The Persian - David McCloskey

 Having found my way to McCloskey via The Seventh Floor (reviewed very recently below), I was made up to find The Persian in my local library.   I mean, how of-the-moment is it possible to get?   And that, I'm afraid, was the problem.   Israelis and Iranian false flag ops - it's too painfully of the moment - the only element lacking is a demented and corrupr US President blackmailed into participating (but who would dream that up?).   There can be no question about McCloskey's skill as a writer but I couldn't engage with this at all.   My fault, not his.

One problem for me, technically, was the lack of a major player I could identify with.   I don't care about the 'hero' Kam Esfahani, a failed Iranian-Swedish-Jewish dentist who gets drawn into Mossad black ops whose story is being extracted under duress by his Iranian captors.   Perhaps if we'd been shown more of what breaks him ...   The core of his story, which should I suspect is meant to make us empathise with him - is his affair with Roya Shabani, the widow of an Iranian scientist who Kam helped assassinate.   Kam rather cynically seduces her and turns her into a double agent but he still has feelings for her.   It's plausible, I suppose - Stockholm Syndrome and all that - but I just don't buy it on an emotional level.   At the end of the day what we have here is a weak momma's boy and a woman victimised by two mysogynistic theocracies.

For me the most captivating character here is the Mossad action man Arik Glitzman.   His motivation, by the end, we can absolutely identify with, and I would love to see him reappear in a future McCloskey novel.   The action sequences are superbly executed, the fieldcraft, as in The Seventh Floor, completely convincing.   McCloskey, in my view, is now 100% the most significant US writer of contemporary spy fiction.    

The Accomplice - Joseph Kanon

I have reviewed several of Kanon's thrillers on this blog.  The Accomplice is as good as any.  Aaron Wiley, a desk man for the CIA, is in Hamburg in 1962, visiting his uncle Max, a Holocaust survivor who has spent the postwar years hunting senior Nazis - a sort of rival to Simon Wiesenthal.  In 1962 the Israelis have only recently tried Adolph Eichmann, the Man in the Glass Booth, having snatched him from Argentina.  Max's target is Otto Schramm, whom he studied medicine with and who picked him out of line-up at Auschwitz to serve as an unwilling assistant.  At the same time a wave of the hand from Schramm sent Max's eight-year-old son to the gas chamber.  Now, on this autumn afternoon in Hamburg, taking coffee with his nephew, Max spots Schramm strolling in the park.  Schramm, who supposedly died in a car crash in Argentina two years ago.

Max suffers a heart attack and dies - but not before passing his mission in life to Aaron, who soon finds himself in Buenos Aires, seducing Schramm's daughter and working with both the CIA and Mossad to capture Schramm.

As always, the depth of Kanon's research is profound.  You absolutely believe what he tells you, not only the history and spycraft, but also the exotic settings.  Given that two key locations are vast municipal cemeteries in different hemispheres, you have to wonder how Kanon came by his insights.  Dedication, no doubt, is the answer.  The pace is expertly handled but we wouldn't care about the story if we didn't care about the characters, and we do, even the Nazis.  Another great achievement, a worthy addition to Kanon's impressive list.