Patricia Wentworth: More Than Miss Silver

I don't read all that many cozy mysteries, but I have a soft spot for Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver series. Miss Silver is a retired teacher who may be sitting in a corner, knitting, when visitors come to call on a country house.

The visitors are told Miss Silver is an old family friend or relative, and they assume that the family is providing a little bit of comfort and company for an old lady living in genteel poverty. Little do they suspect that Miss Silver is unobtrusively gathering information that will reveal a blackmailer or even a killer.

I read the whole Miss Silver series (32 books!) back in the 1970s, when they
were already decades old and Patricia Wentworth had been dead for well over a decade. In the last couple of years, I've enjoyed revisiting some of them in audiobook versions, perfectly performed by Diana Bishop.

What I didn't realize is that Patricia Wentworth wrote many other mystery books outside the Miss Silver series; a couple of dozen standalones and three short series. Luckily for us, in addition to the Miss Silvers, Open Road Integrated Media is reissuing the other books in ePub and Kindle ebook formats. Here are the series titles:

The Ernest Lamb series

The Blind Side

When the handsome but evil Ross Craddock is found killed with his own gun, there is a wealth of suspects who had the motive to kill.  The London Metropolitan Police department's Inspector Ernest Lamb, and young Detective Frank Abbott have their work cut out for them.



Who Pays the Piper

Lucas Dale is determined to break up the engagement of Susan Lenox and Bill Carrick, so that he can have Susan for himself. A spot of blackmail seems to have done the trick, until Dale is found murdered. Lamb and Abbott suspect Carrick, but soon find that there are quite a few others who wished Dale dead.





Pursuit of a Parcel

Lamb and Abbott become enmeshed in a deadly game of World War II espionage, with agents and double agents, mysterious parcels and a beautiful young woman in danger.

The Benbow Smith series

Fool Errant

A mysterious woman warns Hugo Ross not to take a job with an eccentric inventor, but Hugo needs the money. Soon he finds himself embroiled in a world of espionage and danger, and calls on Benbow Smith of the Foreign Office for help.



Danger Calling

Benbow Smith recruits Lindsay Trevor, a former British intelligence agent, to rejoin the clandestine services to help catch a master criminal.

Walk With Care

Benbow Smith becomes involved in an investigation to uncover the forces working to eliminate voices in favor of disarmament.




Down Under

When bride-to-be Anne Carew disappears, her desperate fiancé, Captain Oliver Loddon, contacts Benbow Smith. Smith believes this is just the latest of a series of abductions over the past few years by one man, but the police disagree. Loddon will risk his own life to save Anne.

Frank Garrett series

Dead or Alive

On the very day Meg O'Hara asks her Irish spy husband, Robin, for a divorce, he disappears. Time passes and he's presumed dead, but then Meg receives a message suggesting otherwise. Frank Garrett of the British Foreign Office investigates, along with Bill Coverdale, who has been in love with Meg for years.

Rolling Stone

While Frank Garrett investigates a series of thefts of valuable artworks, his nephew goes undercover to penetrate an international gang of dangerous thieves.

There are too many other Wentworth mysteries to list here, even when you exclude the Miss Silvers. But if you want to see which ones are now available from Open Road, just head here.

If you enjoy romance novels, Wentworth started out as a romance writer and Open Road has a couple of those as well: A Marriage Under the Terror, set during the French Revolution, and A Fire Within, which hints at the Miss Silver to come.

Note: Open Road Integrated Media provided me with review e-copies of Fool Errant, Dead or Alive and The Blind Side.

Images source: openroadmedia.com

Review of John Lawton's The Unfortunate Englishman

The Unfortunate Englishman by John Lawton (Atlantic Monthly Press, March 1, 2016)

At the center of Lawton’s stylish new espionage thriller is that classic set-piece of the Cold War espionage novel, the exchange of imprisoned spies on a bridge between East and West Berlin. But it’s the story of how the characters got there, physically and emotionally, that propels the story.

Protagonist Joe Wilderness (born John Wilfrid Holderness) is an agent for MI-6, given the task in 1965 of arranging to swap KGB deep-cover agent Bernard Alleyn for a hapless English businessman caught adding a little spying to his business trips to the USSR. We learn how Alleyn lived a thoroughly conventional English life for 20 years before being nabbed by British intelligence. On the other side, Geoffrey Masefield, a metallurgist, is betrayed by his own romantic notions of spydom and the incompetent ambitions of his British handler.

