Burn Notice: The Fix [Mass Market Paperback]

Tod Goldberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 5, 2008 | Series: Burn Notice

Covert spy Michael Westen has found himself in forced seclusion in Miami?and a little paranoid. Watched by the FBI, cut off from intelligence contacts, and with his assets frozen, Weston is on ice with a warning: stay there or get ?disappeared.? Driven to find out who burned him and why, he?s biding his time helping people with nowhere else to turn. People like socialite Cricket O?Connor whose own husband has vanished, along with her fortune...

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Tod Goldberg is the author of the novels Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Fake Liar Cheat, as well as the short story collection Simplify, a 2006 finalist for the SCBA Award for Fiction and winner of the Other Voices Short Story Collection Prize. He teaches creative writing at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

When you’re a spy, certain things come easy. You never have to pay your parking tickets. The IRS leaves you pretty much alone provided you don’t try to deduct TEC-9s from your 1040EZ. It’s okay if you have sex with someone you don’t actually like. In fact it’s often encouraged, and if on the off chance you fall in love with the wrong person and have to kill them, or they try to kill you, your boss rarely asks for you to fill out a purchase order for a body bag or extra bullets.

But not even being a spy gets you out of having lunch with your mother.

It was a Tuesday, and because she lied and told me I was taking her to the orthopedist, I was sitting poolside at the Hotel Oro having lunch with my mother, Madeline. The Hotel Oro is one of those hotels on South Beach that no one actually stays at, but everyone seems to visit. It has an Olympic-sized infinity pool, which seems odd when you consider the ocean is only five yards away, but then the ocean doesn’t have full bar service and cocktail girls dressed in gold bikinis serving you finger foods. At night, DJs spin Eurotrash for Paris Hilton and the entire hotel throbs onto the street, like it’s an actual living creature that feeds on celebrities. My mother kept lifting her sunglasses up to stare at the people being seated at the tables around us.

"You expecting someone?" I asked.

"Fiona said she might join us," my mother said. Fiona was my girlfriend for a while. Then she was not my girlfriend for a while. Then it was just confusing, and a little violent, in a good way, and now she’s more like a business partner, but might be my girlfriend again sometime soon. It’s complicated. "I don’t like you calling her," I said.

"She told me the cutest thing yesterday," she said.

The problem with having your business partner being your former and maybe future girlfriend is that it’s hard to make any essential mandates about behavior. You risk pissing off someone who may or may not call your mother either way. It’s only slightly worse when the same person happens to be a former IRA gunrunner who still has something of an opaque moral center and who doesn’t understand personal boundaries.

"Do tell," I said.

"Just girl stuff, Michael."

Girl stuff. Ten years of interrogating hostile enemy targets, you’d think I’d be able to break through that code, but give me twenty Enigma machines and fifty men sitting in a locked room at Quantico, and there’d be no way of figuring out what the hell girl stuff means.

I’d have been more upset with this whole line of conversation had I not been distracted, which is actually how I generally like to feel during conversations with my mother. That way I don’t get too emotionally involved, or, in a pinch, can plead ignorance if important dates or activities are mentioned.

Across the pool, three white guys in Cuban shirts, tan chinos and ankle holsters were trying their best to look natural, which would have been easier if they weren’t all wearing the same shirt, which is what happens when you try to look natural by letting some intern buy your resort wear. That they weren’t trying to look natural while monitoring me was of some concern.

"We should do this more often, Michael," my mother said.

"What’s this, exactly?"

"Family time. You know it wouldn’t kill you to take me out to lunch every week. I read where the president calls his mother every day. She even vacations with him sometimes."

The three white guys in Cubans were a little on the chunky side and their skin was almost translucent, which meant they weren’t normally field agents. Field agents tend to have a few fast twitch muscles and maybe a decent farmer’s tan from sitting with their arms out car windows, waiting for something to happen, or snapping photos, or shooting at moving targets. Doughy is no way to go through life. Everything works less effectively when you’ve got plaque in your arteries, but doughy also says: Happy. Content. Secure.

Miami-Dad’s finest: The Strategic Investigations Bureau.

SIB agents are paper hounds and numbers guys. Loophole chasers. Get them outside and maybe they know how to handle a gun, but you take them out of their comfort zone, you put a knife to their throat or you show them a little of their own blood, and they turn into hand puppets.

"That’s great," I said. "Next time I see the president, I’ll let him know you’re free."

"I’m serious, Michael," she said. "Since you’ve been back, you haven’t taken me to a single movie. Would it kill you take me to see a movie?"

It might. But at the moment, I was more concerned by the SIB agents. If they were anchoring the back door, that meant someone was in the front and that there was probably a gun or two aimed in this direction from one of the adjoining buildings. Most likely, the ATF was near, too.

"Ma," I said, "how did you hear about this place?"

"Fiona said we should meet here."

"When?"

"This morning. Why, Michael?"

"Did you call her?"

"Michael, I know you want your privacy, but it’s not wrong for a mother to call her son’s girlfriend. Do you know when I was dating your father that your grandmother used to call me every morning?"

