Review: Brunner in the Black by Will Nichols

An international spy thriller with a devilishly sharp PI at the helm, Brunner in the Black by Will Nichols is teeming with classic and contemporary energy.

Lenya “The Narwhal” Fischer is as cold as they come – an ex-con private eye born and raised in East Berlin with a dangerous rolodex of Stasi and KGB contacts at her fingertips. When she’s hired by a high-profile client to destabilize a corporate titan, she quickly finds herself swimming in deeper waters than usual – one of her most reliably invisible contacts is brazenly murdered, and her beloved cat is gruesomely strung up as a warning to back off the case. Rather than roll over, Lenya declares war on the shadowy powers willing to kill to keep their secrets quiet.

The Brunner Group may be a logging dynasty from the past, and a dinosaur of old Europe, but their modern survival seems increasingly tied to organized crime with all the sinister leverage that entails. From the highest seat of Vatican City and the royal family of Liechtenstein to merciless Russian underbosses and an alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, Lenya finds herself tangled in a web of money laundering, murder, and the malicious power brokers who run the world. Calling in every favor she has coming, and trying every investigative trick she can muster, this graying legend confidently strolls the knife’s edge of criminality and street justice.

While the private investigator genre is bursting at the seams with clever protagonists haunted by the past and melodramatic neo-noir prose, this novel blurs genre lines, which certainly ticks the boxes of a private eye thriller, but the international locales elevate the story well above other cookie-cutter franchises, with a chaotic anti-heroine at the helm. The slow drip of Lenya’s backstory only heightens her enigmatic persona, while the involvement in the cabal of villains from her past opens the door for further character study, and even more vengeance. The companionship and counsel of Father Mukuta is another refreshing element, balancing out Lenya’s impulsivity with reason, humor, and the intimacy of an old ally.

The prose intriguingly mirrors the gritty and snappy style of classic espionage writing, with a cloak-and-dagger plot that feels like a classic Cold War drama, but with contemporary references to Signal, the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, and criminal billionaires, resulting in a clever mashup of two different eras and atmospheres. The classic storytelling elements are somewhat familiar – plot drivers of mobsters, secretive inside sources, arms dealers, financial fraud, and corruption at the top – but these timeless storytelling elements are combined with subtle but recognizable social observation to bring the novel firmly into the present.

While thrillers often require some suspension of disbelief, there are some convenient plot progressions that run counter to the suspense. The pacing is also inconsistent and frequently rushed, with long historical or contextual passages overshadowing lines of pivotal action, along with a tendency to over-explain the significance of information, clues, or encounters. These moments often happen in dialogic exchanges, which can come off as vehicles for exposition, rather than authentic conversations between truly believable characters.

Some editorial polishing could tighten the prose and eliminate some cut corners in the storytelling, but this high-stakes takedown of global elites is a timely and satisfying global thriller.