But the story that matters most is Wilderness’s. This novel begins in 1963, just where its predecessor, Then We Take Berlin (reviewed here) left off, with Joe being in a heck of a predicament as a result of an East/West smuggling operation gone spectacularly awry during JFK’s famous visit to Berlin that summer. We jump around between there and 1961, as well as 1965 and even all the way back to 1946, when Joe was an army sergeant, black marketeer and British intelligence agent in the chaos, romance and ethical soup that was Berlin after the World War II shooting war stopped and the Cold War was in its infancy. Coming back to Berlin in the 1960s isn’t easy for Joe; it brings back bittersweet memories and forces him to deal with some of his old black market contacts.

Joe Wilderness is one of my favorite espionage thriller characters. Born into East End poverty, trained in thievery by his burglar grandfather, talent-spotted after being drafted into the army at the end of World War II and educated in the languages, history and politics you’d want any Cold Warrior to know, Joe is as smart, conflicted and cynical as any Raymond Chandler character. In his world, moral ambiguity is the norm and he doesn’t waste his time putting his faith in any person or ideal. Still, he has a heart, even if he opens it up only occasionally and reluctantly.

Another strong point of the novel is John Lawton’s evocation of time, place and atmosphere. It’s hard to find a more fascinating time and place than Cold War Berlin, but Lawton still uses his narrative skills to transform history into gripping fiction. His description of barbed wire going up right through the middle of Berlin in 1961 had me gripping the book so hard my hand cramped, even though I know the history well. Lawton is a master at weaving the historical facts into the threads of his fictional story and bringing both to vivid life.

I’ve been debating whether I’d say that it’s necessary to read the first Joe Wilderness novel, Then We Take Berlin, before reading The Unfortunate Englishman. It’s definitely not absolutely necessary, and I’d hate for anybody to miss out on this book, but I have to recommend reading Then We Take Berlin first. That’s where you get Joe’s full and extremely colorful background, which adds extra richness to the plot of The Unfortunate Englishman.

If you like the Joe Wilderness books, Lawton also has a terrific series featuring Metropolitan Police detective Frederick Troy. The series begins with Black Out: An Inspector Troy Thriller and its titles are set during World War II and various times thereafter, through the 1960s.

Note: The publisher provided a free advance reviewing copy of The Unfortunate Englishman. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Image sources: bookdepository.com, bridgeofspies.com, harper-ganesvoort.com.

A Thanksgiving Sampler

Thank God we're talking about test driving,
not our own disastrous driving tests.

A friend and I have been tasting champagne this weekend, because that's what Hubby and I have been asked to bring to Thanksgiving dinner. After we methodically worked our way through several bottles, we felt festive enough to sample pumpkin pie coupled with various flavors of ice cream she had in her freezer. We agreed on the Veuve Clicquot Brut Yellow Label and concluded it's best to stick to a good vanilla.

The holiday season is full of figuring stuff out: the gift for your best friend, the guest list for your winter potluck, how to ship cookies to your far-flung kids. You also need to find some books to read to keep yourself sane. An excellent way to ensure a book matches what you're in the mood for is to stock up on a variety. Let's test drive some possibilities.

During the winter holidays, one hones one's cloak-and-dagger skills hiding gifts at home and diplomatic talents charming colleagues at the office party. Surely, this is the season for reading espionage.

Something British and cynical might hit the spot. Former BBC correspondent Adam Brookes has followed up his compelling Night Heron (Redhook/Hachette, 2014) with Spy Games (Redhook, September 2015). Freelance journalist Philip Mangan is a decent guy with more than his fair share of restlessness and curiosity. After a dabble into espionage necessitated his fleeing Beijing, Philip is in Addis Abba, investigating the Chinese presence in Ethiopia. Then three things happen: an MI6 asset dies in Hong Kong, Philip barely escapes a café bombing, and he is offered some classified Chinese military documents. Thus are Philip and Trish Patterson, his MI6 handler, drawn into a power struggle that is playing out primarily in Ethiopia; Oxford, England; and Chiang Mai, Thailand.

