No Right Way

Valentin Vermeulen Thriller #4

by Michael Niemann

The fall of 2015. It’s been four years since the civil war in Syria started and over a year since ISIS took over major parts of the country. The refugee stream into Turkey has swelled to unprecedented numbers.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is scrambling to offer services and shelter to the multitudes. The Turkish government is doing what it can. Money from the rest of the world and European governments is flowing in to help alleviate the crisis. Numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are using UN funds to do the on-the-ground work to house and feed refugees.
Valentin Vermeulen's job is to make sure that all those funds are spent for their intended purposes. As he digs into his task, he learns that some refugees have not received any aid at all. Figuring out why that is quickly lands him in trouble with organize crime.

Genres: Mystery

Paperback

Published May 14, 2019

About the author

Award winning author Michael Niemann has long been interested in the sites where ordinary people’s lives and global processes intersect. He’s shared umqombothi with shack dwellers outside Cape Town, interviewed Morgan Tsvangirai, former Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, when he was still a trade union leader, and has seen Eduardo Mondlane’s dorm room at Northwestern University, faithfully recreated at the Museum of the Revolution in Maputo.

His thrillers featuring UN investigator Valentin Vermeulen are published by Coffeetown Press. Legitimate Business and Illicit Trade were published in March 2017. Illegal Holdings came out in March 2018, and No Right Way went on sale in June 2019. Illegal Holdings won the 2019 Silver Falchion Award for Best Thriller at Killer Nashville. The fifth Vermeulen thriller, Percentages of Guilt is due for publication in 2020.

His short stories have appeared in Vengeance, the 2012 Mystery Writers of America anthology edited by Lee Child, and Mysterical-E. "Africa Always Needs Guns" and "Big Dreams Cost Too Much" are now available as Kindle singles. "Some Kind of Justice" will follow soon.

On the non-fiction side, he is the author of A Spatial Approach to Regionalism in the Global Economy (2000). His academic articles have appeared in numerous journals and several edited books. Copies are available on this website in the non-fiction section.

Throughout his academic career, he has helped students of all ages and backgrounds to understand their role in constructing the world in which they live, and to take this role seriously.

He grew up in a small town in western Germany before moving to the United States. He has studied at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Bonn, Germany, and the Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver where he received his PhD in International Studies. He lives in southern Oregon with his dog Stanley.

Reviews

[Lance Charnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

The still-ongoing, slow-rolling tragedy of the Syrian civil war will certainly spawn a whole sub-genre of books in the years to come. Most will focus on the products of the crucible of slaughter and extremism (probably a whole generation of thriller villains); many will be literary works pondering the impacts of dislocation and loss; there'll be a few capers (looting the Syrian Mint, anyone?) and flat-out war stories. How many will be, at their heart, financial mysteries? Well, at least one -- this one.

Southern Turkey in 2015 is teeming with refugees from the intramural bloodshed across the border. Some of the escapees are in official camps; others have been smuggled in as semi-enslaved labor for Turkish businesses. After one of them, Zada, thinks she's found a way out of her bondage in a vineyard, she turns up dead. Her friend Rima Ahmadi sets out to discover why and crosses paths with U.N. investigator Valentin Vermeulen, who's in the area looking into possible misuse of U.N. money going to support the refugees. This leads (as it tends to) to shady dealings on both sides of the border, organized crime, disorganized official corruption, and escalating threats to our hero and heroine.

Valentin is Belgian, previously an investigator in a German prosecutor's office, and now in the employ of the Office of Internal Oversight Services, a real-life agency that services as the U.N.'s financial watchdog. He's no Jason Bourne: he's middle-aged, not at the height of fitness, and fond of good food and good beer. But he's good at his job even if the ways he goes about it irritate his superiors. Africa has been his beat up until now, but he seems to have adapted well to his new surroundings. He's instantly relatable as an everyman, has generally normal reactions to the chaos around him, and works his way through problems with good sense and a nose for shady doings. In other words, you could do way worse than to find yourself sharing a bar with him alongside a dusty road in the middle of nowhere.

Rima is the definition of "plucky"; she's bright, dedicated, good in a pinch, and mostly capable of rescuing herself. She makes a good foil for Valentin without there being any hint of romantic attraction between them, a rarity in this genre.

This is Valentin's fourth full-length adventure; I reviewed the third, Illegal Holdings , for Macmillan's Criminal Element website, which made we want to see how this book turned out. Both there and here, the author writes clearly with a good eye for characterizations. He's especially good with taking very obscure settings and making them reasonably easy to visualize and navigate through. (In this book, he spends most of his time in a couple of southern Turkish cities most non-Turks have never heard of, and makes it work.)

Since this is, as I mentioned, largely a financial mystery, the meat of the action comes through chasing down front companies and bank records and trying to make numbers match up. I've enjoyed this since The Crash of '79 , and the author is adept at making these often-intricate doings largely understandable. However, it's a whole different beast than the usual murder mystery, though there's one of those in here, too (remember Zada?).

One of the things I disliked about Illegal Holdings was an attempt to liven things up by overlaying an action-thriller veneer on the main story. This sometime required Valentin to call on unaccountable skills. That isn't the case here; while he gets mixed up in a couple of car chases and some gangster skullduggery, the methods he employs to get out of his pickles could reasonably come from his background or a good civilian performance-driving course.

No Right Way drops a reasonably normal protagonist into the middle of chaos and lets him detect his way out of trouble as he closes in on some bad actors. If money laundering and debit-card fraud don't quicken your heartbeat, this may not be the story for you. If, however, you like personable protagonists, self-reliant heroines, exotic settings, and a dose of topicality, you can find it here. I can see these novels ending up on Netflix or Hulu someday through some intricate multinational co-production; you might as well get a jump on them now.

[Cat Treadgold · Rating 5 out of 5]

The name Valentin Vermeulen doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like “James Bond,” but if I had to choose between them, I’d definitely go for Valentin. He has Bond’s ingenuity, charm, manners, and sang-froid without his sexism. He’s also a dish: I imagine the movie version of him played by Rutger Hauer in his forties. He genuinely cares about the people in peril he meets on his assignments, which always start as mundane and end up as fabulous adventures, despite the fact that they often take place in regions that don’t interest me, or that didn’t interest me before reading Michael Niemann’s descriptions. The villains are complex and three-dimensional. Although Valentin has some serious skills, everything that happens is plausible, and he is never clueless for the sake of the plot. I tend to prefer mysteries over thrillers, especially thrillers about topical issues such as migrant workers, but this one favors suspense over violence. The author is well informed, and his writing style is erudite but accessible. I’ve read every one of the books in this series, and I never find my attention drifting. Books by small presses often get short shrift. Give this series a try.

[Shomeret · Rating 4 out of 5]

No Right Way is the second book I've read in Michael Niemann's thriller series dealing with the cases of U.N. fraud investigator Valentin Vermeulen. Like all the books in this series, No Right Way involves fraudulent misuse of U.N. funds. I really liked the protagonist's sense of justice and Niemann's focus on important themes in the first book in this series that I read. So I accepted a free review copy of No Right Way from the publisher via publicist Wiley Saichek.

I think that readers will consider No Right Way a very current book since so many news stories deal with the horrifying circumstances of refugees. Michael Niemann gives us a window on every day tragedies that are happening to entire populations in our real world.

For my complete review see https://shomeretmasked.blogspot.com/2...

[Doranne Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am reading Michael Niemann's novels for a second time. His series of international thrillers are exciting reads as well as providing windows into other worlds. In No Right Way, we are dropped into the refugee crisis as Syrians flood into Turkey escaping war.