Books:
The Tourist & Nearest Exit (The Tourist Series 1 & 2) by Olen Steinhauer
These are the first two in a series of modern spy novels about a division of the CIA called "tourism" that does a lot of off-the-books spying/assassinating. Apparently the guy who created the TV series Berlin Station (a show I found to be pretty dull just to throw that out there) wrote these and he's IJHO better in fiction because these books are basically spy procedurals and the step-by-step plotting is somewhat fun to read. The plots are pretty intricate (in a good way) and, without spoilering, I’ll just say that the second book is kind of a continuation of the first book as it picks up the direct consequences of that one. There’s also a personal/family story in there and lots of inter-agency squabbling, killings in sexy locales, killings in dingy locales, and politics, i.e. more or less what you’d expect from spy novels. They’re instantly forgettable with characters who are slightly more fleshed out than being mere plot motors but aren’t too much beyond that, a plot that makes logical sense though it all seems absurd if you think about it too hard, and a second book that gets wobbly enough to not give me great confidence going forward. Does all that sound like a complete contradiction to my initial stated enjoyment of them? I mean, yes, they’re not great, but I also wasn’t bored and finished both of them back to back. My guess is if you’re an aficionado of the spy genre, you’ll likely already have read these (and probably think they suck since it’s hard to imagine these books being up there in the pantheon of top spy novels); if not and you occasionally dabble in the genre a la moi well these were entertaining enough with Andy Weir-level writing.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Speaking of which… I’ve used Andy Weir before as my meter for serviceable writing with fun plot (primarily because I think enough people read The Martian that he might serve as a metric for others as well) and he’s achieved metric once again - go, Andy! This book is in the same vein as The Martian, i.e. a right-now/near-future catastrophe that requires a lot of beat by beat scientific solutions, the unpacking of which becomes the primary plot driver and tension. The book takes place in the present day but posits a doomsday scenario in which the only hope of saving mankind is to invent and launch a ship to a nearby star system in a last ditch effort - that would be the hail Mary part - to stave off the end of the world. Whatever you felt about The Martian (if you read it) is what you'll feel about this. As with that book, this is a book about scientific problem solving and coming up with new solutions when the other ones fail. The structure of the book keeps everything moving as it cuts back and forth between the narrator on the ship dealing with present-tense problems but having forgotten details of how he got there intercut with the past stuff on Earth as he slowly remembers. I won't spoil anything so I'll just say this book zings right along, is pretty fun, is grounded more in the details of problem solving bordering on engineering with some sci-fi elements than being a sci-fi book itself (well.. ish), and if you like that kind of thing would make for a perfect airplane/beach read.
TV/Streaming:
Follow the Money (Seasons 1-3):
This Danish cop/white-collar-crime show turned out to be way more entertaining than I thought it would be based on the kinda draggy first episode - there was a lot of setup and characters and finance-y stuff all with, at most, moderate levels of hotness (and that’s being generous) which made it slow for this Janice. You’re familiar with the Janice Proposition of course, the Fields Medal winning math formula which definitively proves the 1:1 ratio between my willingness to invest in complicated pilot episodes and the provision of, volume of, shirtlessness of, and overall existence of nonstop eye candy. Meaning I really had to do some work with this one and am super impressed with myself as a result. The first two seasons are about an older street-smart cop being paired with a finance-nerd-cop as they track down the killers behind a series of murders and unravel the much larger financial conspiracy in the process. The third season focuses on the nerd cop dealing - badly - with the aftermath of the first two seasons. While there are a few other side plots around family/personal issues, this show primarily focuses on the crime stuff either from the cop POV or from some of the criminals as well. The Oscar/Felix-y relationship totally works and completely drives the show, and, for reasons I won’t spoil, that all shifts in season 3 which made that one somewhat less engaging than the other two for me. I mean it was a’right and a good enough wrapup to the series (I think it’s over), but it was just different and maybe I wanted more of the same at that point. If you’re willing to do like I did and live right at the edge of the Janice Proposition, i.e. you’re willing to invest a bit of energy at the beginning to stick with it despite its hotness shortcomings, and if you like moderately-paced cop shows (think: The Bridge (Swedish version) if you’ve seen it in terms of pacing), this is pretty good crime series.
Young Royals (Season 1):
Continuing this week’s Scandinavian theme, I thought this Swedish show set at a hoity toity high end boarding school for the rich and/or royalty was going to be a Gossip Girls-y sort of frothy soap but really it was much more of a teen drama. The essence of the show is that the young (14? 15? somewhere in there) prince of Sweden is sent to this private school after some kind of Instagram scandal and what happens in the face of jealous friends, his sexuality (I'm spoilering nothing that isn't revealed within the first 10 minutes here), and a romance he has with a townie. It's relatively predictable and takes itself with something approaching lethal seriousness at times - oh, the burdens of being royalty when you just want to kick around a soccer ball and have a few shots of brannvin with friends! - but then again isn’t everything lethally serious when you’re a teen? It’s a bit draggy, but overall I liked it, i.e. five or six 45ish minute episodes and nothing great but would certainly pass the time on a cross country flight. Dermatological trigger warning: they either cast actual teens or the makeup people went crazy with the zits (or my OLED screen is just that amazing) because this is by far the worst collection of skin I've seen on television - possibly in reality as well - to the point of total distraction; I mean you really cannot stop seeing anything but nonstop zits zits ZITS which made me want to prophylactially rush to Walgreens to purchase a topical cleanse on the offchance that I might be getting some kind of sympathetic skin reaction merely from watching.
Movies:
Werewolves Within - This movie is an odd - in a good way (at least when gummied) - mashup of a horror movie with a sort of self-aware wink at the tropes of horror movies, sort of like a locked room werewolf mystery crossed with What We Do in the Shadows. The basic plot is it's winter in a small town in Vermont where there's a werewolf (or a human killer trying to make it look like there's a werewolf) knocking off people from a group that's trapped by a storm. It's completely amusing and actually manages to be both kind of funny in spots as well as kind of actually scary in spots. I gummy-thought the tone worked primarily because the movie doesn’t stop for comic beats or anything but rather (more or less) puts heightened, OTT characters in an otherwise tensely dramatic situation - think Evil Dead and its ilk. The production values are a notch above the norm, the script is fun, the runtime is pretty short, the acting is good, and this would definitely make a fun group watch.