The Tiger By the Tail

 You name it: fiction, mystery, thriller, war story, romance, political thriller, suspenseful novel.  Up Country by Nelson DeMille is all that, besides being a good story.  The main character is Paul Brenner, a retired Army detective.  He had just retired, when his former commander asked him to solve one more crime.  This is the plot.

During the Vietnam War, a wounded Vietnamese Cong was on the second floor, trying to remain quiet when he witnessed a terrible crime taking place, below him on the first floor, by the Americans.  This building had been bombed and there were gaps in the floor.  This Cong wrote what happened to his brother, also a Vietnamese soldier, who was killed.  The letter was found and kept as a souvenir by an American soldier.  Many years later, the American soldier decided to send the letter to the United Staes Army/Government, for historical value or whatever.  When the letter was translated the government realized that a crime had been committed and wanted the perpetrator punished. That's the assignment Paul Brenner was given and that's all the reader knows and understands, too.

Brenner has the name, and the Vietnamese village the witness came from.  That's all.  Brenner doesn't even know if the witness was still alive. If he's dead, that the end of the assignment.  If he isn't, Brenner needs to get a positive identification of the perpetrator.  

I think I enjoyed this book so much because I was alive and can identify (in a way) with the times.  I was a twenty-something year old, during the war, and was both anti-war, and very busy with career, marriage, and new family, to really understand what soldiers like Paul Brenner were going through.  I know less than a handful of people who were in the war.

1.  Joe spent the entire war as a dental hygienist, in Japan.

2.  Tom who was a typist in an office, there.

3.  A cribbage partner, who won't talk about it.

4.  A priest who led platoons and had a bounty on his head, as did other platoon leaders.  The witness of the South Vietnamese soldiers, fighting for their homeland, led him to the priesthood.  The soldiers were devout.  

I was not prepared for the descriptions of fighting in Up Country.  I also hesitate to recommend this book to one of my book clubs.  It is gory--too descriptive of the violence perpetrated during war. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the story. I learned, I laughed, I gagged, I cried, I blushed, and I sighed with relief when the crime was exposed.  I'll be thinking about UP Country, for a long time.

State of Terror

 I belong to a book club, “ Argonauta,” named after the first book the club read, Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindberg.  Argonata is a chapter in Lindberg’s book.  Argonautas are female seashells, really delicate egg casings that drift here and there, living an adventure, for whom knows where the sea may take them.

Such is this book; I want to tell you about.  It is State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny.  I put off reading it until the last days before Argonauta met.  I had mistakenly thought it was nonfiction.  I pictured a boring explanation of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's performance, a defense of what she had done, or a commendation on her successes.

Not so.

The book, State of Terror, is an argonauta sea shell that will take you on an adventure in a sea of political gales.  Dramamine won’t help.  You can’t get off the story.  You are reading a whirlwind of intrigue, word play, politics, and John Donne (the poet).  (There are a lot of figures of speech employed, {which I enjoyed very much,} because one of the major characters was a former high school English teacher.)  The English teacher, Betsy, and the main protagonist, Ellen Adams, the Secretary of State, use a personal secret code that only they understand, using figures of speech, for example:

An oxymoron walked into a bar…and the silence was deafening.

An argonauta was tossed from a wave into a bar and found herself in a State of Terror.

Thus the reader finds herself flying home in Air Force 3 from the Secretary of State’s first foray into diplomacy.  It was a disaster.  As the president, Doug Williams had known it would be.  Ellen the Secretary of State was set up, by the president.  They do not like each other and it was a surprise that the president even picked Ellen to be the Secretary of State. She and we readers can see that her role is going to be the scapegoat.

Then attention from Ellen’s debacle is drawn to a series of bombings throughout Europe. Chaos ensues trying to figure out what was going on.  Who, why, and who’s next are questions that make everyone frantic. Eventually, we find out that Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, and Iran are involved.  We think they’re involved in a race to develop nuclear weapons.  Actually, they are being manipulated by a vile Islam extreme terrorist, Bashir Shah.

I’m not giving any spoilers, so I won’t give a plot summary.  I will tell you that one of the delights of the novel, is that the characters are thinly disguised real people, currently, well-known people:

President Doug Williams is our President Biden.
Former President Eric Dunn is Former President Donald Trump.
British Premier Bellington is Boris Johnson
Osama Bin Laden is Bashir Shah

The private thoughts of the Secretary of State will make you wonder how real they are, or were.  The book is a political thriller.  The wordplay is clever and you may laugh out loud at the comebacks and witty banter employed by the cautious political enemies.  You will also cry, yes, sob.  The violence and loss of the characters you will have grown to love will make you weep.

State of Terror by Hillary Rodman Clinton and Louise Penny have a sensational bestseller.  I stayed up late reading this 500-page turner.  If you are human, you will probably lose some sleep, too.

So!  A hyperbole walked into a bar…and said this book is the best book I’ve ever read!