A country-hopping collection of engaging, high-stakes tales by Europe watchers.
An anthology of short stories chronicles the splintering face of contemporary Europe.
This collection of tales, set in the backrooms and alleys of Europe, presents a continent that has never been more interconnected—and perhaps never in so much danger of coming apart. In Constantine Bouchagiar’s “Shifting Syrian Sands,” a Syrian in Germany sets out to help his fellow refugees, though as he grows more successful, his actions become less altruistic. Preston Smith offers “The Promised Land,” a spy thriller set in Latvia’s border with Russia, where a former Riga police officer investigating a human trafficking syndicate finds more trouble than he bargained for. In Graham Thomas’ “Beaches and Banks,” two expatriate bankers living in Cyprus find themselves working for the same firm. It should be great—they are drinking buddies, after all—until Tom Graham discovers some suspicious practices being carried out by his friend Bob Anastasi. In “Prose and Politics,” Nick Eaden imagines a Scottish politician who thinks he’s finally found an economic solution to his country’s independence from England: previously undiscovered fuel reserves in the North Sea. Unless, of course, the information is just a trick of Russian hackers. The collection’s authors, by and large, are not known for their fiction. Instead, they are journalists, academics, and other experts from the world of international affairs. This gives the book, edited by Anderson and Dunn, a different feel from your average thriller: The details are exact, the structures surprising, and the pacing a bit slower than readers might expect. Even the lengths of the tales—often 30 pages or more—vary from normal short fiction fare. Some are better than others—Thomas’ and Smith’s stories are the standouts—but all provide a provocative window into some corner of contemporary European life that Americans, in particular, are unlikely to have spent much time considering. The foreword and the afterword are both concerned with threats to democracy across the continent, and many of the tales hint darkly at future problems. Whether readers share similar fears or are just looking for stories full of international intrigue, they will find much to enjoy in this wide-ranging anthology.
A country-hopping collection of engaging, high-stakes tales by Europe watchers.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9985742-8-8
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
Readers who limit themselves to one story a night are in for a lot of sleepless nights.
Ardai celebrates the 20th anniversary of his publishing imprint, Hard Case Crime, by reprinting 20 of his own noir tales from 1990 to 2023.
Any collection this big is bound to be a mixed bag, but even the lesser stories here illuminate the formulas they depart from. “The Investigation of Things,” in which two Chinese brothers compete to solve the murder of a Buddhist monk, shows that Ardai’s gifts aren’t best suited to whodunits. The cancellation of a boy’s promised trip to see the circus in “The Day After Tomorrow” pushes Ardai’s ability to plot a short-short story to the limit. And “Nobody Wins,” which chronicles the gratuitously calamitous effects of a private eye’s search for his missing fiancee, has a title that would have been perfect for this whole volume. Ardai’s best stories walk a tightrope between noir fatalism and surprising invention. Some of them boast unsettlingly original premises. A fed pursues a doomed relationship with the grieving mother of a boy he arrested and got killed in “The Home Front”; “Game Over” follows a roll of quarters intended as a birthday gift; “My Husband’s Wife” showcases the coolly amoral voice of a conference attendee’s wife as she commits an escalating series of infractions. Other stories present endings bound to startle the most hard-bitten fans. “The Case” follows the adventures of a suitcase bomb that hasn’t (yet) exploded; a bodyguard’s search for a lubricious charge who’s disappeared from under his nose leads to a bloodbath in “Jonas and the Frail”; the man who hires a trio of contract killers in “Masks” turns out to have a shocking motive; and the ending of “A Free Man,” neatly balancing disillusionment and sentiment, provides a fitting close to the volume.
Readers who limit themselves to one story a night are in for a lot of sleepless nights.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781803366265
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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