Review of Alex Gerlis’s Vienna Spies…
(Alex Gerlis, Vienna Spies, Studio 28, 2017, ASIN B06XY644HG)
What a great story! More gripping than Follett’s Eye of the Needle and Deaver’s Garden of Beasts, this spy tale about Vienna at the end of WWII kept me reading. It’s complex, poignant, and gritty. It took me a while to keep the characters straight, even with the character list kindly provided by the author, but that’s stretching it to find something negative. My kind of book!
The book is related to some of the author’s other historical novels—Major Edgar, the spy controller, is in them, for example. I believe the main characters, Rolf Eder and Katharina Hoch, are new. Eder is a Vienna native who becomes a somewhat reluctant spy for the British, a dangerous game in wartime Vienna, considering the Austrians have bought into Hitler’s far-right nationalistic nightmare. His partner Katharina becomes his lover after he gets over the loss of fiancée who was tortured by the Viennese Gestapo. The overriding problem: Keep a Soviet spy Viktor from turning Austria Communist at the end of the war. The means? Get an old Austrian statesman not to side with the Soviets by hustling him out of Vienna to the American-British lines.
This novel isn’t for the squeamish, although the descriptions don’t begin to compare with the horrors the Nazis performed. At the same time, readers will meet human beings who laugh and love their way to survive the worst war the world has seen.
Readers might even end up identifying with the Soviet spy. All the spies here are conflicted. Not one Nazi has redeeming qualities. Classic battle between some good and some evil.
***
Did you miss Rembrandt’s Angel? More Nazis, ISIS terrorists, and a cartel contribute villains to this mystery/thriller about a Scotland Yard’s obsession to recover a missing Rembrandt. Available on Amazon and Smashwords and its affiliates (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc). Or ask for it at your favorite bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask them to order it).
In libris libertas…