It's not necessary to read Night Heron first, but I'd suggest you do that simply for the pleasure of understanding exactly why MI6 isn't thrilled to find "Philip Mangan," "China" and "spy" again in the same equation, and why Philip is feeling a bit cross about it, too. At 437 pages, Spy Games could benefit from some tightening up; however, if you like an intricate plot woven with separate threads, colorful characters, and beautifully drawn exotic locations, this is for you.

If you're feeling in the mood for dueling American and Russian intelligence agencies, sex used as an espionage tool, and very sadistic villains (brace yourself), check out books written by an espionage insider, former CIA agent Jason Matthews. His writing feels very up close and personal in its focus on the characters' lives and personalities and their elaborate spycraft.

In 2013's Red Sparrow (Scribner), Matthews introduces the CIA's young hot-shot, Nate Nash, and the beautiful Russian agent, Dominika Egorova, whose job it is to get him to divulge the identity of a Russian traitor (see Sister Mary Murderous's review here). Dominika is a synesthete who perceives people surrounded by a colored aura; at the appearance of her black-haloed boss, former Lubyanka prison torturer Alexei Zyuganov, I pulled the covers over my head.

Dominika is back in Russia in Palace of Treason (Scribner, June 2015). She's climbing the ranks of the SVR, much to the chagrin of the scheming Zyuganov, and maneuvering to avoid exposure as she passes information to the Americans. Meanwhile, there's a mole at CIA headquarters passing secrets to the Russians, which creates a very pleasant symmetry (don't you think?), and jacks up the suspense. I was surprised and pleased to see Russian President Vladimir Putin appear as a minor character, as wily and enigmatic as we Westerners find him in real life. Palace of Treason can be read as a standalone, but you'll want to read Red Sparrow, too. One can never find enough good spy yarns––especially those with lovesick agents and recipes.

With all the demands of the holidays pressing, you might appreciate the comfort of an offbeat mystery with a strong sense of place, such as Tarquin Hall's Vish Puri series, featuring the Most Private Investigators Ltd. agency in Delhi, or Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Botswana.

Vaseem Khan's quirky first book, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra (Redhook, September 2015), is the opening book of such a proposed series. Inspector Ashwin Chopra's heart condition has forced him into early retirement after more than three decades on the Mumbai police force. During his last day, Chopra learns of a young man who apparently drowned in a puddle. The Inspector is warned off opening an inquiry and returns home to find a baby elephant, Ganesha, bequeathed to him by his uncle.

As a policeman, Chopra was an incorruptible officer who prided himself on treating everyone equally. So he can't get the screams of the dead youth's mother––that her family is too poor for his death to be adequately investigated––out of his head. Chopra decides to look into it on his own. He must keep this a secret, because his wife, Poppy, would object, and he doesn't want his former police colleagues thinking he's one of those unfortunate people who have no life outside work. Chopra balances caring for little Ganesha, whose abilities are not entirely realistic, with a criminal investigation that takes him through various Mumbai neighborhoods. This allows the reader to glimpse a fascinating city through the eyes of a man who loves it, even though he regrets some aspects of its modernization. The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra is a little too consciously charming for my taste, but I wanted to tell you about it because many readers love it for its charm, and you might, too.

Tomorrow we'll look at a few more holiday reads.

Review of Simon Mawer's Tightrope

Tightrope, by Simon Mawer (Other Press, November 3, 2015)

During World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the new Special Operations Executive to "set Europe ablaze" by supporting the resistance to the Nazis in occupied countries. Many young men and women who knew other languages, especially French, were sent behind enemy lines to gather intelligence and work with local resistance groups. Their chances of being captured, tortured, imprisoned and executed were very high––and they knew it from the start.

For years, I've been fascinated by the story of the SOE, and especially of the young women who volunteered for this lethally dangerous duty. In an era when it was rare for a woman to do anything other than graduate from school to marriage and children, these women were trained in the arcana of espionage, including parachute jumping, hand-to-hand combat and silent killing. What was in the minds and hearts of the women who became SOE agents?

In Trapeze (Other Press, 2012), which is the predecessor to Tightrope, Simon Mawer gives us the story of a fictionalized SOE agent named Marian Sutro. She's English and French, grew up in Switzerland and moved to England with her family as things got dangerous on the European continent before World War II broke out. She had friends in France, especially Clément, the young scientist whom she'd had a crush on for years. When Germany overran France, it seemed very black and white to her; a place and people she loved were in danger from an evil invader and she wanted to help.

