Customer Reviews

Identity Theory

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I wanted to find a book so engrossing that I wouldn't want it to end and I certainly found it in Identity Theory. Dark Continents, Special Forces and spy networks in the age of electronic communication... all conspire to reveal death squads and mass murder in the name of peace and freedom. This is no plot for conspiracy theory junkies, but a believable network of things that go bump in the night, disgorging certain facts that are worth killing to hide. Anything to avoid international embarrassment.

There is a video tape, the recording of a village massacre, in the hands of one man, a South African mercenary. When he tries to sell that tape, alarms go off around the world, particularly London, Germany and the United States. All this is past history, long considered safely buried and it is unacceptable that such images should reach a live audience. To this end, factions move to block that one South African mercenary, who gets lucky once too often.

A newspaper woman in London wants to buy the tape; frustrated in her attempts, she doggedly pursues any leads. A purveyor of information supplies relevant data to clients, no questions asked as long as the client pays well. Until the long-forgotten past emerges and the pieces become too obvious to ignore. And the mercenary dodges and feints, avoiding discovery, but aware that the odds are against him. This is a world where collateral damage is as acceptable as income tax; a certain number of losses are expected and pass mostly unnoticed. When that delicate balance is disturbed and information leaks out, disparate forces unite to stifle those asking dangerous questions.

This novel is a disturbing read, but it is not a book to be easily put aside. Temple builds the tension and ratchets up the action to the page-turning end, an excellent, well-written thriller that evokes malevolent shadows of intrigue and special ops. We all know these forces are at work out there somewhere. We just don't know the details or suspect the urgency of certain information. Temple reminds us that the surface has cracked; categorical denial by any government is imminent. Luan Gianes/2004.

Although Australian author Temple has won his country's Ned Kelly crime fiction award three times, this is his American debut. And a fine one it is, delivering a complex plot of spies, information dealing and murder.

Protagonist John Anselm, an American, lives alone in his ancestral home in Hamburg, Germany, and works as an information dealer for a struggling firm, finding people, things and secrets. The owner is an old friend, with plenty of his own shady secrets. Anselm used to be a roving foreign correspondent until he was taken hostage in Beirut. His captive experience has left him haunted by fears and demons, his memory fragmented.

In the prologue we meet mercenary Con Nieman, whose security job ends in a bloodbath, leaving him in possession of a tape showing American soldiers massacring an African village. What this means and why its recovery is important enough for "collateral damage" not to be a problem, weaves together a story of ambition, avarice, political evil and expedience, and even love. Temple's characters are complex and intelligent, his writing is spare and eloquent and the tight plot is exotic and suspenseful. Readers will be looking forward to finding more Temple novels in local bookstores.

This is my first book for Temple, and I am extremely impressed. The writing is direct, simple, but very effective. The story switches back and forth from three main prospectives with enough variation to keep the reader entertained through the multiple views. Full of action, suspense, and very intelligent. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in a good thriller, or even a good read for that matter.

It's difficult to do justice to this excellent novel in a short review. The first half mixes the action-packed adventure of Con Niemand, former soldier turned mercenary, with the slower, more complex unfolding of the character of 'corporate risk manager' John Anselm and his equally complicated world of conspiracies and double-dealing. The link between their stories doesn't become clear until about halfway through the novel, but this isn't the end of the plot twists; there are plenty of surprises still to come.

The style of Identity Theory (originally published as In The Evil Day) is often spare, even terse; while there are some richly detailed passages to establish character and setting, some chapters consist of nothing more than dialogue between two unidentified speakers. This befits the shadowy world Anselm and Niemand inhabit, where knowing who you're working for may be difficult, dangerous, or hard to reconcile with your conscience... and while trust may be rare and larger loyalties obsolete in that environment of `plausible deniability', where the interests of nations have become secondary to those of political parties and the corporations who finance them, Niemand, Anselm and Wishard do have consciences.

