The Hemingway Thief

Starred review from May 16, 2016
Henry “Coop” Cooper, the narrator of Harris’s stellar debut, is thinking about murder—of his own pseudonym. When his first literary novel is widely panned, he turns to writing vampire romance novels under an assumed name—which are immediate bestsellers, to his unending shame and his agent’s glee. In remote Pendira, Mexico, Coop is taking a break on his agent’s orders, when he and Grady Doyle—the new owner of the dive hotel and bar Coop inhabits—interrupt the beating of a grifter, Ebenezer Milch, who has quite the story to tell. In Paris of 1922, an uncle of Milch’s stole the legendary suitcase containing Ernest Hemingway’s papers, and now a book collector with nefarious ties and hired assassins is after the suitcase. Coop winds up traveling across cartel-laden Mexico in a battered RV with an ex-DEA agent, a former hit man, and Milch in search of the suitcase, finding himself out of his depth at every turn. Filled with charming pop-culture references, this deft caper novel is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and poignant. Agent: Brent Taylor, Triada US Literary Agency.

May 15, 2016
The theft of an original Hemingway manuscript leads to the possible discovery of the author's famous lost briefcase full of stories in this south-of-the-border caper. Henry "Coop" Cooper is an American writer making a tidy living off a series of novels about a Scottish vampire detective. Like many a hack before him, he's planning the novel that will finally bring him serious literary credibility. At the Mexican backwater where he's taken refuge, Coop and the ramshackle resort's equally ramshackle owner, Grady Doyle, hear the tale of a thief who has purloined an original manuscript of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and, with it, what he believes to be clues to the location of a legendary cache of lost Hemingway writings. Their chief adversary is a ruthless rare-book collector out for blood as well as the goods. The bloodthirstiness of collectors is not a bad inspiration for a thriller, and the general tone of sarcasm and dissolution, along with characters who seem to be wisecrackers more than tough guys, are some of the elements you might want in a shaggy dog tale of pursuit. But, at least in terms of its tone, this novel is written with a confidence it hasn't earned. The plot construction is shaky and often confusing, the characters ready with a quip but not particularly engaging in themselves. Some thrillers have and some have not. This is one of the latter.

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July 1, 2016
Japan 1565. A young man thinks he might have killed a girl; he's a little fuzzy on the details, but when he went to sleep, she was alive; and when he awoke, she wasn't. He confesses his (apparent) crime to ninja assassin Hiro Hattori and Portuguese Jesuit priest Father Mateothis is the fourth in Spann's Shinobi seriesand Father Mateo immediately suspects something else is going on, that the young man might have been framed. Hiro, on the other hand, knows the dead girl's family, and honor demands he avenge her death. This isn't the only mystery series set in feudal Japan (there's Laura Joh Rowland's Sano Ichiro series, for example, and I. J. Parker's Sugawara Akitada novels), but Spann sets hers apart by using a distinctly modern-sounding writing style, with contemporary phrasing and idiom. This may bother purists, but for those willing to go with the premise of a book written in sixteenth-century Japan but translated into contemporary English, the result is a compelling tale engagingly told.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)