When Tightrope begins, the war is in its last weeks and Marian is coming home. She wasn't an SOE agent in France for long. She was betrayed, captured by the Nazis, tortured and finally sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious prison camp for women near Berlin, where many real-life SOE female agents were sent. (By the way, I highly recommend Sarah Helm's masterful history of the camp: Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (Nan A. Talese, 2015).)

Back home in England, nobody knows how to treat Marian and she hardly knows who she is and how she is to live in this postwar world. Mawer evocatively portrays Marian's numbness and alienation, the way she can more easily relate emotionally to her memories of her fellow Ravensbrück prisoners than to her own family and colleagues. To help her recover from her traumatic war experiences, Marian is advised to see a psychiatrist. She tells him that life in the camp appeared to be nothing but gray, but underneath the monochrome their lives were complex, with hierarchies, networks and groups. The way a prisoner made her way through the complex meant the difference between life and death.

Queueing for rationed food in 1947

In many ways, it seemed to me that the same could be said of Marian's life in postwar England. Rationing of food, clothing and other goods continued for years, rebuilding was slow, everybody just seemed to want to keep their heads down, forget the past and get on with things. Gray. But Marian soon learns that the Cold War struggle has begun, another layered reality of complex relationships and loyalties.

Marian is offered a job and she attempts to return to some semblance of a normal life, but her past keeps impinging on the present. She has friends who are nuclear scientists, she has contacts in the intelligence services and, when she returns to Ravensbrück to testify against Nazi prison camp guards, she meets others who are in the intelligence game.

After the US drops atomic bombs on Japan, develops the far more powerful hydrogen bomb and seems to be seriously considering a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union, she wonders what was the point of all the sacrifice only a few years before, if World War III is now on the doorstep. Slowly, inexorably, Marian is drawn back into the ambiguous world of intelligence, with its agents, counter-agents, double agents and moles. Marian is once again in an environment where security and life itself depend on hierarchies, networks and groups. Will her choices lead to safety or betrayal?

Although this is a long and slow-moving novel, and Marian is a difficult character, I was riveted. Mawer makes Marian completely believable, even if often not very likable, and he immerses the reader in the tensions and uncertainty of her position, slowly upping the ante as the story goes on. Mawer has done his research, too, and skillfully interweaves real characters and events from SOE history, and British intelligence during the Cold War, into Marian's story. Details of Marian's SOE experiences will ring true to those who have read the histories. Her experiences reminded me a good deal of the description of what happened to SOE agent Eileen Nearne, which you can read about in brief here.

Former SOE agents Eileen Nearne and Odette Sansom
attend the 1993 unveiling of a plaque
at Ravensbrück, where both were imprisoned

Marian's story is told through the eyes of Sam Wareham, the son of Sutro family friends, who met Marian shortly after her return. Sam was 12 years younger than Marian and had an immediate schoolboy crush on her. His fascination for her continued for years to come, including when he became a member of the British intelligence services. The idea of looking at Marian through Sam's eyes has some benefits in telling the espionage story, but some real detriments, since his character so often has to write about events and thoughts that he couldn't know anything about.

Hayley Atwell in Restless

Though I am dubious about the use of the Sam Wareham character, in other respects I think this is a first-rate novel, and should especially appeal to those who enjoy reading about World War II and/or Cold War espionage, particularly about female agents. I liked it every bit as much as William Boyd's Restless (Bloomsbury USA, 2006), a standout novel that was dramatized by the BBC. The three-hour BBC drama, starring Hayley Atwell, Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery and the fabulous Charlotte Rampling, was just released on DVD in the US, in case you're thinking of a good Christmas gift for somebody who enjoys espionage movies.

Although I did read Trapeze before reading Tightrope, I don't think that's at all necessary. Tightrope is also a better read than Trapeze, so if there's any question in your mind about whether you'd like either of them, I'd go with Tightrope first.

Just in case you want to read more . . . 

Note: I received a free review copy of Tightrope from the publisher, through the Amazon Vine program. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Henry Hemming's The Ingenious Mr. Pyke

The Ingenious Mr. Pyke: Inventor, Fugitive, Spy, by Henry Hemming (PublicAffairs, May 2015)

I picked this to read because I'm fascinated with 20th-century espionage, but the story is at least as much about the amazing mind of this little-known character. Geoffrey Pyke's mind wandered constantly, putting together different sights and experiences to come up with novel solutions to problems some people didn't even know existed.