If you’re a tourist, one of the best things about coming to South Beach is the ease with which you can pool hop from one hotel to the next. Why, you could rappel down from the Hotel Victor’s rooftop pool directly into the Hotel Oro’s if you happened to have that skill set, which, judging by the two slightly more athletic-looking agents poised to do just that very thing across the way, they’re now teaching younger and more agile government recruits. Though I suspected the ones at the Victor were actually ATF.

"I didn’t know that," I said. I stood up as casually as possible, so as not to arouse any suspicion in the SIB or ATF agents. Mistakes get made when you haven’t been out of the office for a few years and now have a license to shoot someone; it’s doubly bad if you’ve been gorging on fatty foods in the interim and are now a little nervous, are thinking, Yeah, maybe if I put a bullet into someone, like a former IRA gunrunner wanted by an alphabet soup of organizations alive or dead. Thinking, Maybe I’ll get a bump. Thinking, Maybe I’ll get a corner office. "Why don’t we talk about it in the car?"

"But our food hasn’t even arrived," Mom said. I clenched my teeth into a polite smile, just in case I was on a camera somewhere. "We need to go," I said. "Now."

"What about Fiona?"

"Fiona won’t be showing up," I said.

***

For the last ten years, I’ve lived wherever the government has told me to live. There were also times when I didn’t live anywhere at all. Times when a helicopter would drop me in front of a target, I’d do my job, and the helicopter would pick me back up five minutes, or five hours, or five days later, depending upon the circumstances of the job and whatever collateral damage might have ensued.

You don’t ask a lot of questions. You’re given your assignment and you do it or you risk the consequences. My last official job as a covert operative was in the lovely city of Warri, Nigeria, vacation hotspot for large arms dealers, exhausted genocidal maniacs and anyone who loves to fall asleep to the peaceful drumming of AKs being fired into the sky.

I was sent there to dispose of a problem: A gangster was causing problems along a lucrative oil field—as in, he periodically had his people blow up the refinery, sabotage the pipeline, kill the security detail, that sort of thing—and I was there with a very simple offer of $750,000 to find some other way to entertain himself.

Sometimes, it’s just easier to pay off the bad guys. Fewer bodies. Less psychic turmoil. But mostly, fewer bodies.

Everything was going swimmingly. We had a charming room in the lovely Warri Grand Hotel, where every low-level thug is treated like a higherlevel thug. I didn’t trust the gangster. He didn’t trust me. But there was money from the American govern ment in between us, and we both trusted that. The problem was that at some point between me stepping off a plane in Nigeria with the authorization to wire money into the Russian’s account, and the exact moment I made the call to start the transfer, I lost my job.

If I worked at Kinko’s, that wouldn’t be much of a problem. I’d just strip off my name tag and walk out the door, because even on your worst day, it’s unlikely a gangster will kill you if you lose your job at Kinko’s. But when your job is to deliver $750,000 to a gangster and you have to try to explain to him that, unfortunately, you’ve just been informed that there’s a burn notice on your file and therefore all pending deals you’re a part of are now canceled, well, there’re going to be hard feelings.

There were.

Thing is, you can’t just tell a gangster that you’ve lost all of your security clearances, that your cover is gone, that your bank accounts have been frozen and that, for all intents and purposes, Michael Westen is pretty much just a regular guy now and he’ll have to find someone else to deal with if he hopes to get his money. Even if it’s the truth. Which it was. But when you get a burn notice it’s not just your job you lose, it’s all the fringe benefits, too.

Like assault teams.

Exit strategies.

Someone who might claim your desecrated corpse. Thus, if you happen to get your burn notice in a place where you’re likely to catch fire, too, you’re obliged to figure out a more servicea...

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Signet; Reprint edition (August 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451225546
• ISBN-13: 978-0451225542
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #70,781 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #69 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Movie Tie-Ins

More About the Author

Tod Goldberg is the author of several books of fiction, including the novels Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Fake Liar Cheat and the popular Burn Notice series, as well as two collections of short stories, Simplify and Other Resort Cities. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Bennington College and lives in La Quinta, CA where he directs the Low Residency MFA program in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside's Palm Desert campus. His latest book, Where You Lived, is available exclusively as an ebook. For more information, visit todgoldberg.typepad.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Michael's Once Again Fixing Things for Others, August 18, 2008

By 

Mark Baker (Santa Clarita, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Burn Notice: The Fix (Mass Market Paperback)

It was supposed to be a nice lunch with his mother at a fancy hotel. Instead, Michael Weston winds up leaving quickly when he notices agents everywhere on the patio. No, he isn't being paranoid. But they weren't out for him but his ex-girlfriend Fiona. Investigating further, he discovers that Fi was set up by Natalya. Natalya is former KGB and is in a bit of a bind. Seems if she doesn't come up with the money she is accused of stealing, she will be killed. She blames Michael for her problem, so she's giving him the same choice.

Meanwhile, Sam has agreed to help Cricket O'Connor, a woman who fell in love with the wrong man. Her husband has disappeared with most of her money, and thugs keep showing up demanding the rest. Somehow, Michael has to track down the guy's real identity and then get Cricket's money back. Can he do it while keeping Natalya at bay?

