The Best Revenge - Gerald Seymour

 

If James Bond has a direct opposite it would be Gerald Seymour’s master spy Jonas Merrick. Unlike Mr. Bond, Jonas never goes into the field to do any dirty work or to gather vital information about the threatening intentions of foreign governments. Jonas, in fact, so seldom leaves his desk once he arrives there promptly each morning that his colleagues have very little idea what he does all day long. Jonas is such a non-entity to the rest of MI-5 that he has become a joke. He has one friend at the top, and one or two nearer the bottom of the organization - and he likes it that way.

“Jonas had no university education, he had never in three decades with the Fivers been on a promotion course, he ignored summons to meetings where policy and progress were examined…And he was not sure why they still tolerated him.” (Chapter 4)

But, unbeknownst to almost everyone within MI-5, Jonas has probably done as much or more to protect the security of the UK and the West than anyone else in the building. And now, he’s on the verge of cracking a long-embedded UK Chinese spy network, one so important to China that heads are literally going to roll all around the world if Jonas is successful - and one of those heads just might turn out to be his own. Because this time, Jonas has become so deadly from his desk chair, that the other side is coming for him.

And Jonas is not ready for them - not even close. After all, he really doesn’t like dealing with actual people.

“It was the essence of Jonas Merrick’s professional life that he stayed huddled inside his cubicle, and had his phone and his computer, and his own library of paper files that he took home to read, the cat sprawled on his thighs. He would have claimed that the way he worked was to keep emotion and consequence at arm’s…” (Chapter 16)

Not this time, Jonas. Not this time.  

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The Jonas Merrick Series:

The Crocodile Hunter (2021)

The Foot Soldiers (2022)

In at the Kill (2023)

The Best Revenge (2024)

Gerald Seymour has also written thirty-seven standalone novels, the most recent being 2020’s A Damned Serious Business. Among my favorites of the standalones are: A Song in the Morning, Home Run, Killing Ground, The Waiting Time, Holding the Zero, and Rat Run. 

 

Reading: Is It Biology or Is It Environment?

My barber asked me last week if I go everywhere with a book in my hand. She's been cutting my hair for twenty years now and she remarked that she doesn't recall a single time that I sat in her chair without first closing the book that I carried in with me. She's right; I don't recall a single time either. (These days, it is more likely that I’m closing and e-reader cover than a physical book, however.)

That got me to thinking about the difference between avid readers and those who either don't read at all, or who only read one of the obvious bestsellers once or twice a year. I wonder what turned some of us into readers and left so many others unblessed with the inclination? Is it genetic? Are some us simply born this way and others not? 

It's kind of scary to think that something like a love of reading, something that has played such a large part in my life, was given to me through sheer, random chance. I have only one sibling, a non-reading brother, and I cringe to think that there was a 50-50 chance that I would miss out on the "reading gene" and that that little fellow would end up in my brother's DNA rather than in mine. Of course, he's probably just as happy being a non-reader as I am being a book nut since he has no way of knowing what he's missed. But still…the very thought shakes me a little.

I'm coming to believe that it is near impossible to turn a person who is inclined to be a non-reader into an avid one. Yes, you might be able to move them along the reading scale in that direction (as I’ve managed to do with my brother in recent years), but I don't believe that they will ever turn into the kind of book nut that so many of us were destined to be. That spark is either there, waiting to flame up when it's ready, or it's not there at all, and throwing all the gasoline in the world on it won't start a fire.

What has been your experience?

The American Library - Janet Skeslien Charles

      

     In October, 2024, we spent a couple of days in a Dallas B&B that had its own version of a Little Free Library inside the rental. A sign on the container invited us to take a book or two with us when we left, and to leave something behind if we had anything to contribute. The Paris Library is one of two books I took home with me at the end of that weekend, but I’ve just now gotten around to reading it. I tend to read a steady diet of historical fiction, and was a little burned out on World War II fiction, so I ended up putting the book aside when we got home - and immediately forgot I even had it until stumbling upon it a couple of weeks ago. (I still haven’t read the second book.)

