The Scarecrow
By Michael Connelly
Little, Brown and Company, 2009

The Defector
By Daniel Silva
Penguin Group (USA), 2009

South of Broad
By Pat Conroy
Nan A. Talese, 2009

Review By Ronald Goldfarb

In the summer season, I decided to slough serious books on heavy subjects in favor of escape and pleasure reads. I turned to three of my favorite authors—Michael Connelly, Daniel Silva, and Pat Conroy. This literary trifecta rarely fails to entertain. This time, two delivered the expected reading pleasures, but one disappointed.

The Scarecrow
The Scarecrow is Michael Connelly’s 20th fiction book. He writes a few a year, and they are usually good (the Harry Bosch series) or very good (The Lincoln Lawyer). He writes fast—“… it pours out of me,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in May—and the faster his work, the better the public response. He wrote The Poet in three months, and it sold 3 million copies worldwide. This year, Connelly produced two books: The Scarecrow and Nine Dragons, his 15th installment in the Bosch series, which will be published in October. The Scarecrow follows journalist Jack McEvoy and Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Rachel Walling, both stars of The Poet, on a new adventure.

Connelly is a former crime reporter in Florida and Los Angeles and he writes with insight about the work of newspaper reporters, trial lawyers, and the police. In The Scarecrow, Connelly’s story turns on the forced retirement of the book’s hero when his employer downsizes. With two weeks remaining at his Los Angeles paper, McEvoy intends to go out with a bang. A call from the mother of a young gang banger jailed for a murder she says he did not commit sends McEvoy into another daring exploit.

Not only does The Scarecrow reveal what is going on in America’s failing newspapers, but it also presents, ¬in terrifying detail, insight into the capacity of new technology to invade privacy, and worse.

In The Scarecrow, Connelly displays a mastery of digital technology. This story deals with law firms that use data storage systems, naively presuming impenetrable confidentiality. Signing up for Web hosting and colocation services, the firms’ ability to assure their clients’ privacy is compromised. That, and the possibilities of hacking and data mining, provides the villains in The Scarecrow their murderous scheme:

The Internet is…the great intersection, for things good and bad. With chat rooms and websites devoted to any fetish and paraphilia imaginable, we have people with similar interests hooking up every minute of the day. We are going to see more and more of this….Where they take it out of fantasy and cyberspace and into the real world.

Connelly describes how, in the extreme, this phenomenon can lead to rape and murder:

They call them bunkers and farms. They sit in pastures and deserts. They are as nondescript as the nameless warehouses that line industrial streets in every city in the country. Data storage centers are billed as economical, dependable and secure. They store vital digital files that remain just a fingertip away no matter where your business is located. But this week’s investigation into how two men used stored files to choose, stalk and prey on women is raising questions about the industry that has seen explosive growth in recent years. Authorities say the bottom-line question is not where or how you should store your digital information. The question is, who is minding it?

To reveal the source of Connelly’s title would be unfair, but it is tied to one of Connelly’s several story lines. Connelly’s villains often are weird, creepy serial killers with strange modus operandi. In The Scarecrow he deals with abasiophilia (I didn’t know the term either), where killers get off on strange sexual fulfillment derived from early childhood experiences.

The Scarecrow is the second of Connelly’s novels involving reporter McEvoy and investigator Walling, who become lovers. Presumably, there will be more, and Connelly fans look forward to them.

The Defector
Like Connelly and other masters of the thriller genre, Washington, D.C.-based Daniel Silva writes regularly and never disappoints. His stories follow a cast of interesting characters, and all have The Perils of Pauline features, so this review will not give away plot details. What makes Silva’s adventures special is the verisimilitude of his descriptions of the spy business and the serious themes of world politics he includes in all his stories.

Prior novels dealt with terrorism at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, the Holocaust, Vatican politics, and Israeli–Palestinian conflicts. The Defector and Silva’s prior book, Moscow Rules, deal with the rise of Russian oligarchy and crime mobs in the wake of Glasnost, and with the jeopardy of Russian investigative journalists: 49 reporters have been killed since 1992. In the background is the violence of the Stalin era: “You can’t put a shovel in the soil of Russia without hitting bone.”