Here's the great news. If you are a fan of the TV show this book is based on you will love it. The characters are spot on, including a couple recurring characters who shows up. Michael narrates the book for us, so the entire thing feels exactly like one of his voice overs from the show. All the action and humor of the show translate perfectly to the written page.

Even if you aren't familiar with the show, you should be able to follow the basics. We're given enough information that all the relationships make sense.

Unfortunately, I had a couple problems with the plot. While it was fast paced and kept me reading, a couple times I wondered why exactly the characters were doing what they were doing. I quite possibly did miss something, but I couldn't figure it out by rereading parts of the book. Additionally, the language is a little worse than what they can get away with on TV, especially in a couple scenes. These are both minor issues, and on the whole I really did enjoy the book.

This was a pleasant read. Fans of the TV show will love having it as a tide me over between episodes. And it just might bring some new fans into the fold.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Great Idea, Poor Execution, March 24, 2009

By 

T. A. White "ekokai" (Phoenix, Az) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Burn Notice: The Fix (Mass Market Paperback)

I was very excited to see a paperback of my favorite TV show. I wish this had lived up to my excitement. Instead, it was a very long, somewhat boring attempt at capturing these great characters and sticking them in a book. The characters were molded to fit the authors writing style. Michael was too cynical, Sam too slovenly and Madeline too annoying. The only person who was close to accurate was Fiona, but it would be difficult not to portray her accurately as she's fairly one dimensional.

The "voice over" that works so well on the show is drawn out and over done in the book. Frequently, a page or two goes by between dialog while we get instructions on the history of whatever; Fisher Island, a magazine, a half dozen branches of the secret service.

I'll stick to the actual TV series which it top notch. I'm off to buy the DVD's now.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tod Goldberg Captures Michael Westen's Voice Perfectly, August 6, 2008

By 

Mel Odom (Moore, OK USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Burn Notice: The Fix (Mass Market Paperback)

BURN NOTICE, featuring Jeffrey Donovan in a role that seems made-to-order for him, became my favorite television show during the summer of 2007. With support characters like the incredibly sexy Gabrielle Anwar and Bruce Campbell flanking him, I am constantly in awe and in love with every episode. I've yet to feel slighted with last year's season or this year's.

Tod Goldberg, brother to Lee Goldberg who has written the DIAGNOSIS: MURDER and MONK tie-in novels as well as a few episodes of the latter, was chosen to write at least three tie-in novels featuring the BURN NOTICE crew. The first, BURN NOTICE: THE FIX, is set to release on August 5, but I found a copy this week and burned through it during a plane flight.

One of the things I enjoy most about the television show is the quirky humor. Another is the first-person narrative in which burned spy Michael Westen talks to the audience and explains spy thinking and the realities of the world. Oh - and the gadgets. LOVE the gadgets.

Goldberg's book, thankfully, is chockfull of the humor and the inside knowledge that brims from the television episodes. The book reads like an episode of the television series, only it's played out longer and deeper than any 43-minute episode could equal. There are a lot more players in this one, and Goldberg plays them all well. The blend becomes exciting and intoxicating immediately.

I loved the setup of the book that got everything underway. Michael is having lunch with his mother and notices too many people watching him. Since he doesn't recognize any of them, he knows they're not there for him. In a split-second he reasons that they're there after Fiona Glenanne, his ex-lover and present/sometime partner. She used to be an IRA bomber and now supplements her income buy selling illegal weapons in Miami where the US government quarantined Michael.

In no time at all, Michael is also involved with another ex-lover/ex-enemy who blackmails him into getting three million dollars for her. She says she's in debt to the people she works for because they think she's been trafficking in illegal goods and keeping it off the books.

Then Sam Axe (played by Bruce Campbell) drops by to ask Michael for help on a project that dropped into his lap via his girlfriend Veronica. Since Sam's a retired Navy SEAL, he's biding his time sleeping with rich women that keep him in the lifestyle to which he's become accustomed until his Navy pension kicks in.

One of Veronica's women friends, Cricket O'Connor, has been preyed upon by her husband, who turns out to be a real louse. I could feel Michael's frustration on every page as his world comes apart while he deals with his problem and all the problems his family and friends insist on dumping on him. Even more than that, Fiona is jealous enough to kill the woman pressuring Michael, and he's thinking maybe that wouldn't be such a bad deal.

Goldberg is spot on with this one. As I read the witty dialogue, snappy patter, and gleaned the twists and turns that hammered Michael and that he manufactured, I saw the television episode unwind inside my head. Goldberg has the characters down cold and there wasn't a false move throughout. He plays them off each other perfectly.

After this romp through the novel based on the show, I'm really looking forward to the next pair. Hopefully, though, the books will become an ongoing enterprise. Although the summer season is going to feature 16 episodes this year, eight in the summer and eight in the winter, there's still a lot of time in between. Tod Goldberg's novels will definitely help cover those months for fans of the show.