There
are certain moments throughout the year that I feel like just
completely relaxing and reading a novel I don’t have to think
about—one that I know will be entertaining, won’t treat me like
an idiot, and yet be effortless enough I don’t have to work out a
histogram of literary allusion to decipher meaning. (There are other
moments of the year such novels beg.) It should be a novel I don’t
care if it contains a bucket of tried and true material as long as
the author executes with precision, style, and mood. It should grab
me from the first and not let go until the last. And, most
importantly, it should be true escape—a world or story so
well-packaged as to taunt me when I’m not reading it. Such books
typically defined by author (occasionally by surprise)—Paul Di
Filippo, Elizabeth Hand, David Mitchell, Ian Macleod, and several
others have never let me down. Neither has Jon Courtenay Grimwood,
and his second Tom Fox novel, 2018’s Nightfall Berlin
(written as Jack Grimwood), doesn’t break any trends.
It
is summer 1986 and Tom Fox is on vacation in the Caribbean with his
family. Licking mental and physical wounds, he hopes the time with
his wife and son under the warm sun will help him recover from the
cold, dramatic events of Moskva. (For the record, there is no
need to have read Moskva to read Nightfall Berlin.)
But if wishes were fishes… Contacted under urgent circumstances,
Fox has been specifically named as the person to escort a high level
British ex-diplomat who wants to leave exile in East Berlin and
return to Britain to stand trial for treason. Reluctantly making the
trip to glasnost GDR, Fox arrives on the Soviet side of the
Berlin Wall to do his duty. Trouble is, there are behind-the-scenes
plans that have Fox pegged as merely collateral damage. His escort
mission turned upside down in a matter of hours, Fox finds himself
not only on his own in Soviet-occupied East Germany without diplomat
papers but in desperate need of getting beyond the Wall. Need and
certainty, however, are not always common bedfellows.
A
superbly written spy thriller in the tradition of Le Carre, Nightfall
Berlin takes all the strengths of Moskva—and Grimwood’s
talents in general—and spins them into an intense Cold War drama
that reverberates back to WWII and Fox’s youth. Proving the
legitimacy of stereotypes is all about execution, the pieces of
Grimwood’s story have appeared in novels for nearly the past
century but are delivered in such a tight, detailed, perfectly paced
parcel that one can’t help getting wholly caught up in Fox’s
plight behind the Berlin Wall. Double bluffs, drop boxes, secret
cabals, forced suicides, silenced pistols, hidden messages, femme
fatales, and more, it’s everything one could want in a spy novel
but is never mailed in. Grimwood is simply too suave to let such
things happen. Thus, for those moments you just want to forget the
world and escape into a dependable, well written book, the second Tom
Fox novel Nightfall Berlin delivers in spades. How Grimwood
is not on bestseller lists, I’ll never know…
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