Review by Booklist Review
Brano Sev is Steinhauer's most intriguing hero yet, and that's saying something. The disappointments and betrayals of 20 years have seasoned the earnest young apparatchik first seen menacing the background in The Bridge of Sighs (2002), the debut of this loose-knit Eastern Block series. In that tale, Sev was a poignant mix of hope and despair, idealism and ironic apathy that landed him squarely in Graham Greeneland. Now it's 1966, and after being framed by a fellow spy, Sev has a chance to redeem himself with the party by tracking a person of interest who has appeared in his childhood village. When a badly slashed corpse turns up, it seems as though we're headed toward a mystery, but Steinhauer has many, many more surprises in store, and we are led with Sev into brka, a perplexing maze that takes him to Vienna, where he is left out in the cold until an old flame flares up. With its shifting perceptions, pervasive paranoia, and truly unpredictable plot, this will be savored by readers of well-crafted espionage ranging from Alan Furst to John le Carre. --David Wright Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Did Brano Sev, an agent of an unnamed Eastern European country, kill Bertrand Richter in Vienna in the 1960s? Or was he set up by his superiors at the Ministry of State Security, the headquarters of his service located at the address that gives Edgar-finalist Steinhauer's uneven third novel its title? And why does he have a slip of paper with the name Dijana Frankovic on it when he wakes up, bewildered, in a Vienna park? Even Sev doesn't know-amnesia!-but the consequences are all too clear: he's demoted to a dead-end factory job, "fitting electrical wires into gauges so that the machines of socialist agriculture would never fail." (The author ably captures socialist rhetoric.) Sev gets a chance at redemption, and the opportunity to find out what really happened, when the ministry sends him home, to the provincial town of B?brka, to investigate a possible double agent, Jan Soroka. While the details of life behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War ring true, some readers may find the flawed Sev too undeveloped a character to care about his fate. The real story involves Sev's father, who left the country under suspicion of collaboration after WWII, but the plot's Byzantine complexity, more confusing than intriguing, clouds that classic father-son drama. Agent, Matt Williams at the Gernert Company. Author tour. (June 13) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
At the height of the Cold War in 1966, things have gone badly for Brano Sev, a major in the Ministry of State Security in an Eastern Bloc country. Sent to Vienna to plug a leak, Sev is accused of sabotaging the mission and soon finds himself back home working in a factory, lucky to have avoided prison. Five months later, his former boss, Col. Laszlo Cerny, shows up with an offer: check out a defector who has returned to B?brka, an isolated village north of the capital, where Sev was born and still has family, and he may earn reinstatement. Thus begins a quest for the truth behind a series of baffling events on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Aware that he is being used but unable to figure out for what purpose, Sev finds that not only is his fate at stake but also that of his country. Steinhauer (The Confession) is a master at entangling a compelling protagonist in a spellbinding web where each broken thread entraps the character (and the reader) in yet another mystery. This is an imaginative, brilliantly plotted espionage thriller, with finely detailed settings and a protagonist of marvelous complexity. Highly recommended. [See Mystery Prepub, LJ 2/1/05.]-Ronnie H. Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Eastern Europe in the late '60s: a dismal time, a dreary thriller. Major Brano Sev is a State Security Officer in the People's Militia of a down-trodden, never-named USSR satellite. Actually, he's a spy, a very good spy. Clever, courageous, durable: coping with corporal punishment unstintingly administered is one of his noteworthy attributes. In addition, he likes to think of himself as unswervingly loyal to the socialist idea, but in this he's about to be severely tested. As the story opens, Brano is in Vienna on a secret assignment--a secret to him, too, it turns out, since a whack on the head has induced temporary amnesia. At about the time he fully recovers his memory, Brano discovers what it means to be an apparatchik in a political party paralyzed by paranoia, a party with a single item on its agenda: survival. After being framed and denounced by an ambitious colleague, he's stripped of his rank and consigned to scut work ("the third man down the assembly line") at a factory making agricultural machinery. Though ever stoical, Brano acknowledges relief when Comrade Colonel Laszlo Cerny appears with an assignment that could lead to rehabilitation. He's to go to Bóbrka, his hometown, to check out the dubious behavior of one Jan Seroka, a fellow native son. On the face of it, the mission seems straightforward enough, but Brano--loyalty now leavened by recent experience--suspects that treachery has become reflexive among his Politburo peers. He's right, and once again he's framed, this time for murder. Other betrayals follow until at length Brano is forced to conclude that his most trusted friends are indistinguishable from his bitterest enemies. Steinhauer, who's done excellent work in two prior suspensers (The Confession, 2004, etc.), misses here: this time out, he confronts the reader with the formidable task of empathizing with an essentially colorless protagonist. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