Pyke's ideas ranged from using specially designed snowmobiles to tie up more Nazi troops in Norway during World War II and keep them out of the battlefields, building massive aircraft carriers out of ice and wood pulp, and constructing an oil pipeline under the English Channel to supply the D-Day invasion. But Pyke wasn't just a war tactician.

Pyke and his three siblings lost their father when they were young, and their mother told them she would gladly lose all of them to have him back. Being effectively an orphan must have had something to do with Pyke's interest in childhood development, which led him to start a school whose techniques and philosophy are influential even today. Pyke was also influential in the development of the field of public opinion gathering, firmly believing that this could help prevent war and combat anti-Semitism.

Building a prototype of Pyke's ice ship

Though he worked closely with Lord Louis Mountbatten and was known to Churchill, Pyke's commitment to anti-Fascism and his many Communist friends made him a target of MI-5 surveillance at the same time he was working for Britain on the war effort. MI-5 became convinced Pyke was a Soviet agent. Another goal of this book is to answer that question. Read the book and find out for yourself what the author concludes.

This is a quick and engaging read, and I think it should be of interest to people who enjoy 20th-century history and biography. I was left wishing I could have gotten to know Pyke better, but I doubt there was much more the author could have dug out about him.

When You're Too Tired to Sleep

What do you do when you fall into bed exhausted and then can't get to sleep? After rejecting ideas too masochistic (scouring out the bathtub, ironing) and even worse (lying there and making a mental list of where you've gone wrong since first grade, pondering our current US Congress), you should reach for a book or a DVD and the remote. Which one all depends on how you feel.

Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins

If work has you feeling imprisoned and you've got a life sentence with those in bed beside you: your spouse, snoring and snorting in his sleep, and your dog, who won't stop licking his privates: Break out with George Clooney in O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, if you're hankering for a Coen brothers movie with bluegrass music, or Out of Sight, if you're more in the mood for an escaped Clooney pining after Jennifer Lopez, who plays a dedicated US marshal in a movie based on the Elmore Leonard novel. Perhaps you like the idea of the prison being a World War II German POW camp, and your thoughts about the escapee run to the more the merrier, and include Steve McQueen on a motorcycle; if so, fire up The Great Escape. You could watch a cult favorite, The Shawshawk Redemption, featuring unconventional prisoner Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), and his buddy, the prisoner/entrepreneur, Red (Morgan Freeman).

Or, crack open Michael Robotham's Life or Death (Mulholland, March 2015), for a look at another enigmatic prisoner, Audie Palmer, who climbs out of a Texas prison the night before he's due to be paroled. Audie had admitted his involvement in an armored truck robbery that led to the deaths of four people. He was sentenced to 10 years, but the missing $7 million was never recovered. Weaving in and out with Audie's back story are the efforts to find him by pint-size FBI Special Agent Desiree Furness; the sheriff, who as a deputy shot Audie in the head during the robbery; and a prison buddy named Moss. Aussie author Robotham's storytelling kept me turning pages, but some British substitutions for their American counterparts (such as bank "queue" rather than "line") were a little distracting. More distracting are the length of Audie's sentence (c'mon, this is Texas, not Scandinavia), the fact Audie even survived in the joint, given the particulars, and the ease with which he escaped; however, these quibbles weren't enough to keep me from enjoying it. This isn't one of those pulse-pounding thrillers; it's the kind that makes you want to know what happened in the past and how things would end, and, no, I didn't peek.

For when you're so tired, you're feeling less than human––in fact, you're wondering if you're lower on the mammal totem pole than your dog: Empathize with Jax, a mechanical servitor who longs for freedom in Ian Tregillis's The Mechanical (Orbit, March 2015), a hybrid of steampunk, fantasy, and alternate history set in the early 1900s. The book opens with the public execution of some Catholic spies and the destruction of a rogue mechanical man. In the 17th century, the work of scientist Christiaan Huygens led to the development of a Dutch army of automata powered by alchemy and clockworks. These "Clakkers," capable of independent thought, but enslaved through a built-in hierarchy of obligations called "geasa" to their masters and the Queen on the Brasswork Throne, allowed the Netherlands to become the most powerful nation in the world.

