Paris in the Dark

July 2, 2018
In Butler’s flawed fifth outing for Christopher “Kit” Cobb (after 2014’s The Empire of Night), the Chicago newspaperman who doubles as an American spy, investigates a series of seemingly random bombings in Paris in the autumn of 1915. Kit, who’s in Paris to write a feature story on American ambulance drivers, suspects the culprits could be among the many refugees flooding into the city to avoid the war in the countryside. Slowly, however, his focus shifts to a different group of saboteurs: American terrorists seeking to coax the U.S. into the conflict. Though Butler effectively captures the social flavor and visuals of WWI-era Paris, thriller readers accustomed to logic and procedure will be frustrated. Kit, for instance, never visits the scene of a bombing or interviews witnesses, and the finale takes place in that old chestnut, the Catacombs, where the bombers have inexplicably holed up to build their next explosive device. Series fans who don’t mind melodrama and the sometimes lead-footed tempo will be satisfied. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc.

August 1, 2018
November 1915 finds Butler's durable war correspondent/secret agent Christopher Marlowe Cobb expecting some time away from cloak and dagger. Fate, the Germans, and his boss have other plans.Despite the pleas of the Foreign Office and the manifest inability of the British and French to win the Great War on their own, Woodrow Wilson is stubbornly keeping the U.S. on the sidelines. But of course there's nothing to prevent Kit (The Empire of Night, 2014, etc.) from sending the Chicago Post-Express inspiring tales of Americans like John Barrington Lacey, Cyrus Parsons, and Jefferson Jones, who've volunteered to serve as ambulance drivers. Kit's relatively sedate plans of riding along with these drivers and getting them to pour their hearts out are upended by a bombing at the Terminus Hôtel and the promise of more. James Polk Trask, the head of the American Secret Service, thinks Kit would be the perfect candidate to infiltrate the ranks of recent German immigrants who may secretly be saboteurs. It's hard to share his confidence, since the first person Kit suspects of heading the saboteurs is vindicated in a spectacularly abrupt way, and his second suspect disappears while Kit is supposed to be keeping an eye on him. Luckily for Kit, he's far more successful at romancing Louise Pickering, a New England--born nurse who's just as wary of strangers as he is and just as susceptible to high-flown sentiments. As for the rest, readers who don't know how World War I turned out will find no spoilers and precious little espionage. Paris isn't the only thing in the dark here.Sensitive but unimpressive. The early paranoid previsions of all-too-contemporary fears about immigrants just aren't enough to lift Butler's latest above the crowd of stiff-upper-lip period tales of the War to End All Wars.

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September 1, 2018
Butler returns to his outstanding historical-mystery series starring Christopher "Kit" Marlowe Cobb with WWI in full swing, though still without the participation of the U.S. An American spy posing as a journalist, Cobb is in Paris, ostensibly writing about American ambulance drivers but actually tracking German agents (Cobb's superiors recognize that eventually Woodrow Wilson will be forced to join the fray). When hand-set bombs (rather than those falling from zeppelins) begin exploding in Paris, it's clear that the espionage threat has intensified dramatically. But is it German agents setting the bombs or some form of homegrown terrorist? It's up to Cobb to find out, but along the way he falls into a passionate affair with an American nurse, who worries that her capacity for intimacy with men may have been spoiled by all the broken male bodies?victims of the "random tumble of metal through torsos"?whom she tends every day. There are strong echoes of Hemingway in this relationship?its tenderness and its fragility?and in the melancholy and sense of tragic inevitability that hangs over the book. Beneath the frame story, this is a surprisingly introspective and quite moving novel about love and war.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)