Spies and Mysteries

Sometimes  a mystery writer wants a location in which to set his or her protagonists so we find ourselves in cities or towns with the same names as those we know, although they're a little bit altered to suit the narrative. Robert B. Parker's Boston home for Spenser is very clearly mapped onto the Boston we might visit. Sometimes the writers make up new cities, as Evan Hunter did when writing the 87th Precinct novels as Ed McBain. His Isola is New York City, but swapped out so Hunter can manipulate it in ways to which the actual NYC might not lend itself.

And then sometimes the writer just changes the whole world. Len Deighton allowed the Germans to successfully invade England in SS-GB, and Malcolm Mackay made the Darien expedition a success in order to make a northwestern seaport in an independent Scotland and tailor the city to his liking in In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide, the first novel set in the aging and deteriorating port of Challaid.

The alternative historical elements play mostly to set the scene of the story and disappear whenever we're moving through the narrative itself. Characters still Google things and have iPhones, and aside from a couple of mentions of different sports teams and a King of Scotland, the different world doesn't intrude on the plot. It centers on the murder of a small-time money launderer, which goes unsolved by the police long enough for the man's girlfriend to hire her own agents to find out what happened. The girlfriend, Maeve Campbell, has an interest in finding the killer because the police suspect her. The men she hires, young Darian Ross and experienced ex-cop Sholto Douglas, are more than happy with their fee but have to navigate a tightrope as they look into the murder. Non-police investigators are either licensed detectives -- and thus police lapdogs in corrupt Challaid -- or "researchers" technically unable to probe a crime legally. Even when Ross and Douglas produce a suspect, the sinister operators of Challaid's organized crime rings and the corrupt police officers in league with them seem to have the pair and Maeve herself spot on a target for their own plans.

Mackay's best known to this point as the writer of the "Glasgow Underworld" series that began with the story of a hit man in The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter. He displays significant crime and hard-boiled tale chops in that series and puts them to good use in these new stories as well. Although Ross and Douglas are mostly on the right side of the law, they live and move in a world where those lines aren't always as bright and the actors on the stage not as clearly categorized. Cage suffers from some inconsistent world-building -- Mackay likes to use interstitial news articles and such to set up the history of the Challaid world and the people in it. But he doesn't always tie these intermissions into his narrative as solidly as he could in order to make their speed-bump characteristics worth the time. The plot complicates itself into enough confusion that the actual solution to the crime makes just a bit more than no sense at all.

Mackay displays style and a gift for crafting hard-case, world-weary characters who stubbornly cling to ideas of honor and human dignity in a life that rewards neither. So a couple more novels in the world of Cage could be worth the read, but unless he manages to give his plots enough backbone to stay coherent enough to know what those characters are doing then any that come along after that could very well be consigned to the pages of histories that never happened.

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National Review political correspondent Jim Geraghty has written plenty of political commentary and a couple of non-fiction works, in addition to the clever satire of the kudzu of federal bureaucracy, The Weed Agency. With Between Two Scorpions, he tries his hand at the espionage suspense thriller with equally promising and problematic results.

CIA operative Katrina Leonidivna meets an old contact who claims to know about a plot against the United States with powerfully disruptive consequences. She dismisses his warnings as a con, rigged up to help him escape the consequences of his many double-dealings, but when an explosion kills him and a group of innocent people and almost kills her, she decides to look into the claim. Her husband Alec Flanagan and a crew of misfit operatives from several branches of the United States' different clandestine services will also probe the information her late informant tried to provide. But their clock shrinks considerably when shadowy terrorists begin strikes designed not to maximize body count but to exploit some of the fault lines of modern American society. Katrina, Alec and the rest of their "dangerous clique" have little info and less time to stop the plot before it weakens America from the inside, perhaps permanently.

Like a lot of people who have to write every day, Geraghty has little trouble dropping an engine into his story and keeping it going. The characters exist almost entirely on the surface at this point, with just a few of them getting any exploration in detail. But since he's envisioned this as a series he probably plans to save closer looks at other team members for later stories. The terrorist plot itself turns on some shamefully plausible ugly behavior on the part of people given the right kinds of stressors and seems far more conceivable than is comfortable.

The character exposition and exploration isn't stitched as smoothly into the plot as it needs to be and sometimes seems more infodump than introspection. Geraghty, who proves himself a funny guy on his Three Martini Lunch podcast, should also dial down the jokeyness inside his story. Thrillers work fine with humor, but some of what Alec and his coworkers do for laughs grows from a setup/punchline combo more than it comes from the story. These elements feel more like scenes from a 1980s action-comedy TV show than a high-stakes espionage tale.

But Scorpions offers loads of potential and it's more than possible that as Geraghty hits a better and more focused stride that the Dangerous Clique could click for quite awhile.