There is now an uneasy truce between the Netherlands and the remnants of its opposition in New France (in Canada). In the capital of Marseilles-in-the-West, spy-in-charge Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord has her hands full with a dangerous Game of Thrones-like situation. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, her small espionage network is disappearing. One of her spies, Luuk Visser, a Catholic priest working undercover as a Protestant pastor, gives Jax an errand and then, oh man, you really must read this book for yourself. Everyone is passionate and scheming away like mad. I've never read anything quite like this cinematic novel, and I bet we'll see it eventually on the big screen. It tackles free will, what it means to be human, identity, loyalty, the meaning of faith and religious freedom, and revenge and redemption. Tregillis doesn't shy away from harming his characters, so you can't assume anyone is safe. Some people may find Berenice's foul mouth offensive, and there are a few scenes I found genuinely disturbing. Some scenes drag a little bit, but these flaws are minor. I'm glad there are two more coming in the Alchemy Wars trilogy because this book was great reading on a sleepless night.

If you'd rather watch a robot than read about one, there are the Terminator movies with our former California governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a cyborg sent back from a future in which machines rule the world. I'm telling you, Schwarzenegger was born to play this role. Blade Runner, based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, features Harrison Ford as Los Angeles cop Rick Deckard, who is called back to duty in 2019 to track down and kill rogue replicants. James Cameron's Aliens has a cyborg on hand when Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver was born for this one) returns to the planet of Alien. Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie, Robocop (forget the re-make), is about a Detroit cop, killed in action, who returns to the force as half-human/half-robot. (And they say Humpty Dumpty couldn't be put back together again.) There are many more of these movies worthy of the time it takes to pop corn and wash it down with a Coke, such as the charming animated flick, The Iron Giant; Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope (thank goodness there's no Jar Jar Binks)....

Say you're in that half-asleep/half-awake state when your identity feels like a mirage, so you could really get into something to do with spies: Of course, you can't go wrong with another viewing of The Third Man, set in Allied-occupied Vienna and starring Joseph Cotten as pulp western writer Holly Martins and Orson Welles as his childhood friend, Harry Lime. We could argue whether it's the best-ever espionage movie. In Éric Rochant's 1994 film, Les Patriotes (The Patriots), Ariel Brenner (Yvan Attal) leaves his home in France for Israel on his 18th birthday. There, he joins Mossad and loses his idealism in a morally fuzzy world. Naval commander Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) takes up with Susan Atwel (Sean Young), the mistress of US Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman), in 1987's No Way Out. Susan's murder cues the spinning of a web of deceit. This is a re-make of a terrific 1948 movie, The Big Clock, with Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, and Maureen O'Sullivan. In the German movie, The Lives of Others, it's 1984, and Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is compelled to launch an investigation of the celebrated East German playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) by a man who has designs on Dreyman's girlfriend. Don't you love wheels within wheels? 

Make sure you leave the butter off your popcorn if you decide to watch your spies on the page instead of on the screen. Don't waste time piddling around when you're tired; go straight to the British novels. What is it about MI5 and MI6 that makes seeing them under the microscope so diverting? We'll think about that while we cringe at some of these British writers' disdainful depictions of the CIA "cousins" as demanding and inept, throwing around cash, bigfooting joint operations, and screwing them up because they think about short-term payoffs rather than long-term consequences.

I kept a stiff upper lip about the cousins and enjoyed Charles Cumming's A Colder War (St. Martin's Press, 2014). It's the second series book about Thomas Kell, an MI6 agent disgraced during the Witness X affair, whom we first met in the 2012 Steel Dagger winner, A Foreign Country (see review here). Kell has now once again been hauled out of the cold, this time to investigate the death of Paul Wallinger, head of the SIS station in Turkey, in an airplane crash. MI6's Amelia Levene thinks three recent intelligence disasters point to a mole in the SIS or the CIA.

