Barry Eisler has the rare gift of writing about amoral people without endorsing their (sometimes) nihilistic feelings.
In his wonderful series of novels about the assassin John Rain, Eisler has shared some of the same turf as Patricia Highsmith’s famous Ripley novels about the killer-without-a-conscience Tom Ripley, but Eisler makes us care about Rain in a way we never do about Ripley.
Highsmith deals in icy black comedy that’s slightly larger than life, Eisler presents Rain realistically as a reflection of the darker elements of the world we actually live in.
Perhaps the glints of humanity and empathy in the Rain novels are due to the fact that Eisler really knows what he is writing about. The author spent time in a covert CIA job and lives part of the year in Tokyo which figures prominently in the books (Eisler has a black belt in judo).
In his gripping new stand-alone novel, “Fault Line” (Ballantine Books), Eisler again uses his knowledge of the world of covert operations (i.e. government-sanctioned assassinations) but combines it with his other career as a technology lawyer and Internet executive in Silicon Valley.
The novel follows two estranged brothers — one working as a CIA assassin, the other as a lawyer specializing in high-tech — who are brought back together by a horrifying wave of violence surrounding the invention of a revolutionary new encryption application.
The lawyer, Alex Treven, thinks he is about to be named a partner in his Silicon Valley firm and become very wealthy because of his handling of the Internet breakthrough. But, on the morning of the big meeting finalizing the deal, the inventor is murdered. Alex and everyone else at the firm assumes this was a random mugging/killing — until somebody tries to kill Alex in his home.
Meanhile in Turkey, Alex’s older brother, Ben, is relayed a desperate message from Alex just after Ben has pulled off a double-hit of two Iranian nuclear scientists.
Alex and Ben haven’t seen each other in years — since a series of tragedies destroyed their sister and their parents.
“Fault Line” combines the page-turning paranoia of the Rain novels with the slowly unfolding (and very powerful) family drama of two brothers wondering if they will ever reconnect in a meaningful way.
There were points in the book where I was reminded of William Goldman’s terrific brother thriller “Marathon Man” (the novel, not the movie). Add some very pleasing dashes of those two classic 1970s intelligence world paranoia films, “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View” and you’ve got a fantastic reading experience.
Eisler allows a reader to see the strengths and the flaws in both Alex and Ben, although the killer spy’s world view seems to be a bit more grounded in 21st century reality.
“The thing was, most Americans wanted nothing more than to be safe,” Ben notes early in the story. “Maybe it hadn’t always been that way, in fact he suspected things had once been different, but these days America had become a nation of sheep…and someone had to keep the sheep safe from the wolves. He understood at some level that the b——t restrictions and the second-guessing just came with the territory. Still, it was galling to be put in a position where he was more afraid of CNN than he was of al Qaeda.”