Silva incisively describes the deadly tedium of the spy business: “The old hands like to say that the life of an Office field agent is one of constant travel and mind-numbing boredom, broken by interludes of sheer terror.”

He explains the nature of safe houses: “For every safe house, there is a story. A salesman who lives out of a suitcase and rarely sees home. An adventurous soul who travels to faraway lands to take pictures and scale mountains. These are the tales told to neighbors and landlords. These are the lies that explain short-term tenants and guests who arrive in the middle of the night with keys in their pockets.”

Silva’s message is this: Spying is not romantic. “The waiting . …Always the waiting…. Waiting for a plane or a train. Waiting for a source. Waiting for the sun to rise after a night of killing.”

Silva’s “hero” is Gabriel Allon, an expert art restorer who is regularly and reluctantly brought back for one last caper for “The Office,” Israel’s counterpart to the CIA and the United Kingdom’s elite, clandestine services—Israel’s allies in all these stories. Allon is recruited by his avuncular mentor, the eminent, aging master spy Ari Shamron, a veteran of Israel’s constant fight for survival. In the hunting and elimination of the assassins of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Allon became a legend, paid a tragic, personal price, and could never leave that world of dark service.

Silva explains the realpolitik of Israel’s secret service and its importance in that country’s survival. Shamron tells Allon, “I don’t believe in sitting around while others plot my destruction. It seems to me we have a choice. We can live in fear. Or we can fight back.” Israel’s spies kill and “clean up the mess later.” These assassins do not kill to plunder or hurt, but, in an existential sense, to eliminate their enemies. The wisdom that drives them is that “Luck is earned, never bestowed.”

Silva’s novels all claim that Israel’s survival depends on the work of Israeli security. “There wouldn’t be an Israel if it weren’t for men like Shamron,” Allon explains. “He was there at the creation. And he doesn’t want to see his life’s work destroyed.” When Allon hesitates having a child, remembering the horror of his first child’s murder by terrorists, his second wife says, “. . . the best way to honor his memory is to have another child. We’re Jews . . . That’s what we do. We mourn the dead and keep them in our hearts. But we live our lives.”

Allon is a child of Holocaust survivors and that memory affects everything he does. It is also what motivates his country’s defenses. When Allon fears that he is not a leader but an assassin, he is told, “You were a soldier on the secret battlefield. You gave justice to those who could not seek it themselves.” The restless souls of Holocaust victims memorialized at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem had to be given some kind of justice or peace.

Silva’s stories offer entertainment with a serious message.

South of Broad
I loved Pat Conroy’s earlier books, especially The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, Beach Music, and The Lords of Discipline. He is able to introduce humanity to odd characters, and to make readers feel the flow of the river tides, smell the watery sea air and savory shrimp cooking, and laugh at Southern eccentricities.

But in South of Broad, Conroy makes this fan wish he’d leave the dysfunctional family pain he’s mined so imaginatively in the past and find another centerpiece for his literary trips. This time the theme wears thin, as Conroy takes outrageous over the edge, and his story becomes unbelievable, uninteresting.

His dialogue is too cute and smart-alecky, his characters too stereotypical—the overly wisecracking narrator; the admirable, reformed redneck; the noble minority member; the eccentrically charming gay character; and the oddly together parents are all too pat. “Family is a contact sport. Dad was a bum, Mom an angel. Same old story. The Irish psycho play.” Conroy has done this before, often, and better.

One of his characters admits that “nothing is too strange for a human being. A human being is a [screwed]-up concept.” In South of Broad, Conroy goes too far proving that notion.

Despite these flaws, the Conroy magic is present, particularly when he declares his love of Charleston, South Carolina, and when he captures the feel of its rivers, tides, and fish. “Since the day I was born,” his narrator remarks, “I have been worried that heaven would never be half as beautiful as Charleston, the city formed where two rivers meet in ecstasy to place a harbor and a bay and an exit to the world.” And there are patches, albeit too few, of his lyrical style of description of people and places.

