How to Survive in Suburbia: Takes One to Know One

Takes One To Know One by Susan Isaacs

Grove Press UK

Pp. 355

Corie has retired from her role as a counter-terrorist agent for the FBI to become a wife to federal judge, Josh, and a mother to his daughter, Eliza. Although she still does some consultation work for the FBI, she ostensibly leads the perfect suburban life complete with a dog called Lulu, a ‘cover’ job recommending Arabic literature to a publishing house, and weekly lunch meetings with fellow freelancers at a French restaurant. And she is bored senseless. So, when she suspects a member of the group of being up to no good – he always picks the same seat to watch his car, changes phones often and makes frequent interstate trips – she imagines that he must have a secret life, and she sets out to investigate. Are her instincts, honed by training at the Bureau, correct, or is she desperately trying to create some excitement, and Pete from packaging really is simply bland?

Corie had approached marriage and suburban life with positivity and enthusiasm, but now she struggles to feign interest in her new environment talking about children’s homework and kitchen renovations. “I had opted for normality and gotten far better than I’d dreamed of. But the trade-off was giving up exciting, sometimes risky work and leaving the exploits to someone else. For family’s sake. Adventure for moms? The dads got that one.” So, she begins to examine Pete and his potential motives more closely. She thinks he may be creating an alter-ego to conceal his nefarious purposes because she recognises behaviour patterns she has displayed – hence the title.

The author includes a lot of research as to the way that agents conduct their business, and, while Cories makes sardonic remarks about some of the training she received – “The bureau had been big on mindfulness, though they called it something more butch back then: staying in the alert zone” – her instincts also lead to valuable insights. Corie confides in her father, who is ex-NYPD and loves watching cosy British crime shows like Father Brown and Death in Paradise. “Like a lot of cops, he was a major mystery fan.” He reads Sherlock Holmes and puts some of the elimination processes to work, casting a net and then narrowing it.

The novel contains some typos and grammatical errors that should have been corrected by a more watchful editor, but these are mitigated by the fact that, as mentioned in the acknowledgement at the end, some people made donations to Long Island charities by bidding to have a character named after them, which is a great idea. This is a very easy-to-read novel, which combines the excitement of law enforcement with the tedium of suburban domesticity. It may hurry to its conclusion, but the characters are warm and engaging, which makes them enjoyable company.

Flight of Fancy: When the Wind Blows

Described as a mystery thriller with fantasy elements, this novel is the first in a series which sparked the Maximum Ride spin-off series. It concerns genetic experiments on babies which produce children with wings: what could possibly go wrong? There are evil manipulators behind these cruel experiments, but there are also those with strong moral instincts. Innocent people who stumble across the flying kids suspiciously vanish. The novel is fast paced with short (two-paged) chapters, clearly-drawn lines between the good and bad guys, little room for ambiguity, and an element of romance with an eye to the big screen: she’s a vet; he’s a ‘troubled and unconventional FBI agent’.

All of the action is described in literal detail, and much of it would look better on screen than it does on the page. “We gathered up the children, kept them moving. We slid and fell and scraped our way down the hillside into a small valley. Then we climbed painfully up the side of a facing hill. Then down the opposite side. We ran until we couldn’t run anymore, and then we ran some more.” The short sentences and minutiae are clunky and dated in a way that recalls Stieg Larsson’s product-placement-crime-fest novels. “Kit continued to work furiously at the desktop. Like many of the younger agents in the Bureau, he was good at it. He likes computers most of the time, and was comfortable around them. He brought up Netscape, then opened it. In the location field, he typed – about:global.” Other aspects of science are explained for dummies to seem technical.

Maximum Ride fan art

The obvious moralising also becomes tedious. When the children escape from the lab, the baddies chase them down with a justification that “The good that will ultimately come will justify everything. The most important days in history are almost here.” Just in case we might have missed the point, it is reiterated several times. “Biotech was definitely the new frontier in science. It can, and undoubtedly will, push evolution farther and faster than anything has in history. The question, though, is whether we’re ready, emotionally and morally, for what we will be able to create in the very near future.” The novel is an undemanding, fairly gripping page-turner that you could read on a plane between interrupted dozes and not be upset if you left it behind in the seat-pocket.