Publisher's Weekly Review
Veteran McCarry (The Tears of Autumn) remains a compelling storyteller, as shown in his latest spy thriller, which chronicles the early career of his series hero, Paul Christopher. In 1939 Berlin, 16-year-old Paul struggles, with his American novelist father and German aristocrat mother, against the Nazi rulers of Germany. The Christophers are refined intellectuals and known to be sympathetic to the persecuted Jews. A sadistic SS officer, Major Stutzer, takes pleasure in harassing Paul, who has fallen into an impassioned but forbidden love affair with a Jewish doctor's daughter. As war breaks out, Paul barely escapes, while his lover meets a horrible fate at Stutzer's hands. Flash forward to 1959: Paul, now one of the CIA's top operatives, undertakes a clandestine operation in East Berlin, where the Soviets have recruited a certain ex-Nazi officer to train their Arab allies. Can Paul finally face his old nemesis and put the ghosts of the past to rest? The book speeds toward a satisfying, inevitable conclusion. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
McCarry (The Miernik Dossier 2005, etc.) takes the story of his recurring master spy Paul Christopher back to its wildly romantic beginning. The only child of a blue-blooded American novelist and his bluer-blooded Prussian wife, handsome 16-year-old Paul is pleasantly aware that he is of interest to an equally handsome dark-haired girl of the same age, who also comes to Berlin's Tiergarten. Not having been introduced, he has taken to calling her Rima, after the character in W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions. Their meeting is anything but cute. In the last days before the war, young Paul stands up to a squad of Hitler Youth in the park, breaks the nose of the squad leader and is brutally beaten for his rash behavior. He is comforted by the girl, who takes him to her father, a once prominent Jewish physician now only allowed to treat other Jews. The patched-up Paul and the solicitous Rima fall headlong in love and begin an affair that is aided by the absent-mindedness of Paul's father Hubbard and the morning absences of his mother Lori. But they have attracted the attention of Major Stutzer, a loathsome Gestapo official whose all-powerful master, Reinhard Heydrich, fancies Paul's beautiful mother. Complicating matters, Hubbard and Lori have been using their family connections and their yacht to smuggle Jews out of the Reich, treachery of which the Gestapo is quite aware. As Stutzer's sadistic bullying of the young couple gets rougher, the Christophers realize Paul must be ferried out of Germany while his American passport can still help him. But they have not reckoned with the sweep of young love, nor have they quite appreciated the stubbornness of their handsome young son. When the ill-fated affair comes to its climax, McCarry jumps to the hairiest days of the Cold War in the now-divided Berlin, where Christopher has joined the world of spies. Former spook McCarry remains at the top of his game. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Effectively a prequel to McCarry's series of outstanding novels featuring master spy Paul Christopher (e.g., Old Boys), this exciting tale presents the prolog and denouement-two periods separated by 20 haunted years-of one of CIA agent Christopher's most dramatic career problems. Born of a German mother and an American father and living in 1939 Nazi Germany, Christopher leads an almost idyllic life with his wealthy and cultured parents. He falls in love with Rima, 16 years old like himself but one-quarter Jewish, so she is subject to the whims of psychopathic Nazi tormentors. That is not all: Christopher's beautiful mother becomes the target of powerful Nazi official Reinhardt Heydrich's insidious romantic attentions. But it is Heydrich's henchman, Stutzer, who causes the deaths of Christopher's parents and Rima and thus becomes Christopher's archenemy and the object of his expert vengeance in the 1950s. The book has much to recommend it: the prose is elegantly literate, the plot unfolds clearly, the characters are drawn in satisfying detail, the transitions are graceful, the sense of place and time is strong, and the "tradecraft" is as authentic as circumstances permit, given the author's own CIA history (he was an intelligence officer during the Cold War). Enthusiastically recommended for all public libraries.-Jonathan Pearce, Stockton, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.