Once a Spy by Keith Thomson

Published by Doubleday on March 9, 2010

Charles Clark, a less than successful racetrack gambler, always thought his father, "Hum" Drummond, lived up to his nickname: a dull, plodding, colorless man. Now that Drummond is afflicted with Alzheimer's, however, someone seems intent on killing him. Charles doesn't understand why anyone would want his hapless, harmless father dead. Watching his father avoid assassination, Charles is amazed to discover that Drummond has hidden talents: he is adept at spotting surveillance teams, hotwiring cars, and disarming attackers. Soon Charles learns that Drummond's life as a washing machine salesman (and as a father) was simply a cover for his true vocation: Drummond is a spy. Unfortunately, unless he is having one of his rare lucid moments, Drummond doesn't remember being a spy and can't recall the identity of his employer. It falls to Charles to help his father stay alive long enough to uncover (or remember) the truth.

From this clever premise Keith Thomson weaves a surprisingly funny story. I took it in the spirit in which it is written, as a humorous look at clandestine service. Don't expect a serious spy novel; the reason that Drummond's life is in danger is just short of preposterous, as are many of the events that occur while the fast-moving plot unfolds. Still, this spoof of a spy novel isn't played entirely for laughs. Drummond is set up as an authentic operative, unlike Maxwell Smart or Austin Powers. The story delivers the sort of action that befits a thriller without ever taking itself too seriously.

Keith Thomson's clean prose style is well suited to the subject matter: it isn't flashy and it doesn't get in the way of the action. The story moves quickly to a satisfying conclusion. I wouldn't call Once a Spy memorable (either as a spy story or as comedy) but it's the sort of light, quick, enjoyable read that clears the mind between weightier books.

RECOMMENDED

Shadows of Berlin by Trevor Scott

Published by Dorchester on March 1, 2012

The cold war warms up in this reasonably entertaining spy novel.  Nick Logan is a retired CIA officer, now working as a private security consultant.  The story opens with Logan’s discharge from an Austrian hospital, having survived an assassination attempt that killed his girlfriend.  Logan soon learns that an unknown source has issued a contract on his life.  Meanwhile, five bodies, all shot through the eye, have been pulled out of the Spree River, leaving Gustav Vogler, Berlin’s chief homicide inspector, to wonder why apparently unrelated victims were targeted by a professional killer -- and leaving the reader to wonder about the connection between those killings and the attempts to murder Logan.

Apart from the dead girlfriend, three women figure into the plot.  Alexandra Schulz is a German intelligence officer to whom Logan has always felt an attraction.  Tatyana Petrova, an Army General and highly placed officer in Russia’s SVR, has a professional interest in Logan and in the growing body count in Berlin.  Logan’s ex-wife, Tina Carducci, still with the CIA, jets off to Austria to watch Logan’s back -- if she can find him.  Fortunately for her, tracking Logan isn’t difficult, given his propensity to become involved in gunfights as he makes his way across Europe. 

Trevor Scott’s writing is sometimes formulaic; his style is lackluster.  He tends to overuse certain phrases.  The novel’s several sex scenes, in particular, seem like Xerox copies of each other.  The women seem to have been cloned from a single source; there’s little to differentiate one from another.  Scott’s attempts to inject humor are mostly unsuccessful. 

On the other hand, the novel moves at the quick pace a reader expects from a thriller.  Intermittent action sequences add excitement to the story.  Although I wasn’t motivated to keep reading by stirring prose or unconventional characters, I nonetheless kept reading.  I attribute that to Scott’s ability to craft a tight plot that kept me guessing without becoming unduly convoluted.  There is, in fact, a nifty twist that brings the novel’s leading characters together for roughly the same purpose toward the novel’s end, igniting a perfect storm of intrigue.  Scott’s deft plotting largely overcomes his pedestrian writing style, making Shadows of Berlin a worthy addition to the second-tier shelf of espionage novels.

