DEAD GROUND

Perilously flawed heroes avenge a cold-blooded killing covered up for nearly a decade by ex-Stasi thugs and soulless bureaucrats in a new (if not improved) unified Germany: another superior, character-driven spy story from old pro Seymour (Killing Ground, 1997, etc.) A cocktail reception at a British Army Intelligence base for pompous and arrogant Dieter Krause, a German who was a boyhood chum of the now powerful Russian colonel Pyotr Rykov, ends badly when Corporal Tracy Barnes, a young administrative assistant, kicks Krause in the groin, scratches his face, and calls him a murderer. While Krause, a former Stasi officer, is patched up in the infirmary, Albert Perkins, a reptilian British interrogation expert, fails to find out what evidence Barnes has of Krause’s guilt. Barnes’s widowed mother walks into the first law office she sees and hires 54-year-old clerk Joshua Mantle to pry her daughter out of the base’s jail. Mantle, himself previously with British Army Intelligence—his stubborn integrity got him thrown out—has a soft spot for hard-luck cases and imagines himself a knight off to rescue a damsel in distress. Once sprung by Mantle, the reckless, headstrong Barnes takes off, alone and unarmed, for Germany to avenge the death of the young German agent who was her lover when Krause killed him nine years ago. Mantle eventually joins her, beginning a cat-and-mouse game as Krause, eager to keep his evil deeds buried, rounds up his Stasi buddies and tries first to intimidate, then kill, Barnes, Mantle, and the few remaining witnesses who might bring him down. Seymour skillfully uses low-violence, high-tension chase scenes in what appears to be a lover’s dangerously doomed quest for justice is exploited by British, German, American, and Russian intelligence bureaucracies. Even with a plague of preachy, meaning-of-it-all soliloquies, Seymour’s punchy plotting and vile people work to create a gripping tale of nasty post—Cold War complicity.