The Way of All Fish

By Martha GrimesScribner, 2014

Baptism

By Max KinningsQuercus, 2014Martha Grimes is the deserving winner of the 2012 Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award. Although she has created several other series, she is best known for the one starring Richard Jury, an inspector at Scotland Yard. There are 22 stellar Jury novels, each named after a pub. The first was The Man with a Load of Mischief (1981) and the most recent is The Black Cat (2010).In 2003, she published Foul Matter, a grandly droll send-up of contemporary New York book publishing. In it, book contracts and Mafia contracts collide. There is a priceless editorial meeting with hit men in a pretentious watering hole where the publishing elite meet. With barbed-wire prose and an insider’s perspective, she nailed the often-Grand Guignol atmosphere of the book industry.Those hit men, Candy and Karl, reappear in The Way of All Fish, the delightful sequel to Foul Matter. It opens at the Clownfish Café. Two guys—“stubby hoods like refugees from a George Raft film”—pull Uzis and spray the room. None of the twenty or so customers get hurt. The only casualty is the owner’s aquarium:

Big glass panels slid and slipped more like icebergs calving than glass breaking, the thirty- or forty-odd fish within pouring forth on their little tsunami of water and flopping around in the puddles on the floor. A third of them were clownfish.All of that took four seconds.In the next four seconds, Candy and Karl had their weapons drawn…. Gunfire was exchanged before the two George Rafts backed toward the door and still firing, turned and hoofed it fast through the dark.

The fish, a many-hued display, are all over the place drawing last breaths. An eye-catching blonde sitting alone who had been eating spaghetti tosses her red wine, scoops up some water and adds one of the fish to her wineglass. Candy grabs a water pitcher and bullies a clownfish into it. This sets up a chain reaction in the café:

The other customers watched and liked it, and with that camaraderie you see only in the face of life-threatening danger, were taking up their water glasses or flinging their wineglasses free of the cheap house plonk and refilling them from water pitchers…. Wading through glass shards…customers and staff collected the pulsing fish and dropped them in glasses and pitchers.It was some sight when they finished.

It’s Monty Python meets the Marx Brothers. It sets the tone for this zany caper.Candy and Karl were in the café on assignment, as it were. They were hired by Joey Giancarlo, or Joey G-C as people called him, to do a hit on literary agent L. Bass Hess, whom they had been following around Manhattan for a couple of weeks. Seems Joey’s son Fabio is a disgruntled author ( ‘are there any other kind?’) because Hess rejected his manuscript. Candy and Karl think Joey sent the George Raft goons to the café because he was tired of waiting for them to make their move. As they remind Joey in a heated—to put it mildly—telephone call, they have “standards,” the chief one being they like to get to know the mark before they off him. Furthermore, they insist on being the only ones who decide whether the guy stays or goes. They can see Joey G-C rolling his eyes as he delivers one of his pithy retorts: “You guys.”Ever since their initial foray into publishing via Foul Matter, books had added a new dimension to Candy and Karl’s lives. Barnes & Noble was one of their main hangouts:

Books were to die for. Literally. They were things you got killed over. Candy and Karl knew New York, licit and illicit, better than half the Metropolitan police and as well as the other half. How would they ever have guessed the publishing world was so shot through with acrimony that they’d just as soon kill you as publish you?

Even better, standards aside, they’ve got values!

They both thought e-books were terrible. They thought the Kindle was cretinous; you read, you want to read a book, not a slab of hardware. Hardware was something that shot bullets.

Hooked on the industry, they liked to keep up via the trade mags: Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, although Candy occasionally sneaks in National Geographic. This is how they learn that Hess is suing a former client, author Cindy Sella, for commission on a book Hess had no part of. She fired him long before publication. Furthermore, such suits are SOP for Hess. In Cindy’s eyes he’s a sociopath; to Candy and Karl he’s a “friggin asshole”; in the world he works in he’s universally disliked.To their surprise, Cindy is the dishy blonde from the Clownfish Café who saved the first fish. By the time Candy and Karl meet up with her, she is but one of a motley crew that would like to take Hess down. So they devise an elaborate means of obliterating him short of murder—drive him crazy. They have no trouble with recruits to pave the way to Hess’s insanity. Immediately on board are “mega-bestselling author” Paul Giverney and publisher Bobby Mackensie, acquaintances, you might say, from the earlier book.Of course, the centerpiece of their madcap plan is fish, the exotic tropical kind. Enter Lena bint Musah, an inscrutable Malaysian lady of many talents: “You pay her, she does it.” Her cigarettes zonk Candy and Karl into another stratosphere. But not before they give her the assignment to learn all about the black market in rare fish. Seems it’s huge. And in Lena’s hands it plays a significant role towards turning Hess into a permanent nut job. Credit is also due to an alligator, a burning bush, a clairvoyant, and a séance in the Andy Warhol museum in Pittsburgh—yes, Pittsburgh. And almost last, but certainly not least, Hess’s uncle in the Everglades who is now his aunt due to an operation—she is not a fan.The coup de grâce, the final act that sends Hess ‘round the bend, is so fitting that it brought to mind the wonderful ending of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. Although Hess’s fate is markedly different, I couldn’t help comparing it to Waugh’s hapless Tony, who is doomed to read Dickens aloud to Mr. Todd for as long as he lives. The Way of All Fish is a fine, fast, wickedly comic romp that is as much fun to read as I bet it was to write.It’s a very long way from Martha Grimes captivating contract killers to the terrorist at the center of Max Kinnings’ Baptism. He is Tommy Denning, age 25 and an ex-soldier (two Afghanistan tours). When he was nine, he and his fraternal twin sister Belle witnessed their father kill their mother, then hang himself. After that, they were in and out of foster homes. He engaged in lots of petty crime, and exhibited constant antisocial behavior. He did time in Feltham Young Offender Institution where he apparently found God. He’s evolved into a religious psychopath. Recently, he and Belle, who worships him, have been living on a remote farm in Snowdonia, Wales. They are part of an evangelical Christian sect known as Cruor Christi, which means the blood of Christ. The sect takes in the troubled and damaged and attempts to reshape their lives. And no one fits that description better than the so-called Brother Thomas and his sister. Except that they are beyond reshaping. Here, among the flock of the Church of Cruor Christi, Tommy Denning has devised a daring act of terror down to the last detail. It begins at midnight when the body of Father Owen is found with a knife in his throat.At 7:45 A.M. the following morning, in a house in South Wimbledon, London, George Wakeham, an underground train driver climbs into his car. As he does so his family is taken hostage by Tommy, Belle, and Brother Simeon, a henchman from the sect. An unfamiliar ringtone directs George to his glove compartment, which contains a cell phone—a much higher specification model than his—along with a wireless headset. He answers the cell and the voice of his wife Maggie directs his attention to the front window. He can see a man wearing a balaclava holding her and their two children at gunpoint.

