A historically well-informed, overstuffed potboiler in which sex and death get lost in trivia.
Hitler’s ideal woman seduces and kills to survive World War II and its aftermath in this historical thriller.
Blond, svelte, and the niece of an SS Obergruppenführer, 17-year-old Kathryn Steiner is the epitome of Aryan femininity in the Germany of 1938. She’s also a rabid anti-Semite after being raped by a Jewish man whom she promptly killed by ramming a letter opener into his rectum. That trauma makes her an ardent Nazi with a coldly instrumental attitude toward sex that can quickly turn murderous. Seeking advancement, she becomes the mistress of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the real-life Gestapo chief and Holocaust architect, who gifts her with a $1.7 million Swiss bank account and shooting lessons at SS sniper school. These come in handy when Kathryn flees Germany in 1945 and goes to the United States while embroiling herself in “Odessa,” a clandestine movement to spirit SS war criminals to Argentina. Her schemes center on Portrait of a Young Man, a painting by Raphael that in real life was stolen from Poland by the Nazis and never seen again. Kathryn tracks Portrait to Brooklyn and conceives a complex caper involving a Roman Catholic monsignor, the police, and a mob boss to deliver it to the pope in exchange for church assistance for Odessa fugitives. Further adventures take Kathryn to Moscow as a CIA agent tasked with seducing a Russian official who keeps a list of Soviet spies in his safe, but not before she spends a lengthy portion of the novel in law school. Along the way, she avidly kills a number of ill-behaved men, including drunken Wehrmacht soldiers; menacing Russian soldiers; SS Hauptsturmführer Thomas Richter, who tries to blackmail her; and would-be rapists.
Peterson’s yarn mixes a war and espionage saga with heavily interpreted historical figures and events. His scenes of mayhem are evocative and intense—“Kathryn heard the terrifying sounds of the machine guns and could see people falling….the woman next to her received a direct hit in the head and was decapitated.” Military history buffs will like the tale’s tutorials, though they are often delivered as stiff, expositional dialogue. (“In January, Adolf Hitler gave my uncle the command of Army Group Vistula…which was to provide the frontline defense of Berlin against Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front,” says Kathryn at her law school admissions interview.) Kathryn is an arresting femme fatale, and watching her in action is often a treat. But her flirting isn’t the subtlest—“Take your clothes off and show me the length and girth of your penis”—and her feminine wiles can feel like a Gestapo interrogation. (“The two passionately kissed and groped, all the while Kathryn querying Anderson, ‘In what part of New York are your parents living? Are they aware of the item that you sent?’ ”) Worse, Kathryn doesn’t do much that’s important. The story is full of long, repetitive procedural scenes of her buying train tickets, ordering white wine, shopping, or filling out forms in contexts that lack any stakes. The narrative bogs down in endless rehashes of plans, travel arrangements, and back stories as new characters are laboriously apprised of plot points that readers already know about. The result is a thin tale filled out with much redundant padding.
A historically well-informed, overstuffed potboiler in which sex and death get lost in trivia.Pub Date: April 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64530-596-5
Page Count: 578
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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