RECOMMENDED

The Unknown Soldier by Gerald Seymour

First published in Great Britain in 2004; published by Overlook Trade Paperback on March 28, 2006

Gerald Seymour is one of my favorite writers of espionage fiction. Toiling in the shadow of John Le Carré, Seymour's work is largely overlooked by the American audience. Seymour doesn't have quite the stylistic grace of Le Carré, but he is -- at his best -- nearly Le Carré's equal as a storyteller. While The Unknown Soldier isn't Seymour's best work (Home Run remains my favorite), the novel features some of Seymour's most intriguing characters.

Seymour structures the plot as a series of interlocking storylines, each following a set of characters that, for most of the novel, lack any connection to the others. The key character, known both as Caleb and Abu Khaleb, has managed to talk his way out of Guantanamo by adopting the identity of an innocent cab driver. For reasons that don't become apparent until the final chapters, Caleb is making his way across the Earth's largest sand desert, the Empty Quarter in the Arabian Peninsula. Sparsely populated by camels and itinerant Bedouin tribesmen, the Empty Quarter serves as a hiding place for Caleb's al Qaeda masters. A good part of the novel describes the arduous journey Caleb makes across the forbidding terrain and the conflicts that arise between the untrusting terrorists who accompany him.

Other characters include Beth Jenkins, a lonely geologist working at the Shaybah oil extraction plant; Samuel "Bart" Bartholomew, a disgraced physician who works in Riyadh, where his income depends upon the information about his patients that he provides to British intelligence officer Eddie Wroughton; Juan Gonsalves, Wroughton's American counterpart; Jed Dietrich, a Guantanamo interrogator working for the DIA;, and Marty and Lizzy-Jo, the pilot and sensor operator of a Predator that prowls the windy skies above the Empty Quarter. Each character comes fully alive. Their individual stories are more interesting than the slowly unfolding explanation for Caleb's trek across the desert.

As is characteristic of Seymour's novels, The Unknown Soldier is solidly plotted. Dramatic tension builds as the characters, carrying out their own missions and agendas, end up working at cross-purposes. Thriller fans looking for fast action, gunplay, and heroes who save the world from evil fanatics might be bored by The Unknown Soldier, as well as Seymour's other novels. This is a novel of intrigue and intellect rather than daring exploits.

Readers who want a clear, unambiguous ending in which the good guys defeat the bad guys should probably never read a Seymour novel, particularly not this one. I didn't mind the unresolved nature of the story's conclusion but I don't think it had quite the punch that Seymour intended. Perhaps there have been so many novels about terrorism in recent years that I've become jaded, but the open-ended, supposedly ominous ending didn't resonate with me. For that reason, I thought The Unknown Soldier was worth reading for its characters, less so for its story.

RECOMMENDED

The Quest for Anna Klein by Thomas H. Cook

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on June 21, 2011

On behalf of a foreign affairs think tank, in the aftermath of 9/11, twenty-four-year-old Paul Crane agrees to interview ninety-one-year-old Thomas Jefferson Danforth in the belief that Danforth can provide insight into the terrorist attack. Crane is vexed by Danforth's failure to come quickly to the point of the meeting he requested. Instead, Danforth has a story to tell -- a story that begins in 1939 with Danforth's recruitment to "the Project." Point of view shifts frequently between Crane's first person account of the 2001 interview and the third person narration of Danforth's story (a story Danforth repeatedly describes as "a little parable").

Danforth's friend Clayton initially asks Danforth to volunteer his country home in Connecticut as a training ground for Anna Klein, a spy-to-be who speaks nine languages. In Connecticut, "a little steel ball of a fellow" named LaRoche teaches Anna to shoot a pistol and to use the destructive tools of sabotage. Clayton asks Danforth to learn more about Anna, to be sure of her loyalty. As Danforth spends more time with Anna, he comes to understand that he is terrified by the prospect of living an ordinary life. Despite Clayton's warning of the perils he might face, Danforth volunteers to accompany Anna to Europe and to assist her role in the Project, without yet knowing what the Project might be. Encouraged by Anna and caught up in his "lust to matter," Danforth realizes he wants to be more than "a little spy"; he wants to do something important. He also wants to be near Anna. As they travel together to France and then to Berlin, Danforth gradually learns of the Project's dangerous goal. But he also learns more about Anna ... and what he learns he will later unlearn, and relearn, and repeatedly question.