“George, I’ve got to read something to you.” Her voice was trembling. “You have to listen to it very carefully, okay?”“Okay.”“Unless you do exactly as instructed, the three of us will be killed. Any attempt to raise the alarm will result in us being killed. Any attempt to deviate from the implicit nature of any instructions given to you, however minor, will result in our being killed. Do you understand?”He couldn’t speak. His mouth was devoid of saliva and he felt sick.“You must take the headset that is with the mobile phone. Do you see it?”“Yes.”“It has an on/off switch on the side. Put on the headset and turn it on. Do it now…. You must keep the headset on at all times and keep this line open until you are instructed to do otherwise.”…”Maggie, I want to speak to them.”Pause.“They won’t allow it, all communication must come through me. Now you must continue with your day, exactly as normal. You must go to work and you must keep the headset on with the line open until instructed otherwise.”“Maggie, ask them what they want.”“They can hear you. They’re listening…. They say you’ll find out everything in due course but now you should do as you are told.”“In that case I want them to know that I will do whatever they want, on the condition that they don’t harm you or the children in any way.”“…they agree but you must now proceed as you would on any other day and they want you to know that they will be watching you and listening to you at all times….”

The first part of Tommy’s plan is in play. From the radio comes the prediction that daytime temperatures would soar in excess of ninety degrees. All told, it is going to be a brutal day.At 8:19 A.M. a man startles George in his train cab. He is in his mid-twenties, his head shaved to the length of the thick dark stubble on his face. His penetrating eyes stared into George’s. He assures George his family is fine: “And rest assured, they will continue to be fine so long as you do exactly as I tell you.”It is not long before George realizes to his horror that this is his Internet buddy who posted under the name of Pilgrim. He was a young man who clearly had a burning interest in becoming a train driver. He flattered George and treated him with reverence: “George had opened up to him probably more than he should have done, more than was strictly safe.At 8:56 A.M. Pilgrim, a.k.a. Tommy, orders George to halt the train in the tunnel between Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road stations. There are 400 people trapped on board in the sweltering heat, as a powerless George is forced into sending them falsely reassuring messages. Otherwise he has been savagely silenced.By a little after nine, the powers that be at the LU (London Underground) Network Control center in St. James are in panic mode. Detective Chief Inspector Ed Mallory of Scotland Yard is called to the incident desk there. Mallory is the best hostage negotiator in the business. Blinded thirteen years ago during one of his earliest negotiations, his disability gives him a uniquely acute skill set. The intense concentration with which he listens and intuits potential behavior patterns in hostage takers’ voices is enhanced by his blindness.The tension mounts as the action escalates. Two members of the Specialist Firearm Command sent into the tunnel by Ed are killed by Tommy. As the panicked passengers try to take matters into their own hands, Belle and Tommy begin shooting anyone in their path. Under a bomb threat and the rising body count, Tommy gets an open mike (hardware elaborately produced on short notice) to get out his message. It’s all the more terrifying because it is delivered as he has begun flooding the tunnel, thus creating the titular baptism:

Make no mistake about this, I am a global insurgent…. My authority comes from one place and one place only, the Bible. ‘For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them and shall guide them into the fountains of waters; and God shall wipe away all the tears from their eyes.’ Revelation chapter seven, verse seventeen. I, Tommy Denning, am that lamb…all those who have God in their hearts, must rise up behind me and prepare for battle.

Finally, he gets to the crux of his demands. And this is more chilling than anything Ed has ever encountered in all his years of crisis intervention. Ed must implement desperate measures to carry out an unorthodox solution guaranteed to put a knot in your stomach.This is high voltage suspense that reads faster than the speed of light. Kinnings handles themini-characterizations of the passengers deftly. He has completely captured the complex psychology of terror to give us a thriller that satisfies on all levels.____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.