Yeah, looking for a mole is nothing new, but Cumming does a good job with it. He takes his time; there are close to 400 pages. Notable are the clarity of the writing, use of locations, and the charm of the descriptions. It was a pleasure to learn what Tom is reading and to see what's on his shelves. Cumming once worked for MI6, and I liked his knowledge about how the agency works (the extent to which personal relationships affect spying is interesting) and his familiarity with spycraft. The life of a Cumming spy definitely isn't for everybody. Their careers ruin their family relationships and make keeping their stories straight––to themselves, as well as everyone else––almost impossible. They are betrayed by ass-covering superiors and ambitious colleagues, and they need a good night's sleep and sweet dreams as much as anybody. At least a gorgeous young woman falls into bed with Tom, a lonely man in his mid-40s. You might roll your eyes at this, but, hey, while Tom's no James Bond, he's not John Gardner's cowardly Boysie Oakes of The Liquidator fame, either. I'm looking forward to seeing Tom again on a night I can't sleep.

Review of Joseph Kanon's Leaving Berlin

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon (Atria Books, March 3, 2015)

I've always enjoyed Joseph Kanon's books, which are thrillers set in various places around the world, but all taking place shortly after World War II.  Kanon mines that same ground over and over because it's one of the richest veins of material you could ever hope to find.  The war has ended, but not the fighting. It is just a different kind of battle, and the players shifted around. No more Allies fighting Nazis; now it's the Cold War, with Berlin being dead center in the new conflict.

Alex Meier, Leaving Berlin's protagonist, had been a celebrated young novelist in Germany in the 1930s.  Alex was a Social Democrat with a Jewish father, and neither one of those were good things to be once the Nazis took over. But he was friends with the younger members of the powerful von Bernuth family, and their father got Alex out of the country before it was too late.  Alex's parents never got out.

Alex made a new home in the US, married and had a son. Then, along came the Red Scare and, suddenly, a young German socialist was in danger from the government yet again. To avoid being deported from the US permanently and losing all contact with his son, Alex agrees to act as a US government agent by returning to Berlin for a time; in particular to the Soviet Occupied Zone, where several other leftist German exiles had returned, the most prominent being playwright Berthold Brecht. Alex's assignment is to provide information about his friends in the new Germany, and if he does a good job, the promise is that he can return to the US.

Berlin in 1949 was about the most interesting place imaginable. Interesting in the usual sense, but also in the sense of the old curse, "May you live in interesting times."  The city was divided into four occupation zones for each of the Allied powers, but there was no Berlin Wall yet.  Tensions between the Soviets and the other Allies were increasing by the day, as the Soviets tried to squeeze the Allies out of the city, deep within the eastern half of the country, which the Soviets planned as a satellite state.

Along with the political and military Cold War, there was also a so-called Cultural Cold War. The Soviets and the West vied for superiority in literature, music, theater and all the other arts. The Soviets lavished privileges on artists who could burnish the reputation of communism around the world. Alex, who is well remembered as a novelist, is welcomed warmly in the Soviet Occupied Zone and treated as a valued member of the new socialist dream society. As an instantly prominent artist comrade, he can eat and drink off ration at the Kulturbund and is awarded a nice apartment all to himself, with a view to the street rather than the drab rear.

Alex quickly finds that Berlin is full of secrets and lies, with danger and betrayal all around him. This is no longer the city of his youth. His childhood home is rubble and his old and new friends may not be what they seem. Alex's reconnecting with his old love, Irene von Bernuth, who is now the mistress of a high-level Soviet military man, excites his US intelligence contacts, but it endangers Alex's heart and much more. What was supposed to be a quick and easy job soon turns deadly dangerous, and Alex must rely on his wits to save himself and those he still feels loyal to.

I've read a lot of espionage thrillers, but this one has one of the most satisfyingly twisty-turny plots ever; enough to make your head spin and heart pound. Along with the complex and exciting plot, Kanon delivers a large cast of realistic characters, starting with Alex, but also including childhood friends (especially Irene von Bernuth), Soviet officers, Alex's minder from the Party, intelligence contacts and more. Kanon also has a gift for invoking the atmosphere of the ruined city and what Berliners do to survive in the new reality.

This is Kanon's second book set in Berlin, with the first being The Good German (2002), made into a movie starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. This is a very different story, but also one that would make a terrific film. I feel sure of that, because Kanon's powerfully evocative writing turned it into a story that played out in my head as a movie while I was reading.

Another particular strength of the book is the focus on the return to East Berlin of so many members of the cultural and intellectual elite who missed their homeland and were true believers in the communist cause. They included Brecht and writers like Arnold Zweig, Anna Seghers and Stefan Heym.

