The Novels of Thomas Perry and Alan Furst

"Stein said it.  We all lost people.  Two years ago, we both heard you say that if the FBI didn't find those twelve killers within two years you were going after them yourself.  Now, exactly two years later, you tell us you're  leaving. We know what you're doing.  We want you to succeed.  We want them dead and you alive.  What we're doing is trying to make that more likely."
--Thomas Perry, A Small Town (The Mysterious Press, 2020)

The tugboat carrying the torpedo left at dawn, on the Loire canal that wound its way to Orleans, then to the Rhone, the great river that flowed south to empty into the Mediterranean Sea near the city of Montpelier.  Ricard sat against a bollard at the stern of the tugboat.  As the sea rose, the leafy branches of oak and chestnut trees formed a canopy above the canal and threw shadows on the still, green water.
--Alan Furst, Under Occupation (Random House, 2019)

Alan Furst has written fifteen spy novels in a rather lovely poetic prose.  Lately his novels have taken place in occupied Paris during WWII, with vivid personalities and detailed descriptions of time and place as, in Under Occupation, writer Paul Ricard enters into the Resistance and goes to Poland to steal a Nazi torpedo, the pace varying from intense and suspenseful to leisurely and uneventful.  I do tend to prefer Furst's earlier novels, especially Night Soldiers (1988) and Dark Star (1991), for their complexity and wider-ranging geography, to the effective economy of Under Occupation.

A Small Town is the first of Thomas Perry's novels I've read; I was attracted by its title because I grew up in a small town and admire Richard Lingeman's Small Town America (1980).  The small town in Perry's book is of a particular kind these days:  a town where a prison is the main source of employment.  Twelve prisoners plot an escape and thousands of prisoners flee with them. All but the twelve are quickly rounded up, though not before they rape, murder and burn down a number of the houses of the residents of the town, Weldonville.  But most of the book takes place outside the small town, as Detective Lt. Leah Hawkins is given a generous budget to track down and kill the twelve leaders of the escape, after the FBI has failed to find them. Hawkins eventually succeeds, using her considerable mental and physical strength.