The Quest for Anna Klein by Thomas H. Cook

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on June 21, 2011

On behalf of a foreign affairs think tank, in the aftermath of 9/11, twenty-four-year-old Paul Crane agrees to interview ninety-one-year-old Thomas Jefferson Danforth in the belief that Danforth can provide insight into the terrorist attack. Crane is vexed by Danforth's failure to come quickly to the point of the meeting he requested. Instead, Danforth has a story to tell -- a story that begins in 1939 with Danforth's recruitment to "the Project." Point of view shifts frequently between Crane's first person account of the 2001 interview and the third person narration of Danforth's story (a story Danforth repeatedly describes as "a little parable").

Danforth's friend Clayton initially asks Danforth to volunteer his country home in Connecticut as a training ground for Anna Klein, a spy-to-be who speaks nine languages. In Connecticut, "a little steel ball of a fellow" named LaRoche teaches Anna to shoot a pistol and to use the destructive tools of sabotage. Clayton asks Danforth to learn more about Anna, to be sure of her loyalty. As Danforth spends more time with Anna, he comes to understand that he is terrified by the prospect of living an ordinary life. Despite Clayton's warning of the perils he might face, Danforth volunteers to accompany Anna to Europe and to assist her role in the Project, without yet knowing what the Project might be. Encouraged by Anna and caught up in his "lust to matter," Danforth realizes he wants to be more than "a little spy"; he wants to do something important. He also wants to be near Anna. As they travel together to France and then to Berlin, Danforth gradually learns of the Project's dangerous goal. But he also learns more about Anna ... and what he learns he will later unlearn, and relearn, and repeatedly question.

The Quest for Anna Klein turns out to be exactly that: Danforth's quest to understand Anna and to learn her fate. As he gains more information, both during and after the war, he realizes that she might not have been the person he judged her to be. There is an unusual love story in this novel as Danforth comes to feel "like a character in a Russian novel, love and death mingled in a darkly Slavic way." Yet as a reader would expect from an intricately plotted story of espionage, the love story isn't a simple one. Danforth is "doomed to live forever with the incurable affliction of having loved at a moment of supreme peril a woman of supreme mystery." It is a mystery that consumes his life. He is equally consumed by a desire for revenge, although the target of his revenge keeps changing.

Betrayal and loss of trust are the stuff of spy stories, but rarely are the deeply felt consequences of treachery portrayed as convincingly as they are in The Quest for Anna Klein. In many ways this novel is an eloquent story of nearly unbearable pain. The pain that flows from betrayal is palpable in Cook's characters but Danforth endures physical agony as well. Danforth's description of his experiences in Stalin's Russia after the war, including dehumanizing detentions in Lubyanka and a series of labor camps, are haunting. Working in the freezing winter, Danforth longs for summer; fighting mosquitoes in the summer, he aches for the return of winter. "Every blessing brings a curse," Danforth tells Crane, "even the gift of another day of life. Because you are already dead."

In a novel that layers intrigue upon intrigue, I expected to be surprised by the ending, but I was surprised by the surprise. Three surprises, actually, none of which I saw coming, all of which removed my reservations about the novel -- reservations I can't address without revealing the ending. If you read the novel and think part of its premise is unlikely, keep reading to the end. The book addresses timeless moral questions about the nature of innocence and accountability and vengeance, but in the end, it was the story that mattered to me. This is a skillfully plotted and well-executed novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Burning Lake by Brent Ghelfi

Published by Poisoned Pen Press on May 3, 2011

The Burning Lake is the fourth in Brent Ghelfi's series of novels featuring Volk, a Russian colonel who dabbles in crime when he isn't doing assignments for "the General" or engaging in personal quests for revenge (which is one of his primary occupations). Revenge drives the plot of The Burning Lake, as Volk investigates the death of a journalist (and former lover) named Kato. Her body is found buried with those of some missing students near the site of a Russian nuclear weapons design facility. It quickly becomes evident that someone killed Kato to prevent a story from breaking. Volk's efforts to track down the story (and thus Kato's killer) take him to Las Vegas (where he reunites with Brock Matthews, a CIA agent who has appeared in each of the previous novels) and to Tijuana, where he meets a former intelligence officer named Stone who now runs a private security firm.

