“An engrossing, deep-in-the-weeds thriller.” winter work
Many of these short stories, or “sketches,” as the author calls them, have titles that evoke the time when they were written: “Windows 98,” “Hello Kitty,” “Bucket Hats,” “Teletubbies,” “South Park,” and “PalmPilot.” These quick portraits of the human condition appear to be about pop-culture preferences, clothing choices, food, relationships, sex, and careers, but they are as much about assumptions and how the appearance of things is not actually reflective of reality. In “Agnès b.,” a man becomes infatuated with a woman who shares his daily commute. When they finally speak, she confuses him with someone from her past. At other times, these undeniably human tales drift toward the absurdist and surreal. In “Red Wing,” a character, avoiding a boy, runs “faster and faster, higher than the flyover, the road, the ground, and the human world, into a country where no one could catch up with her.” Southie, the protagonist of “South Park,” hangs out with a group of street toughs in a local park. One of their number, a boy who won’t speak, is killed by triad gangsters only to be revived soon thereafter, much like Kenny from the American TV series. In “Birkenstock,” Tok Tok avoids confrontations by running away from them. She knows
it’s time to go when her shoes have worn out, and then she always runs away barefoot, leaving her old shoes behind. Feed your inner nostalgia monster some of these surrealist pop-culture bites.
WINTER WORK
Fesperman, Dan Knopf (352 pp.) $28.00 | July 12, 2022 978-0-593-32160-7 The Berlin Wall has just fallen, but following the murder of a close colleague, disillusioned Stasi veteran Emil Grimm finds that escaping his life in East Germany is as risky as ever. In the chaos following the historic event, intelligence is up for grabs, pitting Russians against Americans against Germans for the names of thousands of agents in the field. Emil lives in a dacha in the woods north of Berlin with his bedridden wife, Bettina, who has ALS, and her caretaker, Karola, who, with the tacit approval of Bettina, has become a second wife to Emil. Among their neighbors is Emil’s former boss, renowned spymaster Markus Wolf (one of the reallife figures in the book). After the murder of Lothar Fischer, his friend and co-conspirator, Emil reaches out to CIA agent Claire Saylor, who has been dispatched to East Germany in hopes of learning the identity of a mole at Langley. He promises to swap her crucial information in return for her getting himself, Bettina, and Karola—who proves to be a great partner in surprising other ways—to freedom. In a kind of woodlands pas de deux, Claire (the protagonist of Fesperman’s 2021 gem, The Cover Wife) becomes increasingly invested in Emil’s cause. Until the thrilling climax, what’s at stake—what the pitched strategic battles are about—is treated almost as an afterthought. It’s the gamesmanship that matters most. Emil’s secret meetings with Wolf have the color and bounce of a much finer wine than the one they’re drinking. A local cop bonds with Emil even as he is being played by him. When a recently retired spy named Clark Baucom says to Claire, “This is all getting pretty complicated,” she’s not at all unhappy about that. An engrossing, deep-in-the-weeds thriller.
RIZZOLI & ISLES Listen to Me
Gerritsen, Tess Ballantine (320 pp.) $28.00 | July 5, 2022 978-0-593-49713-5
The snoop is the star as Rizzoli and Isles make their 13th appearance together. A hit-and-run driver injures young Amy Antrim in downtown Boston, and Sofia Suarez, a middle-aged critical 16
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15 may 2022
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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