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Raelynn Hillhouse Rift Zone
Forge Books 20050801 076534890X / 9780765348906 MM Very Good
076534890X 076534890X From Publishers Weekly Hillhouse's gripping debut, a cold war thriller, has so many unexpected pleasures that its flaws barely register. It's 1989, and American professor Faith Whitney is staying in Germany with the faint (and dimming) hope of learning about her missing father; to make a living, she smuggles minor items (Stalin china, Nazi crystal, etc.) from East Berlin to West. After being captured by the East German Stasi, Faith is forced to smuggle for them or face imprisonment. KGB agent Zara Bogdanov is another antagonist, but a sympathetic one: ambitious and beautiful, she's also openly gay, a strike against her advancement. Capturing Faith and getting her to spy for the KGB would be a feather in Zara's cap, but her motives are unclear, even to herself. Their extended cat-and-mouse game, fueled by a flirty mutual attraction (though Faith is straight), gives an enticing pulse to the sometimes implausible plot. An extended section in which Faith transports hazardous material feels like a climax, but the story continues for another 50-odd pages. The book may be better for its two strong women and its incisive picture of a significant era in recent history than for its thriller elements, but Hillhouse is a welcome new voice. Copyright ? Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From Booklist Hillhouse shows a firm grasp of suspense and intrigue in her auspicious debut, a satisfying international thriller. Weaned on the risky exploits of her mother, a Christian missionary running bootleg Bibles behind the iron curtain, Faith Whitney has become a notorious smuggler, prompting a cabal of hard-line Communists in East German Intelligence to press her into a key role in a plot to overthrow Gorbachev, end glasnost, and ice over the thawing cold war. Seeking KGB intervention from a sexy female agent, she finds herself in a treacherous spy dance that not even her ex-fiance, bomb-squad commando Max Summer, can blast through. Hillhouse keeps things rocketing forward with deft camerawork and a well-constructed plot, punctuated with plenty of high-octane action, including a nifty sequence involving pickled brains and an explosive episode that would be a bad choice for in-flight reading. Several gripping, border-crossing scenes are informed by the author's own background as a rum-runner and black marketeer. The characters are appealing, although one longs to see more of a subplot in which a massacre at an Azerbaijan orphanage spurs Faith's mother to action. Expect this impressive iron-curtain thriller to attract a large readership, among which will be Martin Cruz Smith fans. David Wright Copyright ? American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Price:
1.69 USD
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