THE TUXEDO SOCIETY: A Novel, excellent fifteen years ago, moderately fun now

THE TUXEDO SOCIETY: A Novel
PAUL RUDNICK
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: If Guy Ritchie directed an episode of Queer Eye, it might look something like this hilarious and action-packed spy thriller by Paul Rudnick, acclaimed screenwriter and author of Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, that blends espionage and social commentary, with an elite, gay secret society.

They are fierce patriots. They are licensed to kill. And they are really, really gay. Welcome to democracy’s secret weapon, the Tuxedo Society.

When Andrew Birnbaum, a struggling actor making ends meet by working in a candle shop, gets invited to have dinner with the exclusive Tuxedo Society by his best friend, Brock, his life takes an unexpected turn. What seems like a group of wealthy socialites gathering for gossip and cocktails quickly spirals into a world of espionage, danger, and hilarity.

Andrew soon meets Reggie O’Malley, a Navy SEAL with a penchant for black tie, who recruits Andrew to join the society’s covert mission to protect national security. Armed with gadgets like an inflatable life raft backpack, a yoga mat that doubles as an assault rifle, and, of course, an AMEX Black Card, Andrew quickly finds himself tackling spies, thwarting assassinations, and facing a host of unexpected threats in settings from the White House to the Vatican to the Summer Olympic Games.

The stakes escalate when Andrew and his comrades are sent on a jet-setting mission to uncover the truth about an ancient artifact. Along the way, they clash with oligarchs, crooked senators, and a smarmy televangelist with sinister plans for world domination.

Packed with Paul Rudnick’s signature wit, The Tuxedo Society is a wild ride through decadence, danger, and unexpected heroism, as Andrew discovers that saving the world might just be the role he’s been waiting for.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Take all the silliness of a Bond flick and sprinkle fairy-dust on it, detomate a glitter bomb in a 1979 bath house, pipe in Bette Midler and Streisand and Cher interspersed with Romanovsky and Phillips, and...for the five of you still reading...and here's you a read. The trappings of the twenty-first century feel like they're set dressing. Like, this cisqueer white man cabal of queens sounds like Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. Pastiche of the ways and words of the Good Old Days, fun for a while but...wears thin.

I'm the target audience for this book. I liked it. I really laughed, in pleasure, at the jokes. It gave me the happy nostalgia of knowing someone out there still remembers my heyday.

But it's twenty-fuckin'-twenty-six, y'all. Plug your hearing aid into the charger. Suicide bombers are fiendishly hard to track down using modern data analysis...gaydar shit-sure got no chance. I think we're past this kind of spying being used for humor because we're past this kind of spying being usable in real-world settings, which is always the fun of an espionage novel. It's not realistic or the CIA/NSA/MI{numeral} folk would be on the publisher, the writer, and the writer's mama with every resource they possess; but we-the-reader need to feel it *could* be and that it *could* happen like this.

But there are some lines that truly glitter like well-cut diamonds. Can't quote them because no really good examples don't also spoil stuff, annd if you don't live in fear of the Spoiler Stasi, you haven't been nastygrammed by any of 'em yet. Spoiled things.

Still a fun read, but one I'll send you to the library to check out, not your Bookshop.org cart.

NOTHING ON EARTH, spy thriller for the Rachel Cusk reader

NOTHING ON EARTH
IAN MacKENZIE
The Unnamed Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "I often traveled for work." So begins Nothing On Earth, a propulsive novel that tells the story of Anna Hendrix, an American spy, as she seeks answers for the appearance of a mysterious and potentially powerful metal of unknown origin.

For a long time, Anna was in counterterrorism, but now she is on a new mission, one which has friends and enemies across the globe scrambling to find answers. Her pursuit will take her from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia—through expatriate enclaves and the NGO communities in which she cultivates her cover and extracts information from a wide cast of characters: aid workers, diplomats, foreign correspondents, energy magnates, insurgents, dissident, and of course, other spies.

As the pressure mounts to find the original source of the metal, Anna must make choices with life-changing implications not just for herself, but for the people with whom she deals, always bearing in mind the young daughter waiting for her back home. In Nothing on Earth, novelist Ian MacKenzie reimagines a pivotal decade in the Pax Americana, from the killing of Osama bin Laden to the storming of the Capitol. Anna’s voice—lean, understated, unflappable—is our companion and guide through the dark topography of geopolitical power, and in the end, the furthest reaches of human comprehension.

For fans of Rachel Cusk and John Le Carré alike, this is a story of power and secrecy, geopolitics and science, parenthood and loss, and the question of how we know what we think we know, how we make sense of our existence on Earth.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The macguffin in this story is a metal called for convenience "The Resource." It's never precisely named, but it has sci-fi-esque qualities that make it very important to the US and our new global competitor China. It also drags Anna Hendrix from pillar to post in a grail quest set at the end of the American imperial project.

The reading experience is the thing that peopelled me through the story, as Anna faces obstacles and overcomes opponents whose parallel grail quests for The Resource she thwarts and redirects and generally uses her personal charm and concomitant network of allies and enablers, and the occasional useful idiot, to shape events.

Events that are shaped are rife with consequences. Empires have ill-defined goals that form entire futures for people with no stake in the success of those imperial goals except surviving their aftermath. Anna Hendrix, unlike spies I'm accustomed to spending time with *cough*Bond*cough*, in delivering the story directly to us, allows her audience access to her ruminations on the enterprise she's embarked on, though always couched in interpersonal terms.

