It is common knowledge that the KGB weren't above using sex in its spying activities. Books were written and movies made about it. What isn't generally known is that the Russian Federation's FSB are not only continuing the practice but expanding it.
The Kingfisher Secret
by Anonymous Century
372pp
Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops 575 baht.
Good-looking men and attractive women are recruited to either entice and trap Westerners into working for them, or on an emotional level marry them. Those women are nicknamed Swallows, the men Ravens. This is the secret revealed in The Kingfisher Secret. The author is Anonymous. In the novel, it's implied that it is the joint work of a US woman journalist and a Czech Swallow.
Grace Elliot was getting nowhere with her degree in journalism in her Minnesota hometown, reduced to penning for supermarket tabloids. Opportunity brought her to Prague. There were stories aplenty. Meeting a man who swept her off her feet, how was she to know that William was a Raven? And then there was beautiful and sophisticated Elana. A Swallow. It was a set-up.
Anonymous takes us to Russia, where half the novel is set. The names of characters are false, yet his/her/their detailed description of the inside of the Kremlin is credible. Readers are left in no doubt that a power struggle is under way, nobody is to be trusted. Assassins and bodyguards are impossible to differentiate. They all agree on only one thing: America must be turned upside down, destroyed, obliterated.
The possibility of Hillary's claim that the Russians thwarted her chance at the White House is hinted at. The unlikely winner is a multimillionaire beyond the control of politicians and his Balkan wife is a Swallow. William is murdered to keep Grace from exposing the Russian strategy. They also bribe her to ensure her silence.
What they don't count on is that Elena has had it up to here. It doesn't take much convincing to persuade Grace to join forces with her.
The publisher asserts that The Kingfisher Secret is a work of fiction. This reviewer doesn't second guess them. I can't help wondering whether this imaginary work is worth reading. Is it merely prejudiced against contemporary Russia? Is none of it true?
Cold War thriller
Nightfall In Berlin
by Jack Grimwood
Penguin
454pp
Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops 395 baht.
A history buff at university, my tutor's course was based on his insistence that history as it comes down to us through the ages is essentially a myth. He noted that proof Moses and Jesus existed is unsubstantial. All historians have axes to grind. Stalin killed more Russians than did the Nazis. Mao Zedong killed more Chinese than did the Japanese.
He was never without examples. Napoleon was in Corsica at the time of the French Revolution. Lenin was in Switzerland at the time the tsar abdicated. Numerous famous battles never took place. Moghuls and Tartars were no different peoples. Perry did not discover the North Pole. Nehru wasn't Gandhi's second-in-command. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table never existed, etc.
The works of historical novelists should be taken with a grain of salt. Credible when their authors write well, it's their imaginations we are praising with a bit of history thrown in. Nightfall In Berlin by Brit Jack Grimwood is a case in point. Set in 1989, the participants are unaware that the 44-year war is about to end, the USSR about to call it quits. Communism just doesn't work. East Germany, with its Stasi Secret Police, took it very hard.
The plot here is that a British diplomat chooses to defect. Bad timing. Eastern Europe as a whole is in turmoil. His solution: return home. Arriving was a minor problem. Returning is a major one. Then again, has he really seen the error of his ways or is he a Red spy? Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sends intelligence agent Tom Fox behind the Berlin Wall to determine that by himself. The locale is overrun with spies.
Targeted, his handgun keeps him alive. A Scottish woman naturalist and a Russian ballerina join him. All are searching for Nazi intelligence files. Surrounded in a park, they free feral wolves from its zoo to distract their pursuers, the story's most thrilling part. Tom's family is kidnapped in England, his eight-year-old son a boy wonder and the most interesting character. Bodies pile up.
Grimwood lacks the style of John le Carré, who focuses on the Cold War, yet there's never a dull moment. Tom and his wife have been estranged since their daughter died in a car accident. Neither is faithful. This reviewer sees little reason for them reconciling in this fast-moving fiction plot.
