Citadel by Stephen Hunter

Published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road on January 19, 2016

Citadel is a light war/adventure/spy story with an emphasis on light. It is part of the Bibliomysteries series of mystery/suspense stories that feature books or libraries as a part of the plot. Other entries in the series have been short stories, but Citadel is longer, although certainly not long enough to be classified as a novel. It is probably fair to call it a novella.

In 1943, Basil St. Florian, a British Army captain, agrees to volunteer for a dangerous assignment. His quest is to recover a rare manuscript from Occupied France. The manuscript is a copy; the original resides in a library at Cambridge. The Cambridge manuscript is thought to be a “code book” that allows the Soviets to send messages to a spy in Britain.

Photographing the original in Cambridge is impossible but, rather implausibly, an easier job might be made of photographing a copy in occupied Paris, where it is under the guard of the Germans. That becomes St. Florian’s mission. If he is unsuccessful, the war is likely to be prolonged on the Russian front because, without additional proof that only the code can provide, Stalin will not believe that the British have uncovered Hitler’s plot to deal a sharp blow to the Russians.

St. Florian has the kind of droll wit that suits the era in which the story is set. He would make a good 1940s movie star. He meets adversity with breezy charm.

Citadel is too light to generate true suspense. The action climax left me scratching my head and asking “Why did that happen?” followed by a scene that had me asking “How could that possibly happen?” But Stephen Hunter doesn’t ask the reader to take the story seriously, so I guess believing it doesn’t matter so much. The post-action conclusion, in which the meaning of the code is pondered, is moderately clever, if a bit anti-climactic.

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