{"id":483,"date":"2012-02-25T14:49:02","date_gmt":"2012-02-25T20:49:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=483"},"modified":"2012-02-25T15:13:55","modified_gmt":"2012-02-25T21:13:55","slug":"a-j-kazinski-the-last-good-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/a-j-kazinski-the-last-good-man\/","title":{"rendered":"A.J. Kazinski: The Last Good Man"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Thanks to Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, the axis of the mystery universe has shifted.\u00a0 Where American readers used to feel as familiar with the streets of London and the interiors of British country houses as with the streets of New York or LA, they can now feel familiar with the streets of Copenhagen, Stockholm, and many other Scandinavian locations. It\u2019s been a slow seepage, but our international fiction section had to claim its own fixture a few years ago, with steady sellers like Cara Black, Colin Cotterill, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesb\u00f8 and Arnaldur Indridason taking pride of place, and with the advent of the Stieg Larsson trilogy (those books actually have their very own special store location) the lust for foreign fiction has just exploded.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This book, The Last Good Man,<\/em> doesn\u2019t really have any of the artistic trappings some of the other international offerings have – Karin Fossum\u2019s prose is exquisite, for example – but what it does have is a good old thriller structure that will be familiar to readers anywhere.\u00a0 And what, really, is more optimistic than the thriller?\u00a0 The hero or heroine, through their proactive behavior, saves either the planet or the missing\/endangered family member\/innocent victim at the last turn of the twisty plot.\u00a0 This one is of the save the planet variety, and it couldn\u2019t be harder to put down.\u00a0 I enjoyed the novelty of the setting (this is Copenhagen rather than Stockholm, after all) and I liked the main character, Niels Bentzon, very much.<\/p>\n

While the premise is slightly hokey, that just slots this book in with many other compulsively readable thrillers, and it bears more than a slight resemblance to Dan Brown\u2019s The Da Vinci Code, <\/em>though this is a far better and more original novel, in my opinion.\u00a0 While the book starts out jumping all over the globe – from Beijing to Mumbai to Venice, the work of two policemen is highlighted.<\/p>\n

One is a Venetian policeman, Tommaso di Barbara, who has begun linking a series of strange deaths, tied together by an odd tattoo or marking on the backs of the victims.\u00a0 He has been collecting evidence and trying to present it to his uninterested superior officer, while also dealing with his ailing mother.\u00a0 Tommaso has never \u201cleft the Lagoon\u201d of Venice in his life, and the snips and details of daily Venetian life are fascinating.\u00a0 The other policeman is a Copenhagen detective, Niels, who works as a hostage negotiator.\u00a0 As readers we first meet him in a wonderful scene where he talks down an army vet who is holding his family hostage.\u00a0 It predisposes the reader to like him, while showing, not telling, his character.\u00a0 It\u2019s very effectively done.<\/p>\n

As the other parts of the story begin to slot together, the picture becomes clearer and tighter, eventually focusing almost totally on Niels, who, like Tommaso, has left Copenhagen but in fact has a pathological aversion to travel, complete with physical manifestations.\u00a0 This keeps him far apart from his wife in South Africa, there on a year long job assignment.\u00a0 His superior, like Tommaso\u2019s, is skeptical of the cases when presented together, especially as the only common thread seems to be the fact that all of the victims were doing \u201cgood\u201d in one way or another (so the victims are nurses, doctors, social workers, priests, monks, etc.) \u00a0Along with the weird tattoo on their backs, nothing else seems to be linking them together.<\/p>\n

Niels\u2019 boss, distracted by the climate summit in Copenhagen (with an appearance by Obama) sends him off on what he feels is the harmless and pointless task of warning all the \u201cgood\u201d men in Copenhagen of possible danger, as one of the other clues points to a possible terrorist from Yemen.\u00a0 As Niels makes his rounds, one of the people he encounters is a Rabbi, who shares with him the myth, discussed in the Talmud, of \u201cGod\u2019s Righteous Men,\u201d thirty-six good men and women on earth who hold off evil for the rest of us.\u00a0 Without them, all of us would perish; each generation, they are replenished.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s only when Niels meets an astrophysicist who is married to one of the possible \u201cgood\u201d men that the parts of the story begin to come together.\u00a0 The husband has long left the woman, Hannah, who is mourning the death of her only son; what she\u2019s really good at are systems of all kinds.\u00a0 She sees patterns everywhere, and when she takes a look at the evidence that Niels has gotten from the Venetian policeman, the pattern of the crime begins to make sense.\u00a0 Following her pattern and the suggestion of the \u201cThirty-Six\u201d from the Rabbi, they figure out that the killer is up to number thirty-five.\u00a0 From there on, it\u2019s a race against the clock.<\/p>\n

Each discovery is surprising, often original, and well presented.\u00a0 The author, A.J. Kazinski, is actually two men, one of whom is a filmmaker, and indeed, the book reads a bit like an action film.\u00a0 One with a bit of a brain and a spiritual twist, but still an action thriller.\u00a0 Set in Copenhagen, London, or New York, a good thriller is a good thriller, and this is a good one.\u00a0 I enjoyed the global tour, I loved some of the characters – Niels and Hannah especially – and I enjoyed learning some of the things the authors share as a part of their story, especially the Talmudic myth.\u00a0 This is a really fun read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, the axis of the mystery universe has shifted.\u00a0 Where American readers used to feel as familiar with the streets of London and the interiors of British country houses as with the streets of New York or LA, they can now feel familiar with the streets of Copenhagen, Stockholm, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[10,13],"class_list":["post-483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-historical","tag-suspensethriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":493,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions\/493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}