      The Paris Library was published in 2021 by Atria Books (a Simon & Schuster imprint) and runs 351 pages long, including the Author’s Note. My impressions are mostly positive ones for this well-researched account of how the American Library functioned in Paris during World War II:

• Will appeal to a broad audience of readers
• Centers on a handful of nicely developed characters who evolve and change during the course of the novel
• Uses flashbacks to the main story while occasionally visiting the main character some forty years in the future
• The American Library almost becomes a central character itself 
• Explores the difficult choices Parisians were forced to make during the Nazi occupation of the city - and the hypocrisy of those who sometimes benefited from the tough choices made by others
• Based on historical figures, letters, and memories of those who were there
• Intensively researched for accuracy

     I was a little slow to warm to the characters and plot of The Paris Library, largely I think, because I found the writing to be a little on the dry side. Once I got deeper into the story and became clearer on which characters were destined to play the main roles, that all changed. I got more used to the author’s writing tempo and lost myself in the story. If you read this one, don’t quit on it too soon because the ending is a memorably intense one. For me, this is pretty close to a four-star book.

Inside The American Library in Paris

Photo of The American Library featured in the novel

Top of the Desk: What I’m Reading This Week

 I don’t seem to be finishing many books so far this year, but that’s not because I’m not turning lots of pages. Seems like I’m falling back into one of my old habits of immediately beginning to read a book rather than simply adding it to my TBR for later. The stack of partially read books on my desk seems to be multiplying on its own these days, and even though I read from each of them several times a week, I am slow to reach the final page of any of them. 

The current desktop stack is only this short because I did finish two books in the last couple of days:

Chernow’s biographies, of which I’m a fan, are well researched, complete, and very, very long. Mark Twain (2025), coming in at 1,033 pages of text, plus another 125 pages of footnotes and index, is no exception. Thankfully, Mr. Chernow has a very readable style, but at just over 300 pages into this one, I have a long way to go. (This books is so physically heavy, that you could injure yourself trying to read it in bed.) Mark Twain really comes alive in this great biography.

Blasphemy (2012) is a book of Sherman Alexie short stories that I just started reading last night. Alexie is a Native American (he, I think, calls himself an Indian) author perhaps best known for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Another title of his that intrigues me, a short story collection I read in 2021, is The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. His stories brutally expose the problems so many Native Americans face to this day. He is a solid short story writer.

Gerald Seymour has been one of my favorite espionage thriller writers since I discovered a book of his in a London library in the mid-nineties. I loved his first book from the first page, and more than a dozen books later, he has yet to let me down. The Best Revenge (2024) is the fourth in Seymour’s Jonas Merrick series. Jonas is not your typical spy, he’s more of what his colleagues think of as just another MI-5 pencil pusher…but his pencil is a deadly weapon.

This is my first experience with anything by C.S. Lewis, and through the first three chapters I’m still not really into it. The book was produced from a series of radio talks Lewis did for the BBC during World War II. It’s not deep theology, more like sitting down with a neighbor across a cup of coffee every few days for a good conversation about how we should all try to live our lives. Lewis, at least in Mere Christianity, doesn’t talk down to his audience. I imagine that the British population really looked forward to these talks during the war. 

I read at least a dozen memoirs a year, but I usually know who the writer is before starting the book. Not the case with Isaac Fitzgerald’s Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (2022). But no way could I resist a book with a first sentence like this one: “My parents were married when they had me, just to different people.” Turns out Fitzgerald is quite an interesting man who survived a chaotic childhood to do OK for himself. This one is very conversational and pages turn quickly. 

Just what I need, a book interviewing some twenty-two authors on “the books that changed their lives.” Nothing like that to add to my monstrous TBR list. Yep, just what I need. The Writer’s Library (2020) by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager turns out to be even more interesting than I expected it would be. The authors use the interviews to explore their personal literary comings-of-age, and leave me with a whole lot that I want to read for myself, books and authors that had barely, if at all, cracked my radar before now.

There’s something here to fit just about every mood I might find myself in for the next couple of weeks, but I would not be at all surprised to find one or two new ones sitting atop my desk by this time next week. I can’t wait to find out.

What We Left Unsaid - Winnie M. Li

Sometimes I think I live for road trips, but not just any old road trips. I like to get out and wander aimlessly for two or three thousand miles before doing the same thing on my way back home. That kind of trip has led me to countless unexpected places, and to friends I would have otherwise never known over the last several decades, and it’s still one of my favorite things in all the world to do (although I had to skip doing a trip in 2025). 

