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
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Fans of historical fiction will like this unusual take on World War II.
America pits dollars against reichsmarks in this tale of economic warfare.
In August 1939, war has not quite begun. In Minnesota, government employee Ansel Luxford is horrified at the looming Nazi threat. He goes to work for the U.S. Treasury Department with a plan to fight Hitler: Dry up his source of money to purchase war materiel. Then hostilities begin, and if the U.S., which is legally neutral, is going to provide critical goods to France and Great Britain, it must also be willing to sell to Germany. How to get around that? Let the Germans know that they must pay in U.S. dollars and not reichsmarks, and make sure they don’t have those dollars to pay. And then “lend” the U.K. 150 million bullets and lots of military hardware, like tanks. That oversimplifies the plot, but that’s the gist. Using meticulous research, the author recounts a little-known aspect of the fight against the Nazis. All the characters and biographical details are historically accurate but for a few the author acknowledges at the end. The result is a painless tutorial in economic theory, with vigorous debates about the value of the dollar versus sterling. Once America is in the war, talk turns to the future: Could a world bank and an international monetary fund prevent future global conflicts? The story doesn’t show any dramatic pain suffered by the Germans, perhaps because a dollar desert and Nazi battlefield losses are hard to conflate in a scene. The characters are fascinating, such as Harry Dexter White, a senior U.S. Treasury official believed to have been a Soviet spy, and the brilliant and arrogant John Maynard Keynes. The author lifts Luxford from complete obscurity into quiet heroism, apparently well deserved. There’s a mystery about a displaced paper clip and a threat with an unloaded pistol, but little else titillates the senses. Still, the story flows well and will hold readers’ attention.
Fans of historical fiction will like this unusual take on World War II.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9780593731925
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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