South of Broad is Charleston’s historic right side of the tracks where well-off members of that society live, and in this book Conroy explores the twisted and loving relations between some of them and others with less fortunate histories. He writes rapturously about Charleston as “a city enchanting enough to charm cobras out of baskets” but which also “has a high tolerance for eccentricity and bemusement.” The place “has its own heartbeat and fingerprint,” and Conroy explores them in all his books with love, humor, and respect. In his next book, I hope Conroy will continue writing about his enchanting city—and its eccentricities and bemusements—but leave out the cobras.

Ronald Goldfarb is a Washington, D.C., attorney, author, and literary agent whose reviews appear regularly in Washington Lawyer. E-mail rglawlit@aol.com.

The Past Is Never Dead: The Trial of James Ford Seale and Mississippi’s Struggle for Redemption
By Harry N. MacLean
Basic Books, 2009

Review By Joseph C. Goulden

At the Democratic National Convention in August 1964 in Atlantic City, I was deep into a conversation with a college friend who held a minor position in the civil rights arm of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. We are both southerners by birth, and our discussion turned to a string of atrocities in recent months in Mississippi. In June three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—“disappeared” after being released from the Neshoba County jail, deep in Ku Klux Klan country. An expanded FBI detail, dispatched on direct orders by LBJ, scoured the countryside, expecting to find their bodies. Instead, a fisherman made a gruesome discovery in a back chute of the Mississippi River: the bottom half of the body of one of two black teenage boys who vanished in the spring.

“There are times,” my friend said, “when I think this country would be a helluva lot better off if we could just get rid of Mississippi. Kick it out of the union! These fools violate the standards by which decent people live! Get rid of ’em, we don’t need that kind of trash.”

Despite my friend’s low-level position, I wondered whether he was reflecting the views of superiors in the Justice Department. He tapped the stein on the bar in front of him. “Naw,” he said, “that is the beer talking. But were it up to me. …”

Given the state’s civil rights record, there were times in the 1960s when perhaps many Americans would have happily cut loose Mississippi. To say that many people in the state, including public officials, acted like Third World tyrants is a slur on underdeveloped nations.

As author Harry N. MacLean writes in The Past Is Never Dead, Mississippi “is not only the Deep South, it is the Deepest South.” Between 1892 and 1966, its 539 lynchings were the highest of any Confederate state, trailed by Georgia with 492. Any southerner who ever felt the shame of association can agree with MacLean when he writes, “Even the other ten Confederate states look down on Mississippi, the unreconstructed, unrepentant, and unloved step-sibling.”

The case at hand began when two black youths, Henry Dee and Charles Moore, both 19, were hitchhiking in rural Franklin County, in southwest Mississippi. They accepted a ride in a white Volkswagen driven by James Ford Seale, a former crop duster, truck driver, and town cop—and a member of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, “the deadliest Klan in the south,” MacLean writes.

Months later, Dee’s badly decomposed body was found in the Mississippi River. Police arrested Seale and Charles Marcus Edwards and charged them both with murder. Edwards quickly told officers that he, Seale, and “several others” picked up Dee and another black youth whose name he did not know. They intended to whip the teenagers because his wife had spotted Dee “peeping” at her through a window. Edwards said the men took the boys to the woods and “whipped them,” but that they were still alive when he last saw them.

At this juncture, we encounter a problem that is a recurring annoyance throughout the book. MacLean does not offer an account of what led police to arrest Edwards and Seale. Additionally, his timeline here—and elsewhere in the book—is so meandering that even a careful reader has trouble ascertaining the sequence of events. Only several pages after the arrests do we learn that another Klansman, Ernest Gilbert, had told an FBI agent two months earlier that Seale and another man had told him about “putting a couple of niggers in the river.” Both Dee and Moore were still alive when they were thrown into the water, according to Gilbert’s account, which also offered that Seale said he “hadn’t wanted to shoot them and get blood all over the boat.”

Following Gilbert’s lead, the FBI sent divers into the river and recovered Dee’s body, Moore’s remains, and the engine blocks and heavy metal rails used to weigh down the bodies. One can assume—although MacLean does not say so—that Gilbert’s information led to the arrest of Edwards and Seale. But, in keeping with FBI policy at the time, the agents did not tell the local police of his full statement. Why? MacLean writes that the county sheriff and perhaps half of his deputies belonged to the Klan. “Gilbert would most likely have been killed within days, and other informants would have gone to ground.” In any event, Gilbert said he would not testify in court.

