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Kate Henderson is a senior MI6 officer who heads up the Russian desk for the British organization.  We meet her at a point where she is acting on a tip that the Russians have a high-level spy working at a level guaranteed that he or she will be privy to important information that could do enormous harm to Great Britain. Acting on the tip received, she is trying to get a young girl to take a job on the yacht that is indicated to be sailing with an important Russian official. If his talks are recorded, it would be possible to ascertain who the spy is in the British government. She uses the ploy with the girl she wants to go onboard the yacht that she and her sister, who are attempting to enter England as immigrants, would be guaranteed their residency.

Unfortunately, the girl’s identity is discovered, and she is murdered. Kate is galvanized into raising the level of the search for the mole in the government. At one point Kate herself is thought of as possibly being the mole along with several other people also suspected of being the spy.

The novel moves to cover her search and reactions of both herself and her assistants. Very well done and very engrossing. One of the features used by Bradby in bringing his characters to life is the descriptions of both Kate and her assistant’s private life. These become real people experiencing strains in their personal lives as well as the pressure of doing their jobs. Kate is married, has two children, a girl who is the complicated age of 15 going on 25 and who has encountered her first boyfriend. The boy’s demeanor is not to Kate nor her husband’s liking. There is also a son looking to find his direction in the world. Kate has the misfortune of having an overbearing mother that never misses the opportunity to downgrade her daughter. Her family is very important to her but so is her job, and the conflicts involved are well handled by the author.

The search for the mole is the crux of the matter, and the reader is kept appraised of the investigation into capturing him along with both the family and her job’s pressures. The ending is well done but would seem to rule out any further novels featuring Kate Henderson and her assistants on the MI6 Russian desk. On the other hand, the treatment by the author of this book would certainly indicate future books done as well as this one.

11/19 Paul Lane

SECRET SERVICE by Tom Bradby. Bantam Press; First Edition, First Printing edition (2019). ISBN 978-1787632035. 368p.

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During the Second World War, Adolf Hitler found that he could rally the German army as well as the people by selecting scapegoats to blame for the poor economic conditions the country found itself in. He was able to sell the country on the need to go to war and at the same time began the persecution of the groups that were selected as scapegoats. Among these were Jews and Gypsies. Hitler began the mass extermination of his scapegoats by sending them to concentration camps where many were killed in gas ovens as one means of destroying those groups. Both guards and supervisory personnel easily fell into the positions of both condoning the killing as well as rationalizing their own part in the murders by stating that they acted under orders from above.

The Accomplice is a hard-hitting novel telling the story of the finding of one of the medical doctors that had tortured men, women, and children to death in the name of approved experiments.  Dr Otto Schramm was head of “experiments” at the Auschwitz camp in Poland and managed to elude capture when the war ended.  Seventeen years after the war ended it was thought that Schramm had been killed in an auto accident and searches for him ended. But one of the foremost Nazi hunters, Max Weill, sees him walking on the streets of Hamburg and wants to go after him. Unfortunately Max is a sick man and possibly due to the excitement of the sighting suffers a heart attack and passes away. But not before he charges Aaron Wiley his nephew that is visiting from the US to continue the search. Aaron is an employee of the CIA but basically one working strictly at a desk. Knowing that Max’s wife, Aaron’s aunt was killed by Schramm he takes some vacation from the CIA and begins to chase him.

The main section of the novel is taken up with the chase.  Schramm had fled to Argentina and Aaron goes to Buenos Aires to look for him.  A most interesting situation develops when Schramm’s daughter is found, and Aaron meets her to obtain information about her father.

The two meet, and a love affair develops with the obvious question can Aaron take her father prisoner and bring him to justice to stand trial for his wartime crimes in the face of his feelings for his daughter?

The chase after Schramm and the very conflicting emotions of the people involved provide an excellent read pulling the readers into the plot with the changing feelings of the period shortly after WWII. This is not a story that can easily be forgotten with the emotions generated by the novel staying fresh for quite a while.

11/19 Paul Lane

THE ACCOMPLICE by Joseph Kanon. Atria Books (November 5, 2019). ISBN 978-1501121425. 336p.

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A Dotan Naor Thriller, Book 2

Yigal Zur is not a first-time author and has published several successful novels in the past. I truly wonder what happened to this book. It reads like someone was in a great hurry to finish something before a deadline or the person translating from Hebrew into English was the one in a hurry.

The plot of the novel finds Dotan Naor, an Israeli private detective, in Tel Aviv, when he is called by his partner to fly to Bangkok and find a missing girl. Dotan jumps on a plane with no information about who he is looking for but is handed two passports by the taxi driver that picks him up at the Bangkok airport, one of which is for Sigal Bardon, the girl he is looking for.

Dotan runs helter-skelter all around Bankok, gets beat up, visits a prison to interview someone that may know where Sigal is, and runs into an old friend (now enemy) of his. Reuven was with him in Shin Bet. Due to something that happened back then, and each blaming the other, they were both dismissed from the organization. Looks like Reuven engineered the entire trip and the hunt for Sigal as a means of bringing Dotan to meet with him in Bangkok.

No surprise ending and far from an all-nighter, the novel has the saving grace of supplying a portrait of Bangkok based upon the author’s visits there.

11/19 Paul Lane

PASSPORT TO DEATH by Yigal Zur. Oceanview Publishing; None edition (November 5, 2019). ISBN 978-1608093649.

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