and whiles away the time, surpassing the wealth of genre fiction that falls short of that modest goal. But asking more than that of a Star Trek book is like wearing a red shirt on an away team: It's a bad idea.