Ghelfi's first Volk novel (Volk's Game) remains my favorite, followed closely by the third (The Venona Cable). The Burning Lake is more tightly plotted than the second novel (Shadow of the Wolf) but fails to develop Volk's character as fully as the first three. In each novel, Volk is filled with internal anguish.  In the first two particularly, Volk questions the beliefs that drove his rather ugly past; in the third, he questions his father's loyalty to Russia. I was disappointed that the storyline in The Burning Lake is more conventional. We still see some of Volk's inner turmoil but the focus is almost entirely on external events rather than Volk's ongoing struggle to confront his past and change his present. Volk does find himself regretting actions that further harmed his troubled relationship with his girlfriend, Valya, but that storyline was less interesting than Volk's remorse over his role in the suppression of Chechen dissent (a primary focus of the first two novels).

Still, the engaging, action-filled story unfolds at a swift pace, the point of view rapidly shifting between Volk and Stone. There is considerably less of the violence and brutality that characterized the first two novels, but no Volk novel would be complete without a certain amount of bloodshed. This novel works well as a stand-alone; Ghelfi presents enough information about Volk's past to help the reader understand his history without slowing the pace with needless exposition. While The Burning Lake isn't my favorite Volk novel (and, in fact, is probably my least favorite), I enjoyed breezing through it. I recommend it to Volk fans and I recommend the series to thriller readers. If you want to understand what makes Volk such an intriguing character, however, it's best to start at the beginning and read them all.

RECOMMENDED

The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 15, 2011

Of all the Charles Cumming novels, my favorite remains The Hidden Man, a novel that -- like a Hitchcock movie -- generates suspense by placing unwitting individuals in unforeseen peril.  Cumming tries to do that again in The Trinity Six by sending Professor Sam Gaddis on a quest to identify the sixth and final member of the Cambridge spy ring that included the infamous Kim Philby.  While The Trinity Six is an enjoyable novel, it fails to create the same atmosphere of danger that makes The Hidden Man Cumming’s reigning masterpiece.

The identity of the sixth spy is never in doubt; Cumming reveals it on the first page.  Gaddis learns of it after a journalist friend asks him to co-author a book based on a story she plans to write that will reveal the spy’s name to the public.  The journalist dies soon after that conversation, leaving Gaddis to pursue the truth on his own.  His investigation leads him to an elderly man named Thomas Neame who provides either valuable information or calculated disinformation.  For much of the novel, Gaddis remains credibly clueless as he is played by one intelligence agency and stalked by another.  Eventually his search takes him country hopping and, as is typical in espionage thrillers, when he unearths individuals who can bring him closer to the truth they tend to die.

As he does in his other novels, Cumming derives excitement from intellectual challenge rather than shootouts and chases.  The difficult task of separating truth from falsehood animates the story.  That technique worked well in Cumming’s last Alec Milius novel, The Spanish Game, but it is less successful here.  The palpable tension and riveting suspense that characterizes Cumming’s best work never materializes in The Trinity Six.  This is not to say that the story is dull or not well told; Cumming is a fine writer with a literary style that sets him apart from typical espionage novelists.  Gaddis and the supporting cast are interesting characters and the plot unfolds at a steady but unrushed pace.  Ultimately, however, the novel lacks the heft of Cumming’s most enjoyable novels.  I recommend The Trinity Six to fans of espionage fiction, but with the warning that they might be disappointed if they expect it to live up to the standard Cumming set in some of his earlier novels.

