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3.5 AVERAGE
3.5 AVERAGE
Truly an excellent novel--suspenseful, literary, filled with the colors of the times, with a deeply realized cast of characters with an intricate plot. I want to read it again.
wonderful spy novel. not exactly John le Carré, but good enough.
Another good atmospheric midcentury noir thriller from Joseph Kanon. Suspenseful and authentic seeming with real characters that are easy to care about. One weak spot: the reader tried to do German accents with no idea how things are pronounced which was grating for me.
My biggest problem was the writing. It was difficult to understand who the characters were and what was going on. The writing bothered me so much that I couldn't finish it, which was disappointing because I was excited for it.
adventurous
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
adventurous
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Very enjoyable and stylish noir thriller, though a little unclear. The denouement was so complicated, I had to read it a few times to untangle everything. Still worth it, though, for the splendidly murky atmosphere, which was surely borrowed from the 1948 film A Foreign Affair.
This is a complex character drive story set in East Berlin after the end of WWII where everyone is spying on everyone and very few people, if any, are what they seem to be. The story starts off simply enough with Alex Meier returning to Berlin from the US after having fled the Nazis before the war but things quickly turn as it is shown that his return has been driven by more than just personal choices. Instead he has bargained with the newly created CIA to utilise his connections and knowledge to be their agent in Berlin and clear his name of suspicion. But of course things are not even that straight forward as all sides are recruiting and there are double and triple agents everywhere. While I did enjoy the overall story and the depth of the characters was impressive, I did find some aspects quite hard to follow, particularly the conversational aspects which seemed a bit clunky and blended into each other quite frequently. I also found the complex interplays between the characters a little hard to keep up with but I think this was partly due to me getting lost in the narrative as much as anything else. I suspect though that given another read or two it might become a bit clearer.