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
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
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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