A complex and tightly paced historical thriller.
Spies, diplomats, and lovers cross paths in Berlin in this Cold War–era novel.
Flanders (The Northwest Country, 2016, etc.) follows his First Trumpet trilogy with an engrossing tale of intrigue and duplicity. It’s 1959, and young American diplomat Dillon Randolph has been transferred to Berlin after his last posting resulted in a scandalous affair with an ambassador’s wife. Determined not to disappoint his distinguished family again, he agrees to avoid romantic entanglements in Germany. Luckily for readers, desire can’t be dictated, and he finds himself immediately drawn to East German actress Christa Schiller. However, she’s working for the Stasi (the East German secret police), and she’s agreed to lure Dillon into another scandal in order to protect her imprisoned younger brother. In the midst of these developments arrives Feliks Hawes, a British intelligence officer who’s been tasked with identifying the source of Secret Intelligence Service leaks from Berlin. The divided city, as U.S. security officer Lars Swanson claims, is positively “crawling with spies,” and Flanders continuously expands the novel’s scope to deliver a disorienting, heady mix of Soviet, East German, American, Hungarian, and British characters, each with his or her own agenda. As Christa remarks, “You can never be sure who is informing, who will guard your secrets, and who will trade them for their advantage.” The love-story plotline offers some of the book’s stalest lines (“Confronted by her beauty, he realized that he still desired her, that he wanted nothing more in that moment than to kiss her lips”). However, it also provides subtle commentary on how beauty can blind people, with each lover underestimating the other. Similarly, several intelligence officers miscalculate the Soviet Union’s dedication to isolating its sector of the city. In this uncertain period before the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall, characters move from one side of the city to the other as easily as they shift alliances—unaware of the life-altering change in store.
A complex and tightly paced historical thriller.Pub Date: March 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9908675-6-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Munroe Hill Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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