Snowstorm in August

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.

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What’s Snowstorm in August About?

Joaquín Alboroto is the head of Mexico’s largest drug cartel—and is a character straight out of Winslow’s Cartel Trilogy (and, likely, reality). He’s powerful, ruthless, calculating, and vengeful—and right now, he’s angry. His anger is directed at New York City and the family of one judge from NYC, and he goes after both.

The first step in this process is blanketing Central Park in cocaine—it looks like a snowstorm swept over the park. Horses, dogs, squirrels, birds, children, and adults out for a fun day in August are killed or hospitalized—countless lives are irrevocably damaged at once. And Alboroto promises more to come.

The NYPD is totally unprepared for this—the current commissioner isn’t the right man for this moment, he’s better known for working the political and bureaucratic sides of things. Preventing attacks of this type isn’t in his wheelhouse.

A former counter-terrorism officer in the NYPD is recruited to head up a group of retired officers to confront Alboroto and similar threats. This is a vigilante group with private funding, but in their hearts, they’re still NYPD and want to serve the city. Using old contacts (on both sides of the law), liaising with the Mexican government, and armed with the best hackers and technology that money can buy—plus their own experience and grit—this small group just may be able to stop Alboroto before his next strike.

The Baltic Avenue Group

This right here might be my favorite idea in this novel. So you’ve got a non-governmental anti-terrorist strike force—you need to fund them if they’re going to be effective at all. So, sure, you could have one of them be a super-genius inventor/entrepreneur (like Tony Stark), an orphaned heir of a super-rich man (Bruce Wayne), a group of thieves and con artists turned Robin Hood (Leverage), or a Powerball winner. Something.

Karp gives us a group of billionaires who know the economic impact that a terrorist attack can bring on the city—and on themselves. They don’t want to go through that again, so they’re willing to spend a lot of money to keep them from losing much more. They’re benevolent and out for themselves at the same time. That’s as close to a perfect description of heroes for our time as you’re going to find anywhere.

So, what did I think about Snowstorm in August?

This book made me flashback to a book that I hadn’t thought of in years—I posted about it on October 25, 2013, so probably the last time I gave it any thought was the 26th (though probably the afternoon of the 25th)—Dick Wolf’s The Intercept. There’s a very similar elite group of cops ready to take down terrorist threats with all the fancy tech and everything. That group, however, was part of the NYPD and should’ve been controlled by things like the Constitution, the courts, and the city’s budget. This book, however, features retired cops acting as vigilantes with a budget that probably shames even all of The Big Apple’s. Also, the writing is crisper, the characters aren’t cardboard, and it’s more entertaining. My intent wasn’t to find another excuse to disparage The Intercept, but because the books were similar in so many ways, I had to figure out why I really liked one and had little good to say about the other.

Sometime after 9/11 I remember reading about (and I think I heard one or more of the participants discuss this), some governmental agency brought together some thriller writers, movie makers, etc. to think up some possible, but unlikely attacks that could be launched on the U.S. so contingency plans could be thought up as well as ways to deter this. Does anyone else remember this? Anyway, a lot of what Albortoro gets up to in this book feels like the product of those meetings—possible, but unlikely. Still, if you picked up your phone tomorrow morning and whatever social media feed gives you your news described the attack on Central Park (or any of the other things in this book), you’d believe it. I’m not so sure how willing I am to believe that a handful of ex-cops and federal agents could stop it. But I’d like to think it could happen. (I clearly have more confidence in the ingenuity of criminals and killers than I do in people who’d want to stop them).

There’s an incredibly cinematic feel to this—if your brain doesn’t project a lot of these scenes onto a mental movie screen in your head, something’s wrong. That cover shot alone deserves a Wagner score (although that seems overused, maybe substitute Harold Faltermeyer*). That cinematic feel lets Karp get away with a few things that I’m not sure that other thriller writers could get away with (and some thriller writers use all the time)

* Composer of Top Gun‘s score.

Combine all of those two paragraphs, and what Karp has given us is a blockbuster novel with a very realistic grounding, but it doesn’t necessarily play out that way. But Karp hooks you quickly and keeps on hooking you—he’s not content to get you invested just once, he wants it all. There’s a romantic subplot that works well and rounds out Danny’s character, but I wondered a couple of times if it messed up the pacing a bit (and made me wonder about Danny’s priorities at least once). Aside from that, the pacing was spot-on, and the novel kept picking up speed as it goes and you barrel into the conclusion—I don’t know how someone is supposed to put this down during the last 50 pages (it’s slightly easier in the 50 before that—slightly).

Satisfying action, well-executed plot twists and turns, characters you want to see again, and very believable villains. Snowstorm in August is the action-adventure novel you need to read.