RIFT ZONE

A steadily suspenseful, if sometimes sappy, Cold War thriller.

First-timer Hillhouse sets up an intriguing scenario—East Germany’s leader Erich Honecker and his Stasi allies want to assassinate Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev before his reforms unite the two Germanys and the Berlin wall comes down—and plays it out admirably. Faith Whitney, whose mother smuggled Bibles into the Soviet Union, is a freelance smuggler herself, picking up tchotchkes like china teacups with hammer-and-sickled–shaped handles in East Berlin to sell in the West. In April 1989, she’s blackmailed by the Stasi into helping them with a plot to assassinate Gorbachev. (Honecker speculates that he would not survive the 40 years of “repressed wrath” of the East German citizens, nor the revenge of the former Nazis still in the West German judicial system.) Zara Bogdanov, a lesbian KGB agent, kidnaps Faith and tries to turn her into a double agent, using the extra bait that she can find out about Faith’s father, who her mother has kept a mystery. Suddenly Faith is caught in the “rift zone” between two factions of communists. She’s tortured by both the Stasi and the KGB, and limps through much of the book with broken ribs. Unknown to her, she’s being set up to look like a CIA agent who assassinates Gorbachev, letting the Stasi and KGB hardliners off the hook. Faith squeezes out of various tight spots with lots of help, thanks to Hakan, a Turkish operative who’s a master at forgery; Max Summers, an Ozarks ex-boyfriend who is an explosive disposal expert, even her estranged mother, who is operating an orphanage in Moscow and is smuggling explosives to the besieged Armenian Christians in Azerbaijan. The dialogue is lousy, and Faith, who tends to tremble, seems at times as if she belongs in a romance novel (the ending is shamelessly rosy). At her best, Faith is ingenious and plucky; she knows her Semtex from her C-4, her East/West Berlin and Moscow locations, and how to maneuver without a passport. Ultimately, she outsmarts the intelligence hierarchy of three regimes.

The desperate and complicated political undercurrents of the late Cold War generate plenty of action; Faith is likely to be back.