So the only “evidence” that local district attorney Lenox Forman had was Edwards’ limited statement. MacLean writes that as an elected official, Forman had to consider the constituency that would decide whether he would be reelected. Somewhat lamely, Forman said in January 1965 that he did not have “sufficient evidence” to put the case before a grand jury. As a result, both Edwards and Seale walked.

MacLean says that FBI agent James Ingram was “incensed” at Forman and at the local U.S. attorney for not bringing federal charges. Ingram said he felt that granting immunity to Gilbert would pressure him into testifying.

But this case remained dormant for four decades until an investigation was conducted by reporters. Jerry Mitchell, a reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, succeeded in forcing authorities to reopen several cases, including the murder of Medgar Evers, a state leader of the NAACP. Mitchell obtained a copy of Gilbert’s statement in 2000 and bearded Seale, who laughed him off. That same year Harry Phillips, a producer for ABC’s 20/20 news show, interviewed Gilbert who told him on-camera, “Those kids were abused awful and beaten—and they begged for their lives. I was told all of this. And when they were taken to the Mississippi River, weights were tied on them, and they were thrown in the river live.” Even with this information, prosecutors still dithered. Gilbert died in 2004.

Suddenly, without explanation, Mac- Lean brings the case to life again. What caused the prosecutorial change of mind? Maddeningly, MacLean offers us no explanation. We simply find Seale on trial in federal district court on three counts of kidnapping—a federal offense, the prosecution argues, because Dee and Moore were taken across the state line into Louisiana before they were killed.

The main witness is a very reluctant Charles Edwards, who professes shame at violating the Klan’s code of silence. (Mac Lean calls the fellow a “rat” three times in one paragraph describing his testimony, a rather harsh epithet to apply to a man who finally spoke up, albeit under duress.) Edwards admits he was present when the boys were beaten, but he claims he was elsewhere at the time of the actual murders.

A retired FBI agent testifies that when he arrested Seale in 1964, he “used an old ploy to trick a confession out of a suspect: confront him with the facts of his guilt, with a few inaccuracies, and see if he wants to correct them.” Seale first protested he did not know what the agent was talking about, then said there was no point in him saying anything because “you obviously know it all already.” Another agent testified that when he told Seale that “the Lord above knows you did it,” Seale retorted,” Yes, but I’m not going to admit it. You’re going to have to prove it.”

Seale, now 71 years old, his frail body wracked by heart, kidney, and other ailments, had to be helped to his feet to hear the jury’s verdict: guilty on all counts. Judge Henry Wingate, Mississippi’s first (and only) black federal jurist, proclaimed that although the crime is 43 years old, “justice is timeless.” He imposed three life sentences.

Seale’s lawyers appealed on grounds that a 1972 amendment to the kidnapping statute under which he was tried changed the statute of limitations to five years, rather than life. A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit agreed and overturned his conviction. But in June 2009 the full court upheld the trial court on this point and returned the appeal to panel to resolve the remaining issues. Seale’s lawyers are asking the Supreme Court to consider the case. In the meantime, Seale remains in prison.

MacLean contends that “there could have been two defendants in the case ... Seale for kidnapping and murder, and the State of Mississippi for complicity—knowingly aiding, abetting and creating men like Seale.” To the state’s credit, it has reopened a number of the era’s more notorious cases, and won convictions in almost a dozen. MacLean describes the process as “Mississippi trying to claw its way out of the devil’s pit in its drive for acceptance in the civilized world.”

Despite its annoying structural confusion, MacLean’s book revives memories of a dark part of our history. Rather irritatingly, MacLean breaks into his narrative for irrelevant chapters on an aging Mississippi blues singer, and not one, but two, football games involving Ole Miss. Whatever symbolism he attempted to evoke through these irrelevant riffs escapes me.

Joseph C. Goulden is writing a book on Cold War intelligence.