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.

The Burning Sky - Jack Ludlow

The first volume in the Roads to War trilogy, Ludlow has created a gentleman adventurer in the manner of Buchan's Richard Hannay (Cal Jardine even has a Scots heritage) but has updated the genre.  Jardine is not always a gentleman (see the eyebrow raising scene with a very different M) but largely so.  He is footloose and fancy free after an equivocal divorce and occupying himself by smuggling Jews out of Hamburg in 1935.  He is approached by a former comrade to get involved in smuggling arms to Abyssinia, which Mussolini has just invaded.

Ludlow is one of the pen names of David Donachie, who has knocked out several historical series under several names.  Given the number of titles we cannot expect high literature, but his prose is just about acceptable (far too many subordinate clauses for my liking).  His characterisation is good, though, and his research impeccable.  He gets to the nub of 1930s atrocities and his judgement is sound.  I especially enjoyed the ambivalent ending.  For Buchan everything was always sorted by the end, good always won, and the British way triumphed.  That is not the case here and it is that authorial choice that has me keen to read the next volume of the trilogy.

A Most Wanted Man - John le Carre

I liked this 2008 thriller much more than le Carre's latest, Our Kind of Traitor.  This is absolutely le Carre's home turf and these are quintessential characters about their customary murky business.

All the characters here are empathetic, even the mysterious and deeply troubled Issa who foists himself on a Turkish family in Hamburg, wrecks the life of human rights lawyer Annabel and rattles unwanted skeletons out of the ancestral closet of ex-pat British private investment banker Tommy Brue.  (How do you make a millionaire private investment banker sympathetic?  Give him to John le Carre.)

Issa is the eponymous wanted man - wanted by authorities and quasi-legal organisations all over Europe and beyond.  Is he an evil man?  Is Dr Abdullah, the 95% moral media Muslim who gets sucked into his ambit, a duplicitous crook?  Are the secret services justified in setting them up?  This is the beauty of le Carre at his very best - we never know.  And the ending, which obviously I won't reveal here, is simply perfect.  None of this what happened next or what became of our heroes flummery.  It happens, it's over, the book stops dead.

Written at the height of the war on terror and immediately before the intercontinental criminality of the banking world fell apart, A Most Wanted Man couldn't be relevant.  A movie version is apparently in the works.  Let's hope for great things.