The Quest for Anna Klein turns out to be exactly that: Danforth's quest to understand Anna and to learn her fate. As he gains more information, both during and after the war, he realizes that she might not have been the person he judged her to be. There is an unusual love story in this novel as Danforth comes to feel "like a character in a Russian novel, love and death mingled in a darkly Slavic way." Yet as a reader would expect from an intricately plotted story of espionage, the love story isn't a simple one. Danforth is "doomed to live forever with the incurable affliction of having loved at a moment of supreme peril a woman of supreme mystery." It is a mystery that consumes his life. He is equally consumed by a desire for revenge, although the target of his revenge keeps changing.

Betrayal and loss of trust are the stuff of spy stories, but rarely are the deeply felt consequences of treachery portrayed as convincingly as they are in The Quest for Anna Klein. In many ways this novel is an eloquent story of nearly unbearable pain. The pain that flows from betrayal is palpable in Cook's characters but Danforth endures physical agony as well. Danforth's description of his experiences in Stalin's Russia after the war, including dehumanizing detentions in Lubyanka and a series of labor camps, are haunting. Working in the freezing winter, Danforth longs for summer; fighting mosquitoes in the summer, he aches for the return of winter. "Every blessing brings a curse," Danforth tells Crane, "even the gift of another day of life. Because you are already dead."

In a novel that layers intrigue upon intrigue, I expected to be surprised by the ending, but I was surprised by the surprise. Three surprises, actually, none of which I saw coming, all of which removed my reservations about the novel -- reservations I can't address without revealing the ending. If you read the novel and think part of its premise is unlikely, keep reading to the end. The book addresses timeless moral questions about the nature of innocence and accountability and vengeance, but in the end, it was the story that mattered to me. This is a skillfully plotted and well-executed novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Burning Lake by Brent Ghelfi

Published by Poisoned Pen Press on May 3, 2011

The Burning Lake is the fourth in Brent Ghelfi's series of novels featuring Volk, a Russian colonel who dabbles in crime when he isn't doing assignments for "the General" or engaging in personal quests for revenge (which is one of his primary occupations). Revenge drives the plot of The Burning Lake, as Volk investigates the death of a journalist (and former lover) named Kato. Her body is found buried with those of some missing students near the site of a Russian nuclear weapons design facility. It quickly becomes evident that someone killed Kato to prevent a story from breaking. Volk's efforts to track down the story (and thus Kato's killer) take him to Las Vegas (where he reunites with Brock Matthews, a CIA agent who has appeared in each of the previous novels) and to Tijuana, where he meets a former intelligence officer named Stone who now runs a private security firm.

Ghelfi's first Volk novel (Volk's Game) remains my favorite, followed closely by the third (The Venona Cable). The Burning Lake is more tightly plotted than the second novel (Shadow of the Wolf) but fails to develop Volk's character as fully as the first three. In each novel, Volk is filled with internal anguish.  In the first two particularly, Volk questions the beliefs that drove his rather ugly past; in the third, he questions his father's loyalty to Russia. I was disappointed that the storyline in The Burning Lake is more conventional. We still see some of Volk's inner turmoil but the focus is almost entirely on external events rather than Volk's ongoing struggle to confront his past and change his present. Volk does find himself regretting actions that further harmed his troubled relationship with his girlfriend, Valya, but that storyline was less interesting than Volk's remorse over his role in the suppression of Chechen dissent (a primary focus of the first two novels).

Still, the engaging, action-filled story unfolds at a swift pace, the point of view rapidly shifting between Volk and Stone. There is considerably less of the violence and brutality that characterized the first two novels, but no Volk novel would be complete without a certain amount of bloodshed. This novel works well as a stand-alone; Ghelfi presents enough information about Volk's past to help the reader understand his history without slowing the pace with needless exposition. While The Burning Lake isn't my favorite Volk novel (and, in fact, is probably my least favorite), I enjoyed breezing through it. I recommend it to Volk fans and I recommend the series to thriller readers. If you want to understand what makes Volk such an intriguing character, however, it's best to start at the beginning and read them all.

RECOMMENDED