A fun, if slightly flawed, wartime espionage tale.
This sequel follows an American and British spy team during World War II.
England, 1942. The crucial secrets of Bletchley Park, Britain’s code and cipher school, are in jeopardy. Swedish cryptologist Gunnar Lind has disappeared from the school, and it is vital to the war effort that his knowledge of Britain’s code-breaking program doesn’t end up in Nazi hands. Winston Churchill knows just whom he wants for the mission: Conor Thorn and Emily Bright. Conor is an agent of the OSS, America’s newly inaugurated intelligence agency. He’s known for his rather reckless methods—like his recent shootout with German spies in the Lisbon airport. Emily is an MI6 agent who worked with Conor successfully on his previous mission—and who has developed strong feelings for him despite herself. Conor is a bit distracted after recently learning that his wife, Grace, was raped not long before her death. Emily goes ahead to Stockholm to search for Lind, but when she turns up missing, Conor must go after her, accompanied by the cryptologist’s highly suspicious wife, Eve. With so many emotions involved, it’s all but inevitable that Conor will resort to even more reckless tactics to save Emily and the Allied war effort. Dyer’s detailed prose excels at evoking the feel of World War II spycraft—or at least the sense of it that readers have in their minds: An operative’s “suite at the Grand was impressively spacious, as well as being neat and orderly, as if an army of maids had just left….A small envelope lay on top of the paper. An ashtray, free from any ash, was placed alongside the newspaper and a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes, unopened.” The book features the requisite historical cameos—Alan Turing, Edward R. Murrow, Ian Fleming—and plenty of cloak-and-dagger encounters, which will please readers enough to ignore the rather contrived plot. Grace’s assault seems a bit exploitatively dark for this sort of novel, which can at times feel quite cartoonish. But fans of this genre will enjoy Dyer’s handling of the setting and the tropes.
A fun, if slightly flawed, wartime espionage tale.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9991173-6-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A rather flat entry in a generally excellent series.
The 25th novel featuring Silva’s legendary protagonist.
During his intersecting careers as art restorer and Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon has tangled with Russian gangsters and al-Qaida terrorists. He has become well-acquainted with operatives in multiple security agencies and befriended a paid assassin. He has busted art thieves and created passable forgeries by Renaissance masters and abstract Modernists. This latest installment centers around his relationship with the pope and a newly discovered painting by Leonardo da Vinci that has gone missing from the Vatican. Silva’s novels tend to fall into two categories: books that reflect the politics of the day and books that don’t. His latest is one of the latter, which could be a treat for readers looking for escape, but it falls flat for a variety of reasons. Luxury has always been part of Gabriel Allon’s universe. It used to be an aspect of tradecraft, though. Allon would be wearing a very expensive suit and driving a very expensive car because he was posing as a client at a Swiss bank. Here, his wife is hosting a catered lunch for 150 of their daughter’s classmates in their apartment overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice. What once felt like a scintillating peek into the world of the obscenely wealthy now just feels…kind of obscene. Similarly, Allon goes chasing after a missing painting as a civilian—he retired from Mossad in Portrait of an Unknown Woman (2022)—the same way another man his age might buy a speedboat or get hair plugs. As the story progresses, the stakes are raised, but it’s hard to forget that Allon is now a middle-aged man pursuing a dangerous hobby, rather than a spymaster leading his intrepid team to prevent a disaster that will disrupt the global order.
A rather flat entry in a generally excellent series.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780063384217
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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