Initially celebrated and given privileges not available to others in the workers' state, the returnees who spent the Nazi years in the West, rather than in Moscow, soon found their situations changed. Stalin and his henchmen began an "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign in 1950, targeting those who had spent time in the West. Many were expelled from the Communist Party, imprisoned on trumped-up charges and worse. If you'd like to read more on the subject, you might try Edith Anderson's Love In Exile: An American Writer's Memoir of Life in Divided Berlin (Steerforth Press, 1999). Or, to read about Bertold Brecht's tumultuous history with his native country, as well as his friends, colleagues and lovers, check out a new book by Pamela Katz: The Partnership: Brecht, Weill, Three Women, and Germany on the Brink (Nan A. Talese, January 6, 2015).

Note: Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy, via NetGalley.

Let's Do the Time Warp Again

Doing the Time Warp in The Rocky Horror Picture Show

To do a mind flip and a time slip, you don't need to be a left-and-right jumping, pelvic-thrusting Transylvanian in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. You can stay in your comfy chair and pick up one of the unusual books below. None of them are for everybody. They zig-zag between past and present in an examination of identity and perception or betrayal and redemption.

For someone who wonders if a house can haunt people as well as be haunted by them: The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai (Viking, July 2014). Marxist academician Zee Devohr, of the wealthy "Devohrcing Devohrs," moves into the carriage house of her mother's family estate, Laurelfield, with her husband Doug, a struggling grad student who needs peace and quiet while writing his dissertation on poet Edwin Parfitt. He can't seem to get his ideas onto paper and then is further distracted when another couple also moves into the carriage house. Doug's thoughts turn larcenous when he discovers Laurelfield was once an artists' colony and that files pertaining to his dissertation may be in Laurelfield's locked attic.

This is one of those books you read as if you're opening a Russian nesting doll. It's full of twists and surprises, some of them so small or unexpected that an inattentive reader won't catch them all. When you register one, it feels as if you're in on a little joke between you and the writer that excludes some of the characters. How often do you have a chance to experience this when you read? The many characters are introduced and wander through chapters titled 1999, 1955, 1929 and 1900. After reading this clever book, you'll change the way you think about interpreting history, look at unidentifiable people in old photos and view objects that have been in your family for generations.

If you like putting together those gazillion-piece jigsaw puzzles of a herd of zebras or enjoy the process of not knowing what the hell is going on and getting clued in, bit by frustrating bit: Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (FSG Originals, 2014). The Southern Reach is a secretive governmental agency that sends expeditions into the mysterious Area X, a pristine wilderness in Florida, maybe, created by something strange and contained by unusual borders. Annihilation (see review here) involves the all-women twelfth expedition: a biologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist and a psychologist. Authority details the attempts of Control, the Southern Reach's interim director, to take charge of his agency. Acceptance concludes this trilogy's look at human identity with a visit to Area X by Control and someone connected with the twelfth expedition.

These three books must be read in order and even then your imagination will have its hands full. When I read Acceptance, I wondered if I'd unknowingly taken something that was affecting my mental processing. Fun. These books are fascinating sci-fi/detective sleuthing/dystopian fiction for the right reader.

Like your British espionage to be more than a frantic boiling of nifty gadgets, cold-blooded spies and hot babes? Try Gerald Seymour's 464-page The Dealer and the Dead (Thomas Dunne, February 2014). In 1991, some men and boys in the Croatian village of Vukovar wait for an arms dealer's promised shipment. It never arrives and they are slaughtered by the Serbs. Almost two decades later, a Vukovar farmer's field is cleared of land mines. An unearthed body reveals the arms dealer's identity: Harvey Gillot, a wealthy Englishman famous for the reliability of his word. The surviving Croatian villagers have long memories and are now bent on revenge.

Seymour outdoes himself this time with his many, and I mean many, characters, few of whom approach likability. If you appreciate a slow-burning, multi-threaded story that ultimately kicks into high gear, give this book about redemption and the shadowy world of arms dealing a shot. Or, pick up Seymour's 2013 book, A Deniable Death (reviewed here).

And now, I'll do the time warp and pick up Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2014). It slips time in its story about two friends, one of whom betrays the other. I'm enjoying Rahman's exploration of how well we can know the world and ourselves.