Midnight Black: A Guilty Pleasure?

 

 

 

MIDNIGHT BLACK (2025)

By Mark Greaney

Berkley Publishing Group, 528 pages.

★★★

 

As a kid I devoured Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. They resonated with the Cold War rhetoric that was in vogue back then, with the British Bond’s SPECTRE organization wearing the white hats and saving the world from the evil Russian SMERSH. Although SMERSH was once an actual Russian amalgam of three counterintelligence groups, in Fleming novels SMERSH was an organization of Russian spies and intelligence officers seeking to undermine global democracy. SPECTRE was analogous to MI-5, the British version of the CIA.

 

If you didn’t think about that kind of stuff as much as I did, it was essentially akin to “Spy vs. Spy” comic strips in Mad Magazine with the commies in black and the bumbling “good(ish)” guys in white. If I’m honest, fantasizing about Bond’s girlfriends had something to do with my love of Ian Fleming books. Oddly, though, I never cared for James Bond movies– beyond looking at the so-called Bond “girls”– as the films were too cheesy for me. When I hit high school, I put all that stuff behind me; the Vietnam War nudged me toward Quakerism and an embrace of pacifism.

 

I don’t talk about it much, but every now and then I’m like the reformed smoker who sneaks a cigarette in that I pick up a spy novel for the frisson of a cheap thrill. Midnight Black is Book # 14 of author Mark Greaney’s “Gray Man” series and the second book of his I’ve read. I despise all military jargon, weapons, and things war-related, but I have to give Greaney credit for being very good at what he does. Put another way, Midnight Black was a novel I hated to like. It’s cliched, a throwback to the hottest days of the Cold War, sexist, and so macho it makes Rambo seem like a sissy.

 

Greaney’s “Gray Man” is Court(land) Gentry, code named “Violator.” (Is there any bloody point to code names when both sides of a conflict know who you mean?) He is a decided Rambo-type, a rogue CIA agent who is in and out of the organization depending on who is responsible for reining in his multiple violations of protocol. His one-time handler Matthew Hanley has been demoted to a posting in Bogota and the new guy in the big leather chair keeps Court a veritable prisoner on a military compound, though Court is a manly man who is hard to contain. He’s impossible to do so once he’s told that “Anthem,” his Russian lover Zoya Zakharova, was executed. He simply refuses to believe it and makes plans to smuggle himself inside of Russia, find her, and bring her back to the United States. He continues in that planning even though he has no idea where to look and is told trying to get into Russia is a suicide mission. WWRD? (What Would Rambo Do?)

 

Midnight Black takes us all over Eastern and Northern Europe (Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine, Finland…) and places Court and all those he contacts in extreme jeopardy. He connects with “Romantic,” Zack Hightower, a sometime partner, sometime rival, as well as various contacts seeking to undermine the Russian Federation, CIA folks working on the sly without permission, and seafaring folk who might get him into Russia or might sell him out for a song. Just like Rambo, Court decides a small team is all that’s needed to take out huge military units. And, of course, Anthem is not dead; she’s in a Russian gulag in Mordovia, as is a popular dissident, Nadai Yarovaya who the West wants to spring from prison but won’t go unless her husband is also freed from a nearby gulag. I guess if you’re going to take out three separate gulags you want to keep things small.  

 

Court is resourceful and exploits splits within the Russian intelligence community. Frankly, the plot line is absurd, with one impossible obstacle piled upon another a The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight fashion. I can’t really assess all of the hardware, explosives, tactics, and military alignments mentioned in the book as I know nothing about such matters. Again, though, the novel is akin to Fleming’s James Bond in that it’s all about the kill, the thrill, and the kiss, not plausibility. Keep a towel handy to wipe up the testosterone.

 

Rob Weir

(Code Name: Shamefaced)

 

 

  

 

Witches and Relics in the Time of Plague

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE STONE WITCH OF FLORENCE (2024)

By Anna Rasche

Park Row, 368 pages

★★★★

 

If you’ve ever studied medieval history, there’s much to like about The Stone Witch of Florence. If you’re a serious scholar of the period, there much that might annoy you. As a recovering medievalist it had elements that made me grab it: witchcraft, the Black Death, church corruption, and just enough accuracy to dissuade me from screaming, “Rubbish!” and hurling it across the room.

 

This is a historical novel written by a gemmologist that flirts with fantasy, folklore, and feminist wish fulfilment in blurring the rare with the customary. As modern Wiccans remind us, the word “witch” is often defined by whatever eyes are looking at it. What word would you attribute to a woman who uses gemstones to heal? Is she a folk physician, a heretic, a rock-wielding mesmerist, a threat to public health?

 

In her debut novel Anna Rache juxtaposes her beleaguered heroine Ginevra de Gasparo with church beliefs in the efficacy of relics. It is 1348, the year the Plague begins to ravage the Italian peninsula. (Think medieval; there’s no such thing as a unified Italian nation-state.) Prior to the outbreak of the Plague, Ginevra’s great ambition was to become a member of the physician’s guild of Florence, which got her banned from the city. Some women were allowed to join guilds, but not many. But let’s not romanticize a medieval physician whose practices of using leeches, bleedings, blistering, and unguents in ways that often differed from the “cures” of witches only in the gender of the applicant. 

 

The terms Plague and Black Death are often used interchangeably though they were not the same thing. The Beath Death looked scarier, with the patient’s body growing pus-filed buboes. Yet it was the most-survivable form of plague; the highly contagious airborne pneumonic plague had a death rate of close to 100 percent. Patients went from health to death in less than a day. (Shades of the early days of Covid, anyone?) Depending on where you were, the Plague carried off between 30-60 percent of the entire population between 1348-51. So were “stone witches” such as Ginevra blamed and burned at the stake? No; witch killings gathered steam between the 15^th-17^th centuries.  In the mid-14^th, it was often the case that only heretics believed in witches at all. Ginevra was allowed back to an increasingly-empty Florence with a vague promise from Inquisitor Michele (male) that he might support her application to the guild.

 

There is a catch, of course. Ginevra is also drawn into what is more of a crisis of public faith than of public health. Michele wants Ginevra’s aid in finding out who is stealing relics from local churches. It is a matter of urgency. After all, if what remains of the populace concludes that faith can’t save them, what need is there for the church, priests, or inquisitors? As Rache writes, “Florentines were not exactly known known as the most pious of peoples.” Pre-Plague Florence was as much a city of bankers, merchants, and luxury, despite its fame for holding numerous important relics. One by one they disappear–the left arm of San Filippo Apostolo, the leg of the martyr Miniato, the skull of San Zenobio, and other items deemed sacred and miraculous? What is to be made of vials of colored water left in their place?

 

All of this builds a strange symbiosis between Michele and Ginevra, though her strongest alliance is with the  wealthy Lucia, who supports her and aids in investigating the mystery of missing relics. As happened so often during the Plague, wealthy men fled the cities for the allegedly miasma-free air of the countryside. In an odd way, the rich were right about that. We now know that fleas hosted by black rats and bred in filthy medieval cities were big culprits in spreading the Plague.

 

The Stone Witch of Florence is an unusual novel. Does Rasche intend us to contrast the official veneration of magical relics with the presumed superstition of Ginerva’s Plague immunity with her pure crystal quartz, her energy with garnet, and her ability to drink men under the table with a piece of amethyst under her tongue? Probably. Are we to draw conclusions about power versus the poor? However you read this novel, rest assured it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors.

 

Rob Weir