THE CYNIC

“Serious international espionage” and a voter fraud conspiracy cast a dark shadow over an island paradise and the lives of several interconnected characters in this debut novel.

On the Sedois Islands, there are scant degrees of separation between the characters in this densely populated tale. Dink, an Australian doctor, and his wife, Kylie, are recent arrivals after fleeing Qatar following his DUI charge that could have netted him jail time and 40 lashes. They meet Ajay, a gregarious and popular resident (“Everyone knows Ajay” is a running gag), who has a will-they-or-won’t-they thing going on with his beautiful, lifelong friend Camille, whose cohort Alvina is the island vixen. Ajay’s father, Soval, is in cahoots to rig the upcoming presidential election in favor of Guang Li, or “Lee.” Several spy agencies and operatives, including Mossad official Danny Zur, have Lee on their radars. A decade earlier in Australia, Danny lived upstairs from Dink and Kylie. While the couple have fond memories of Danny, he becomes suspicious of them when it turns out that Dink and Kylie happen to be staying at a hotel where the Mossad assassination of a terrorist that he spearheaded has been exposed, causing a media firestorm. As one character notes, “Even paradise has its limitations.” There is a lot to unpack here, but Pao efficiently establishes these and other characters and gives each a full-dimensioned fleshing out in individual chapters. While there are vivid passages that evoke the Sedois Islands’ idyllic beauty (“Every beach has its own sound”), the author, perhaps taking his cue from the island setting, is too laid back with his unfolding narrative. Dramatic scenes that should have the “senses ablaze,” such as Dink and Kylie’s escape from Qatar, are anticlimactic (“The efficient staff scanned their passes without fuss”). More successful is the climactic race against time to circumvent Soval’s sinister election forces. Readers’ opinions will likely vary on the elusive meaning of the title.

Bliss eludes this vibrant but overpopulated and overplotted excursion.