Temple shows his mercenaries, deadly as they may be, as more honorable than the people who employ them in the hope of being able to disavow responsibility. Niemand is first and foremost a survivor, acting on instinct when threatened, but he protects his friends as best he can, is capable of gentleness, and has no tolerance for those who enjoy killing. Anselm is equally efficient, to the point of being workaholic, but he is loyal to his boss and colleagues, able to empathize with those he hunts, and loves his family.

The women in this novel may sometimes seem too good to be true, and their civilizing influence almost miraculous, but they are a necessary part of Temple's world - proof that it is worth living in, and preserving.

Fans of Alan Furst, early John LeCarre, Graham Greene, Mankell, Raymond Chandler - rejoice. A new Australian writer, the equal of the greatest, finally makes it to the US with this book - but he has a series of PI type fiction (his detective is "Jack Irish") that are absolutely first rate in all the ways that count - dense, wonderful plots, mature adult characters, complex believable emotions, beautiful way with language - frankly I think that though Temple writes in the spy/PI genre, this is really "literature", running circles around most of what passes for Art these days in modern fiction. He has a spare, Hemingway-esque way of setting mood, character, place and will periodically throw a word into a sentence that sparkles like a diamond with its beauty and aptness. This is superb stuff.

I was interested in electronic eavesdropping --- in the winter of 2006, how could you not be? --- and I bumped into a reference to Identity Theory, so I picked it up. And read the first page. And found myself in Johannesburg, at 2 PM, on a weekday.

The character is Niemand, no first name. He's working out. Inside. "Outdoors had become trouble, like being attacked by three men, one with a nail-studded piece of wood." Niemand is no victim: "The trouble had cut both ways: several of his attackers he had kissed off quickly."

Niemand, we are told, "didn't get any pleasure in killing." Which hasn't stopped him --- Temple takes a page to recount three killings on his scorecard. You'll have no problem agreeing with Niemand's actions.

Now we're on page three. An aging Mercedes --- actually, a new one, hidden under an old, rusting body --- picks Niemand up. We meet Mkane, his partner. They're on personal protection work today, collecting a woman at a shopping center and making sure she gets safely home.

She does. Niemand and Mkane check the house out. Thoroughly: "There was one vehicle in the garage, a black Jeep four-wheel-drive. A camera at floor level showed no one hiding beneath it." Rather extreme precautions, you think. What kind of world is this that requires "every cupboard, every wardrobe" to be checked?

The woman drinks champagne. Niemand "holstered his pistol, didn't feel relaxed." Her husband arrives, scorning Niemand's black partner. Niemand looked up, "saw something on the ceiling behind him, something at the edge of his vision, a dark line not there before....The man in the ceiling pushed open the inspection hatch..."

Carnage. Out of nowhere. With hot blood and screaming and guns that don't work and then do, and bodies, bodies everywhere. In the silence that follows, Niemand inspects the husband's briefcase: envelopes, papers, a video cassette. The phone rings. He answers. The papers? The tape? Yes, Niemand has them. Will he bring them out? Yes, but how much? "Twenty thousand. And expenses." And he's off to London....

And so ends chapter one. Take a breath. Your first in a while. Turn the page.

Now you're in...Hamburg. In the office of W&K. Once it was a publisher. Its current business is information --- "looking for people, checking on people." In the modern way: six computer terminals, a state-of-the-art mainframe. Very amoral. Find an address, turn it over. A couple is reconciled. Or maybe the husband, upset by the way she drained the bank account before fleeing to France, kills her. It's all the same to W&K.

A former journalist works here; eventually, you know that whatever is on the cassette will come to involve him. "Eventually" is a long time coming. Temple writes real characters, and they have their stories, their frustrating days, their troubled nights. Plot points drop like Hansel's bread crumbs in the forest. But what's the rush? Every paragraph has a jolt of pleasure.

Like a man remembering his wife: "...the day Lana drove the Mustang under a car transporter on Highway 401 outside Raeford, North Carolina, 1:45 in the afternoon. She was alone, leaving a motel, lots of drink taken."

Like a description of Hamburg: "The sky was an army blanket, dirty grey."

