A game of spies

The game of spies was one the British played exceedingly well during World War II, and their successes have generated a vast literature. This novel posits that a British espionage coup was ignored by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1940, thus allowing the German blitzkrieg to overrun the Low Countries and France in just six weeks. Most of the book is about the flight of two people from the Nazis. One is Hobbs, a British operative with a dubious reputation as a con man and opportunist. The other is Eva Bernhardt, a young German woman "recruited" by Hobbs. Hobbs is inserted into Germany to extract Eva after she obtains information about the Germans' thrust into the west. Chasing these two are Hagen and Frick, smart and relentless officers in the Gestapo's intelligence unit. It's spy versus spy, agent and double agent, double cross and triple cross. It's taut and lean and filled with action, yet author Altman still finds room for insightful reflections on the motives, morals, and misgivings of all the primary characters. A first-rate military thriller. --Thomas Gaughan

A WWII spy novel good enough for a place in the le Carre tradition. It's 1942; the British are on fire to learn exactly how Hitler plans to come at France; the Nazis are just as eager to disinform them. German-born Eva Barnhardt is the pivotal agent-which is to say the spy very much in the cold-in this high-stakes game of geopolitical Ping-Pong. No ideologue Eva. Recruited a few years back by the disreputable if undeniably charming agent William Hobbs, she's been working for the British reluctantly, resentfully, but quite efficiently-brave and brainy Eva an undercover natural despite herself. At this point in her young life, however, she doesn't see that either side offers much to choose from. She despises the Nazis on principle. She detests the Brits for personal reasons: Hobbs seduced her-a child of 20-made her fall in love with him, then left her to be manipulated by MI6. She's in Berlin now as the result of MI6 pressure-but also because the German Secret Service, having pierced her cover, is tickled pink that she's there. The Germans have allowed her to become party to certain troop movement information relative to the French invasion (disinformation, of course) that they're vitally interested in conveying to their enemies. Hobbs has figured this out, though Eva as yet has not. As the denouement approaches, the SS is stalking Hobbs, and Hobbs, who has belatedly come to realize how much he loves the girl he so callously exploited, is stalking Eva, grimly aware that he may have to kill to keep her from unknowingly betraying his country. Tightly plotted, briskly paced: in its admirable economy what thrillers ought to be and seldom are. For Altman (A Gathering of Spies, 2000), an impressive advance over a just-average debut.