And that is what led me to Winnie Li’s What We Left Unsaid, a novel about three middle-aged siblings on a drive from Chicago to California to visit their seriously ill mother. First, though, I fell in love with the cover because of the way that it so perfectly captures the serendipitous spirit of a four-wheel ramble across America. I wanted to experience someone else’s road trip, and I did that. But that’s not all there is here.

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My What We Left Unsaid impressions and takeaways:

• The basic plot (three rather estranged Asian American siblings forced to spend days together on a cross-country drive) is a solid one,
•  Flashbacks to their last road trip together, when the three were children, effectively explains their current family dynamic,
• Too much of the plot heavily depends on coincidence, and this many critical coincidences start to feel overly contrived and forced before very long,
• Li tries to hit every hot-button social/political issue on this roadtrip of about a week’s duration: overt racism, gun violence, gender issues, gay marriage, politics with a definite anti-Trump tone, it’s all there,
• the ending is predictable enough to be disappointing because most readers will see it coming long before the novel’s “big reveal,” is officially unveiled, and
• despite the book’s almost 400 pages, the last quarter of it seems rushed and overly (and very negatively) stereotypical.

Overall, I was disappointed in What We Left Unsaid despite enjoying its road trip aspects. It proved to be too one-sided for me to suspend my disbelief long enough to buy its message. All the “good" guys in the story are exceptionally “good,” and all the “bad" guys are exceptionally “bad.” Li’s failure to include any grey areas or characters in her tale leads to the book’s predictability. And that’s my main gripe about this one. Reluctantly, I’ll give it three stars because it did keep me engaged enough to finish it.

Is Book Lust a Sin?

    

     My bookshelves have long since reached the point where a book has to be somewhere removed from the shelves before I can add any recent acquisition. And even then, it’s still a matter of shifting books around until a spot opens up in the appropriate section of my shelving. I’ve even tried the periodic book-purge in which I’ve found new homes for ten or twenty books at a time, but that method almost always immediately sends me out book-shopping again until all that wonderful free space is filled. 

     So, in practical terms, the rule around here is “one book in, one book out.” And that’s gotten harder for me to do because the individual  choices are getting to be more and more difficult to make now. It's beginning to cut too close to the bone. Rather ridiculously, my answer - despite my aversion to buying e-books from Amazon - has been to buy e-books from those vendors that allow me to download backup copies to my computer, vendors like Kobo and a few publishers that sell directly to readers. (More on this later if anyone is interested.)

     Shelf space problem solved. Whole new problem created. 

     Since the Year of the Plague (2020), I’ve bought more e-books every year than I can possibly ever read. As of this moment, there are 1,659 e-books on my Kobo reader, with a paltry 335 of those actually having been read. A handful of others have been abandoned after failed efforts on my part to find them readable, but that still leaves something over 1,300 unread books on the reader. 

     And I keep on buying them, and buying them, and buying them. 

     They are not all new books; in fact, well over half of them are back catalog choices that I’ve gotten at really good prices. (Is this starting to sound more like an addiction now and not just a harmless hobby?) I see that I purchased over 30 books in January, and already this month, another 10. The best that I can say about them, is that they are a fairly diverse bunch of books - and that I’ll never, ever, run out of things to read. 2026 purchases include:

• Eight books from Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series
• The new Michael J. Fox memoir, Future Boy
• Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, historical fiction about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son
• The Impossible Fortune, Richard Osman’s fifth book in his Thursday Murder Club series
• Michael Connelly’s eighth Lincoln Lawyer book, The Proving Ground
• Elizabeth George’s latest Inspector Lynley book, A Slowly Dying Cause
• The Land of Sweet Forever, a collection of Harper Lee short stories and magazine pieces
• Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Roberts Giuffre memoir of being sexually exploited by Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Prince Andrew, among others
• Clown Town, Mick Herron’s latest Slow Horses book, along with six earlier pre-Slow Horses books from his back catalog
• Eleven books from Martin Cruz Smith’s back catalog

     And of the thirty-three purchased so far this year, a whopping five of them have been read.

     That’s pretty typical of what I’ve been buying now that I’m tending to binge-read certain authors that catch my eye. If I particularly enjoy a book and rate it a rare five-stars, I find myself wanting to know instantly what else that author has published. And then I want to read them all. But 1,659 e-book purchases in a little over five years is crazy. 

     Book lust has to be a sin…right?