Flesh and Blood

A dangerously destructive insect, the glassy-winged sharpshooter, poses a serious threat to the multibillion-dollar wine industry of Napa Valley. The SUV of leafhoppers, this pest that vectors a disaster more lethal to vines than phylloxera functions as the central figure in Nadia Gordon’s novel “Sharpshooter.” Talk of its appearance in the vineyard country around the little town of St. Helena fills everyone with alarm; the prospect of chemical warfare against the hungry intruder threatens the existence of nearby organic farms. Everyone is worried, everyone is at loggerheads. It is in this context that the sniper-style shooting of Jack Beroni, heir of the great Beroni Vineyard Estate and a determined advocate of spraying, sets the community on its ears.

The vic was widely disliked, so there’s little regret at his offing, and there’s a wealth of potential perps. But the Beronis’ neighbor, Wade Skord of Skord Mountain Vineyards, producer of an admired bijou brew, is the prime suspect. Wade, who has been heard to threaten Jack, plays assault golf at night, shooting at glow-in-the-dark golf balls with his .22 rifle. The police think that he could easily have targeted his arrogant neighbor. His friend, Sunny McCuskey, owner and chef of a popular local cafe restaurant, vehemently disagrees. Resolute and resourceful, she will try to prove the police wrong.

That is the gist of Gordon’s story, and the reasons to read it are many: It’s readable, the violence is minimal and, above all, the book’s local color and its culinary, oenological and ecological details are priceless. Sunny, who rolls her own pasta and uses only organically correct vittles, cannot resist cooking and sipping even outside her own restaurant. Since her friends are in the same league, investigation takes a back seat to palate-tickling gourmandizing and epicurizing. There’s enough about cooking, eating and drinking to give you an appetite before you’re halfway through. Everyone samples, sniffs, sips, savors or, occasionally, guzzles. The effect is silly, charming, incoherent and fun to taste. I only wish I could get hold of some of that Grgich Fume Blanc.

Double-cross and double-dealing on all sides, traffic in drugs, videos and human beings, kidnapping, smuggling, murder, rape, lies, betrayal, impostures, evasions, pursuits, snares and pitfalls throng Val McDermid’s “The Last Temptation” and set its feverish pace.

A ruthless international trafficker and an equally ruthless but more impenetrable psychopathic serial killer are being tracked by British, German and Dutch police forces and by Europol, but especially by Dr. Tony Hill, a psychologist-profiler, and his once-and-again partner, Det. Chief Inspector Carol Jordan.

When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. As Tony and Carol struggle to unravel the web of danger and deceit they’re caught up in, to save their threatened lives and help each other, the syncopated plot leads them to Berlin and along the Rhine. The apparently separate cases interweave to carry them through a crime-streaked string of startling incidents, adventures and misadventures. Relentless, electric and absorbing, this is a thriller not to miss.

In Alan Furst’s latest, it is November 1940. Victorious in both East and West, the Germans are trying to bomb Britain into submission and are gearing up to invade Russia. Serebin, a Russian emigre writer living in German-occupied Paris, boards a Bulgarian freighter from the Romanian port of Constanta to Istanbul. He is part of a circus of British-run amateur spies chugging through southeastern Europe--Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and France. Objective: to deny the Germans use of the Romanian oil crucial to their tanks and planes. Oil is the “blood of victory”; and Furst charts the Keystone Kop-like endeavors of Serebin & Co. to sabotage the Germans through a Luna Park of local designs, swings, roundabouts, conspiracies, revolts, betrayals and varied bloodlettings.

Furst has researched the historical background, as he always does, and the chronology of four crowded winter months would be enough to keep us panting. But, though there are trysts and narrow escapes aplenty, Furst’s settings matter more than politics, incidental intrigues more than international ones, social skirmishes more than armed encounters. Atmosphere is all, especially in spy thrillers, and Furst is a master atmosphere-spinner. Understated sentiment, deprecatory charm, digressions aplenty, more nuances than action, more subtlety than slaughter, hints, nudges, whispers and incredible stories one would like to believe are the ingredients of his style. The recipe has worked before, and here it works again. Who would want to complain?

And here is one for amateurs of the esoteric, of astral romances and occult arts for suckers. A.W. Hill’s hero, Stephan Raszer, is a tracker who pursues “strays”: the credulous gulls of gnostic predators. “Enoch’s Portal” is a re-presentation of the sad saga of the Solar Temple and of the victims of its mystic moonshine. The stray whom Raszer tracks is Sofia Gould, wife of a Hollywood mogul, and the quest for the seductive Sofia leads him to Prague where the past is far from past, and to the Australian wilderness where it is very present indeed.

Raszer’s checkered pilgrimage from Hollywood to desolate outback allows for much talk of thanatos and cosmic cremation, of cults, cabbalists, alchemists, magi, sufis, shamans, masons, Cathars, Templars and their secrets, international financiers and financial skulduggery of a high order. Collateral damage is heavy. Some names are coded. Gould represents fool’s gold that alchemists promised; Sofia might be Wisdom, if she didn’t lack it; the evil raptor and inveigler-in-chief is Fourche, a cloven-hooved devil (mis)leading his self-deceived followers into a neo-Cathar suicide snare that promises to use quantum physics to blow them into a parallel universe.

Raszer himself oscillates between rationality and crackpot-ism. Accredited to Interpol, he patronizes herbalists, diets on soy protein and wheat grass, suffers from visions, hallucinations, dizziness and premonitory dreams and doesn’t know quite what to make of the pseudology and pseudoscience he encounters.

The author, too, seems of two minds whether to take his mysteries at face value. But he serves them up in “Enoch’s Portal” in a fast-paced narrative full of twists, turns, thrills and turbulence. If you believe or suspend disbelief, it makes an enticing yarn.