User Profile

I’d give this 3.5 stars if I knew how. I really enjoyed most of it, especially the mystery of Hefflin’s past and the way he got caught up in events at the fall of the Ceausescus. However, some parts were a bit fantastic - not only the (in my opinion) unnecessary receipt of great wealth at the end, but other things too; for example, Hefflin for all his disgust at the violence of the revolution and his disillusionment with the CIA seems to experience very little anguish about killing people himself. Even justified it seems like something an ordinary person wouldn’t simply accept having done. And parts of the romance could have been better written. The resolution felt rushed. Still, it is Maz’s first novel, so let’s see where he goes from here.

So far my favourite Fesperman novel. I like how the two stories intersected, the espionage world of the late 70s and the crimes it was willing to overlook, and their ultimate consequences decades later. Just very well done.

Reading Cold War spy fiction in 2022 feels a bit like visiting an old friend – so familiar, and yet so very long ago. This one takes place in Berlin in the months after the Wall came down. As the general euphoria subsides and people begin to reimagine their lives, a disillusioned Stasi officer finds himself facing an uncertain and unexpected future, caught between the still-active KGB and the CIA agents -- once his enemies -- who might now be his only hope for saving those he loves.

There were things I liked about this, and things I didn’t. For the most part, I enjoyed the story and I thought the mystery of the missing girls were well done, but I didn’t like the resolution of the Erin story. The background of it was all too believable, but as a motivation for murder by the person who actually did it, it was pretty far fetched.

Read this for a course I’m on. The basics I already had down, but it was a good review, and the chapter on third-party tools was particularly helpful.

This was a pretty good story, but fairly grim.

I love these books, but alas, it takes her a year to write them and me only two days to read them.