RECOMMENDED

The Spanish Game by Charles Cumming

Published by St. Martin's Press on November 25, 2008

Alec Milius, who made his debut in A Spy By Nature, returns to action in The Spanish Game. Six years have passed since the events described in A Spy by Nature and Milius is still worried that the CIA and the SIS are out to get him. After bouncing around the world, Milius has come to an uneasy rest in Madrid where he does freelance intelligence work for a private British bank. His boss, Julian Church, sends him to San Sebastián to determine whether Basque unrest will have an impact on business development in the region. Julian puts Milius in touch with an old friend there, a Basque politician named Mikel Arenaza. When Arenaza goes missing after arranging to meet Milius again in Madrid, Milius is drawn back into the world of espionage while investigating his disappearance.

I suspect some readers won't like this novel because they won't like Milius. He is self-centered, obsessively paranoid (perhaps with reason, but that makes him no less unlikable) and a bit amoral (even sleezy). None of that bothered me. I don't need to like the characters in order to enjoy a novel, so long as the characters and story are interesting. If you're looking for a morally pure or likable hero, however, you should probably pass this one by. Having said that, it's only fair to point out that at the end of this novel, as was true in A Spy By Nature, Milius shows himself capable of remorse, if not change.
Other readers won't like this novel because they're looking for more action or less ambiguity. You don't get thrilling chases, gunplay, explosions, high tech weaponry, or nonstop action in a Cumming novel. You don't get larger than life, morally pure good guys or cartoonishly evil bad guys. Instead, Cumming gives you an intelligent, credible plot and interesting, ethically challenged characters. That's not to say that the novels are dull or that they lack action. In The Spanish Game, the story develops slowly, piece by piece. The pace begins to quicken at the novel's midway point as the pieces begin to cohere, and there's quite a bit of action by the end, but Milius spends more time thinking than fighting. The novel has some elements of a mystery as the reader, along with Milius, tries to understand the relationship between the major players. As in any good mystery, the ending came as a complete surprise to me, and a very satisfying one.

The Spanish Game departs from the conventions of the typical spy novel by centering the conflict around Basque terrorists (or liberationists, as you prefer), about whom I knew little before reading the novel. I was drawn into the story and even started to feel a bit of sympathy for Milius. Cumming writes well, bringing a literary quality to his prose that, while falling short of Le Carre, is a pleasure to read. This is a better novel than A Spy By Nature, although not quite as good as his second novel, The Hidden Man (an espionage novel that doesn't feature Milius).

RECOMMENDED

The Hidden Man by Charles Cumming

First published in 2003

When Christopher Keen's two children were young, Keen abandoned his family to take a job as an SIS operative. Thirty years later, Keen works for Divisar Corporate Intelligence. His wife is long dead. Keen has reestablished a relationship with his son Mark, but his son Ben refuses to speak to him. Mark is a senior executive at Libra, a nightclub chain that is about to open a club in Russia. The lawyer putting that deal together is under investigation by MI5, in cooperation with Russian police authorities who observed his meetings with an organized crime figure during trips to Russia. Keen has given professional advice to Libra about its Russian business dealings, and MI5 not only wants Keen's assistance, it wants to use him to get information from Mark. Hours after Keen has his first serious conversation with Mark since leaving the family, a Russian with an apparent score to settle enters Keen's flat and kills him. (The killing is actually the first event in the novel; the early chapters fill in the backstory.)

The bulk of the story centers on the sometimes independent, sometimes cooperative efforts of Mark and Ben to learn who killed their father and why. Cumming builds suspense slowly as we learn about each brother: Mark's enthusiastic but naive willingness to assist MI5; Ben's curiosity about a father he's so long detested; Ben's shaky relationship with a wife who finds herself attracted to his boss. Cumming creates a strong sense of atmosphere and danger as the plot develops; a particularly tense scene has the brothers meeting with Latvian gangsters in a strip club. Each brother is a fully developed character; their very different relationships with their father, and their reactions to conflicting stories they hear about him after his death, is fascinating. A turf war between intelligence agencies working at cross-purposes has become standard fare in spy novels, but it's used to great effect in The Hidden Man. The brothers are caught in the middle, they don't know who or what to believe ... it's a great story.

The careful plot, the depth of the characters, and the nice pace at which the story unfolds all make this a rewarding spy novel.

RECOMMENDED