Black Water

July 18, 2016
John Harper, the 54-year-old hero of this grim novel from British author Doughty (Apple Tree Yard), remembers being a young man in Jakarta in 1965, providing information and covert work for corporations and various governments. Still haunted by the brutal actions he committed for a Dutch private-intelligence operation, Harper has returned to Jakarta in 1998, convinced that he will be slaughtered as were so many others decades earlier. He cautiously enters an affair with a local woman named Rita, worried that she could be killed because of their association. The ambitious plot moves awkwardly from the Cold War in Europe to the Civil Rights struggle in California and back to Indonesia. Yet the different elements never fully connect, the dense prose reading more like a newspaper investigation than fiction. Although tormented by his immoral choices, Harper elicits little sympathy from the reader, except during flashbacks to his childhood in L.A. Agent: Anthony Harwood, Anthony Harwood Ltd. (U.K.).

Starred review from July 1, 2016
Another morally and emotionally fraught thriller from British writer Doughty (Apple Tree Yard, 2014, etc.), this one about an operative for an Amsterdam-based black-ops organization grappling with fallout from his personal and professional history in Indonesia.As the novel opens in 1998, Harper is taking some involuntary R&R in the hills of Bali after some unspecified "errors of judgment" have made him a liability to his firm, which he's fairly certain will soon send someone to kill him. This disgrace is stirring up unwelcome memories of Harper's equally disastrous 1965 tour in Indonesia, which also happens to be his birthplace. Doughty skillfully develops a mood of menace and regret even as she dangles the possibility of happiness in the form of Rita, a Belgian expatriate Harper picks up in a bar. Casual sex quickly deepens into a tentative relationship, until an inexplicable outburst prompts her to ask gently, "What happened to you?" At this point, the narrative pulls back to explore Harper's difficult youth. He's the mixed-race son of an Indonesian soldier killed by the Japanese and a Dutch woman whose wartime ordeal turned her into an alcoholic. Uprooted over and over by his mother's disordered whims, devastated when she plucks him from his one chance at a stable family life, Harper decides to put his faith in "the power of transience: in motion you could be whoever you wanted to be." He's recruited by "the Institute" and sent to Jakarta in 1965. The chilling account of what he sees and does there exposes the dark origins of Harper's individual guilt and probes the larger question of our collective complicity in the evil legacies of colonialism and the Cold War. Yet the compassionate portrait Doughty paints of a man desperate for the opportunity to experience love and loyalty lends a grace note of hope to the deliberately ambiguous ending.Powerful, probing fiction in the tradition of Graham Greene and John le Carre.

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August 1, 2016
In an Indonesian hideaway, John Harper awaits the hit squad that his employers at the Institute of International Economics will inevitably send to eliminate him as a risk following a disastrous confidentiality breach. The institute ostensibly offers corporate risk assessment in areas of unrest, but the Dutch firm's true role is a murkier mix of corporate security and espionage with deniability for foreign governments. Harper's first mission in Indonesia was in 1965, when the Communist PKI's failed coup sparked mass executions of alleged leftists. In 1998, amid the instability of Suharto's collapsing regime, Harper seems resigned to his fate until he meets fellow expat Rita, and their affair forces him to reconcile his instrumental role in the 1965 massacres. Through Harper, Doughty creates a jarringly realistic backdrop of Indonesia's violent past, sharply contrasting the menacing atmosphere with a growing romance and Harper's memories of a vulnerable childhood in 1950s Los Angeles. A tense, contemplative literary thriller and worthy follow-up to Doughty's critically acclaimed Apple Tree Yard (2013).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

April 15, 2016

Moving from Cold War Europe to civil rights America to civil war Indonesia, CWA Steel Dagger finalist Doughty traces a more literary story of a man hiding on a tropical island from something awful he's done in the past.

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