Like the repartee, this time about a courier: "They say Ollie North used him" gets, as a riposte, "You wouldn't want that to be the high point of your career."

Notice I'm not telling you the plot --- I'm no spoiler. But you get the mood of this piece. You and I, we walk down the street not especially worried about the people coming our way. In this book, paranoia rules. Anyone coming toward you could have been hired to kill you. Which makes every moment distressingly intense.

Who is this Peter Temple? Born in South Africa. Now lives in Australia. Was once a journalist. (It shows. His prose is tight as a noose.) Taught journalism in Australia. Edited a magazine. And, finally, chucked it to write novels. He's done seven so far, four about a detective named Jack Irish. And he's won four Ned Kelly Awards in Australia, more than any other author.

Peter Temple is, in short, a major star who's as yet unknown in America. 'Identity Theory' should start to correct that. I'm off to read two more Temples. I'm sure they're great. But just as nothing is as sweet as a first kiss, no Temple novel will thrill me more than 'Identity Theory.'

There are a lot of people trying their hand at writing these techno thrillers where you can track down anyone anywhere in the world by just using a computer, hacking into various systems etc. The few I've read were cheezy. Not so with Identity Theory.

Peter Temple's Identity Theory reminded me of John Le Carre's work in that it's characters are low-key, diligently working under the radar towards figuring the puzzle...towards the end game. Multinational.

Anyway I loved it. I also loved Temple's The Broken Shore, Bad Debts, and Black Tide. And will be reading Shooting Star ('99), Dead Point (2000), and White Dog ('03) in the near future. Also Truth (2008, forthcoming).

Peter Temple has become one of my favorite authors. Robert Wilson is another.

David Honeybone, the editor of Crime Factory magazine who also runs the Crime Writers' Association of Australia, sums up the plot better than I could ever.

"Con Niemand is an ex-mercenary, a South African trained in the art of killing. He earns a living by doing security, running protection for wealthy South Africans who find themselves in a country gripped by lawlessness, still searching for stability post-apartheid. The sole survivor of a job gone wrong, Niemand comes into possession of a video showing American soldiers in an African village, a charnel landscape, where they are calmly dispatching survivors. Survivors of what, though? Niemand hasn't much time to contemplate that question before he's contacted by the tape's owners in London, and with dollar signs in his eyes he boards the next flight out of South Africa to return their property. But such is the importance of this tape that he unwittingly becomes the target of a deadly manhunt.

Switch to Hamburg, Germany, and meet John Anselm, a journalist piecing his life back together after being kidnapped in Beirut. His brain a shattered switchboard of half-memories, courtesy of a rifle butt to the skull from a captor, Anselm controls panic attacks by drinking. He earns a living through a shady but sophisticated electronic-surveillance agency whose clients require information on everything from errant wives to industrial espionage. Unaware of Niemand's situation and that they share dangerous knowledge, Anselm is employed to track the ex-mercenary's movements, until a series of violent events lead their paths to cross, just as the threat of an exhumed American foreign policy secret raises the stakes for all concerned."

Highly recommended!

Tons of action in this thriller. Particularly good treatment of foreign locales -- you begin to feel as though you are there.

Another outstanding book by this Australian author. I love finding a new-to-me mystery writer - gives me a chance to track down and read all the books. Because the first ones are hard to find in the U.S. it is being a challenge, but I've now got all but one. Meanwhile, this one is easily available and it's just one fine, well written mystery. I'm hard to please, let me tell you - I'm a serious mystery buff and I know and demand excellent writing. Peter Temple is my latest and best find. I strongly recommend him to anyone who appreciates good writing, fine plotting, 3 dimensional characters, and a darned good read.

This is the same book as "In the Evil Day " by Peter Temple, nevertheless it's a brillant book with a Le Carré feeling to it. And when it comes to action scenes he's as good as Lee Child! Well, what about it - Carré/Child in a very complicated but also rewarding thriller. His other books are as good. Pity when they have different titels for differnt countries. Can confuse you, n'est pas?