I have to begin by saying that I truly enjoyed reading this novel. Its story was also a way of recalling history through the author Jefferson Flanders’ words since I have a few years on me. As an added bonus, Flanders informs the reader with a short historical data at the end of the book.

In the story’s setup, the American diplomat Dillon Randolph, after his scandal with a married woman in Australia, is sent to Berlin with no distinct job description. At this time, the communists find out about Dillon’s scandal and deeming him a soft target, they set the actress Christa Schiller on him threatening her with the harsh treatment of her brother who is in their jail. They tell Christa they’ll set her brother free if she succeeds to trap Dillon. Their underlying intention is to intensify the crisis between the West and Russia. The intense love story of Dillon and Christa and the wheelings and dealings of the spies on both sides compose the gist of the plot, which has a realistic and credible ending.

One thing I favored, added to the storytelling skills of the author, was that it contained almost no blood and gore. Yet, it had quite a bit of action and adventure, and good and bad parties--even the double agents--were clearly defined. The plot construction is superb with each scene a success and the scenes connect well without veering off the story’s arc.

In addition, the appeal factors of the story were the main players as finely developed protagonists and antagonists and well-rounded secondary characters, a star-crossed love story, and intelligent and capable spies' actions and reactions. The author also stayed away from showing the Germans of East Berlin and even the Russians as terrible people. They all had their agendas but they had an honorability or a saving point in their characters, too.

The descriptions are exquisite without being florid because the author draws a clear, exact, and vivid pictures of Berlin, of both the eastern and the western sections. The subtlety of clues and details, the intrigue, and the rather fast-moving action enhance the drama in the story.

I think historical fiction readers and spy-fiction enthusiasts will find this book well worth their time.

enjoying history, peeking into the divided Berlin right after the Bay of Pigs incident, and a good spy story.

How Dillon reacted when he found out about Christa's intentions and duplicity.

how the English spy and his men put Dillon and Christa in danger at the closing of the story, but this also made the story exciting, so I am not complaining.

read another book by this author because I really like his writing style, which is precise, understated, but masterful.

as if I were there in Berlin after the mid-twentieth century.

is Jefferson Flanders who wrote Café Carolina and Other Stories, The Girl from Recoleta and Other Stories of Love, The Republic of Virtue, and the Cold War First Trumpet trilogy: Herald Square, The North Building, and The Hill of Three Borders.

It has an historically interesting plot and well-developed characters.

If you are only a reader of romance, fantasy, or literary books, you may not like this historical-spy-fiction story.

The action, adventure, and high emotions plus the setting of Berlin as if an island divided and fought over among the conquering nations make this an important book, which also points to, indirectly, to the present-day world-leadership problems among the countries of the world.

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Created Mar 19, 2018 at 5:11pm • Submit your own review...