The Faithful Spy, Black Cherry Blues, Nemesis

Three books that I wanted to like, but each one fell short in some way...
First was Alex Berenson's The Faithful Spy.  The premise seems really promising: John Wells, a CIA agent, penetrates the taliban in Afghanistan, then returns to the US, but his superiors no longer trust him, since he's been gone so long and has converted to Islam while in Afghanistan.  Unfortunately, Wells's beliefs are just window-dressing to allow Berenson to give Wells CIA training but prevent him from using his CIA connections.  By the end of the novel, Wells is barely religious at all, and, having saved the day, doesn't seem to have any effect on his life for choosing Islam.

I'm not really sure if I liked James Lee Burke's Black Cherry Blues.  On the one hand, Burke is a good writer on a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph level.  He has some great descriptions of Louisiana and Montana, his dialog is believable, he has some great characters, and I liked the way he works with his theme of redemption. But I had two problems with it.  One is that Dave Robicheaux, who just runs a bait shop, keeps stumbling into fairly large-scale crimes, involving governments or huge companies.  I realize that this is a convention of the amateur detective sub-genre, but I think that an author needs to work on the suspension of disbelief.  More critically, there's a level of macho posturing that made it hard to sympathize with Dave.  The whole plot really gets going when he goes into a hotel room where the antagonists are staying and tries to intimidate them by whipping a chain around.  It's a stupid move, and it doesn't really square with the picture of Dave as a smart guy.

Jo Nesbo's Redbreast was an exciting novel in the tradition of The Day of the Jackal, with a race to stop an assassin from killing a public official.  There was a big hole left open, though, and I was hoping to see Nesbo tackle it in Nemesis, the follow-up.  Unfortunately, instead I ended up with two Agatha Christie-like plots.  The thing that I never like about Christie is that the plots so byzantine that they seem ready to topple over at a moment's notice.  In this case, we have a bank robber implicating a different one by throwing a soda can with fingerprints on it into a garbage can, knowing that the police would see him throwing it away in the surveillance cameras of the 7-11 across the street.  The whole thing goes completely awry if (1) the police don't get the tape from the 7-11 (2) they don't notice that the criminal is in the video (he's not in the same clothes and mask as he was wearing during the robbery) (3) the garbage is collected before they make the connection.  The other plot is just as bad.  It's too bad, because until the denoument, I was enjoying the novel.