Book Log 2014 #20: Dark Invasion by Howard Blum

It's 1915, and Germany is looking to keep the officially neutral United States from trading with the UK and France, but can't do so openly for fear of pushing American into the war. Thus begins what might be the first modern use of state-sponsored terrorism, as the Germans use their own agents, and Germans located in the US (either as immigrants or sailors stuck in US ports) to strike at US shipping, horses, and other potential materiel of war.

To fight this, the US only has a unit of the New York PD, built off its bomb squad, to track down and stop the saboteurs, combining police tactics with a brand of counterespionage that they learn on the fly. It was surprising how much success Germany had given the ragtag (and often unstable) cast of characters they had carrying out attacks, though it does demonstrate that proper planning and attention to tradecraft can overcome other obstacles. And given the security state we live in now, it was interesting to see the way a group of determined but decided amateurs developed tactics to combat the growing threat.

This isn't a corner of World War I we've often seen, and this is a suspenseful and well-paced accounting. I only wish that the book didn't come to a sudden stop once the US entered the war. The book could really use an epilogue, if just to give some closure to the spy ring and the eventual fates of the individuals involved.

Book Log 2014 #19: The Stolen Ones by Richard Montanari

A string of killings linked to an infamous - and now closed - asylum is the latest in this series featuring Philadelphia detectives Kevin Byrne and  Jessica Bolzano. Once again, I've stumbled into a series in the middle and didn't realize it until I'd started reading, and while there were clearly references to earlier books you can read this as a stand-alone.

And it's worth the read, as the partnership between Byrne and Bolzano is mature and well-defined and the story is complex without being needlessly convoluted. I do plan on going back to start at the beginning, but if you did want to jump in with this book it's worth the read.

Book Log 2014 #18: A Darkening Stain by Robert Wilson

The last of the books in the Bruce Medway series is also the darkest (hence the title), as our anti-hero gets involved (and helps engineer) a complicated plot involving smuggled gold, human trafficking, police corruption, organized crime, and murder. Medway's involvement, fueled by the inclusion of loved ones, takes him to places he'd previously avoided (figuratively and literally), and by then end forces him to make decisions on his life, his work, his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, and his whole reason for being in Africa in the first place.

It's a fitting end piece for the series, probably the best book of the four. It also reminds me that Wilson's new series, featuring a kidnapping consultant named Charles Boxer, is two books in and I need to get to the first one.

Book Log 2014 #17: The Purity of Vengeance by Jussi Adler-Olsen

This fourth Department Q novel takes as its starting point a period in Danish history where eugenics were in vogue and young women - often girls, really - were put into facilities and often sterilized against their will. From this Adler-Olsen creates a convoluted case that involves one of the women subjected to this treatment, a doctor forming a "purity" party on the far right of Danish politics, and a number of seemingly unrelated people who went missing.

While this use of painful recent history makes this a more somber case, there is still a fair bit of humor pulled from the department and Carl Morck's personal life (though that even gets pulled down a bit as Carl is implicated in both the drowning death of his uncle years before and the shooting that left one of his coworkers paralyzed). I do look forward to learning just a bit more about Rose and Assad with every book, and this one certainly moves things forward for both of them.

If you're not reading this series, and you like Scandinavian crime fiction, you should start reading these. It'd be timely, too, as the fifth book in the series was released in the US just this week.

Book Log 2014 #16: Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking by Anya Von Bremzen

I went into this book taking the title in a more literal sense, that the book would be about Soviet food and whatever passed for social realism cuisine. And while that's in there, this book is really a memoir about the author's life in the USSR and eventual emigration to the US. Food plays a prominent role, weaved into stories about family and life under communism.

The most interesting parts to me, though, come once the author and her mother relocated to the US, as their joy at being out from under the Soviet thumb is often tempered by the realities of being in a place where you don't speak the language (or don't speak it as well as you'd like) or understand the customs. Watching the pair adjust and get used to the US (and even begin to miss the USSR) is pretty amazing. I don't know if I'd have the guts to do that, even with the daily indignities that were part of Soviet life.

I'll admit to having wanted a little more straight food talk (I'm always interested in goofy products and the like), but that's just me. This is a really well-written memoir that's got plenty of food talk (on top of the usual memoir topics) and is worth a read.