That makes her sound like a women's-fiction manipulative heroine. She's not that...she is but she isn't...Anna Hendrix, in Author Ian's hands, is a subtle character whose narration has layers of awareness and intentionality that are worthy of the publisher's comparison of the story to one by Rachel Cusk. As in Author Cusk's fiction, I found Anna Hendrix to be a self-aware narrator of her story, while remaining within that story. It's a tricky narrative effect to pull off. It requires sophisticated, self-aware use of tropes and conventions. (I'd cite examples were I writing a critique or analysis for scholarly purposes but I ain't got them chops.)

Setting the story amid the massive upheavals of the Teens and early Twenties allows Author Ian to, from the safe distance of Anna's story-role of first-person narrator, comment on the nature and responsibility of espionage. What result justifies the costs (there are always costs) of meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations, and more importantly the quotidian workings of people's lives? What happens to goals when those setting them change those goals? What is Anna Hendrix's responsibility as the world shifts in directions she can't predict?

That undersells the action part of the storytelling. I'm as susceptible to a chase scene as any other guy. I like Anna Hendrix telling me about how she rips and runs and fights off physical threats, because it's not mechanical...Anna's a mother, her stake in the world is as a result much deeper than her male counterparts in fiction. If she's fighting for her life, she's fighting for her motherhood at the same time.

Sexist though it may be to acknowledge it, mothers are fundamentally different from fathers in affect and effect. I'm not really interested in going deeply into that argument in reviewing this story but I feel it's important to say that the issue of Anna Hendrix As Mother is not glossed over, nor is it obsessed over; another fine balancing act Author Ian navigates with more aplomb than I'd expect from a man writing from a woman's PoV. So now let's talk about that.

I can't offer a full fifth star to this story because Author Ian, as a man, is projecting some cultural baggage of motherhood onto Anna Hendrix and her choice of a career that takes her away from her child. I regard that fact as an unfairness on my part, but I have to do it in the name of reporting my own honest reaction to an important fact of the story. Anna's just given birth as the story opens. I'm aware of that fact for the first quarter of our current action but then, as in life, my awareness of it drops away. I don't know this for a fact, obviously, but I...not a member of the Cult of Mother...found Author Ian's periodic refreshing of her motherhood both appropriate and awkward, as though the Author-Man thought "waitaminnit what about the kid?" I could easily be talked out of that perception by a woman taking issue with my statement. I was also unclear as to why Anna's relationship with her daughter Thea's Korean father was not more part of her calculations regarding The Resource and her pursuit of it.

Another writer would've leaned on The Resource's ill-defined otherworldliness, very much to the detriment of Anna Hendrix's story of how she sets about controlling events surrounding this Resource. I mention this to reassure those who experience story-hives at the lightest contact with things SFnal that you're not asked to invest more than passing interest in the nature of The Resource.

I'll say that as spy thrillers go I couldn't think of another one that so deftly combines the quest elements with the depth of a more interpersonal literary novel. It was a story praised by multiple very high-quality writers, and deservedly so. It's well worth your time and treasure to acquire, literary consumers, and yours too, spy-story folk.

RED LILY, first thriller I've ever called "cozy"

RED LILY
JANICE GRAHAM
Vendome Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 ebook, available 26 May 2025

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of Firebird comes a delightfully funny and tender tale of family secrets, reluctant spies, and one unforgettable woman!

Paris 1989.
A cold war is ending.
A new family is beginning.
And one dog is about to save the day.

Carl Box has never met his Aunt Lily. She was the family scandal — exiled, disgraced, and never spoken of. So when he’s named the heir to her Paris estate, he packs a bag (and his two-legged dog, Billy) and prepares for paperwork, not espionage.

But Lily is very much alive. And very much in trouble.

What begins as a simple inheritance turns into a Cold War caper filled with coded messages, eccentric operatives, and secrets that could still get people killed. Carl soon finds himself in the role of spy — dodging agents, covering for Lily, and wondering what exactly she’s been hiding all these years.

Red Lily is a warm, witty historical suspense about unexpected heroism and the mysteries of family ties — perfect for fans of Killers of a Certain Age, Jacqueline Winspear, and Only Murders in the Building.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Thank goodness for the great middle-class Prufrock! He is that scion of privilege who's niggled by the sense of Something More being somewhere out there, though he can't really say where or why. He's a fixture in Graham Greene's Cold War novels: Our Man in Havana's Wormold and Travels with my Aunt's Pulling. Enough privilege and wealth to leave his quotidian life behind. It's never examined from the standpoint of his privilege, his white-male unquestioned freedom to just...chuck it all, no blame or manhunts pursuing him.

Aunt Lily is meant to be a Mame-like figure, a woman who wasn't shunned by her family for trivial reasons but for her utter unwillingness to conform. A sister to a man who left his son a paint factory and the surname Box, she's really more of an Ethel Rosenberg figure to me. She knows what she's doing, and that there are consequences, but she believes she's Right so she does it anyway. Best to keep family far away. Except when they come in handy, as her Prufrock-meets-Babbitt nephew does now.

There's enough action, enough entertaining woman-spy-trades-on-femaleness to make its more cozy aspects of forming found family and taking care of the people in your life (who aren't there from some societal pressure) to the bitter end to make it feel like a weirdly cozy thriller. Running around there is, but more importantly bonds are formed, forged, and honored.

Box himself is slow on the uptake. It frustrated me that Aunt Lily could run rings around him yet HE was the narrator. It was also more than a little effort to keep track of who's who, which is fine in a thriller but not usually part of the reading experience in a cozy, so a bit of the luster got dimmed for me there too.

All in all, though, I'm not mad at the read, nor especially mad for it either. Fun was had, smiles were smiled, and five hours were not wasted in reading it. Need something to wile some time away that still repays giving it your attention?

Seven bucks and it's yours.