The Girl in Berlin

Starred review from August 19, 2013
British author Wilson masterfully uses misdirection and distraction in this clever tale of espionage and morality, a marked improvement over her two earlier post-WWII novels, The Twilight Hour and War Damage. In 1951, as Britain reacts in shock to the disappearance of suspected Soviet moles Burgess and Maclean, disgraced Communist Party member Colin Harris returns to London from his sojourn in East Berlin, where his activities attracted the attention of the intelligence community. Meanwhile, Jack McGovern of Special Branch, a product of the left-wing working class, is recruited for a counter-intelligence operation: a hunt for a suspected mole that will drag him to East Berlin. There, McGovern will be lucky not to join the mounting list of murder victims. Grand themes of global conflict prove to be mere background for a myriad of personal agendas, as the innocent are sacrificed for expediency and the powerful kid themselves that their days of reckoning will never arrive. Agent: Faith Evans, Faith Evans Associates (U.K.).

September 15, 2013
In the summer of 1951, British intelligence officer Guy Burgess and diplomat Donald Maclean have disappeared and will soon be revealed as Soviet agents. Concern over communist infiltration of British society is running rampant when Colin Harris, a party member, returns from East Berlin, announcing that he is engaged to a German woman and needs the help of his friends Dinah and Alan Wentworth in getting his fianc'e out of Berlin. Meanwhile, Jack McGovern of Special Branch is hunting the murderer of a leftist intellectual and sees Harris at the man's funeral. Soon McGovern is assigned to work with an MI5 agent who is tracking a mole in his outfit. McGovern, a fish out of water in the international intelligence game, goes to Berlin to meet with Harris' fianc'e and quickly finds himself stumbling about the ravaged city, a discordant mixture of bomb site and building site. The key secret is easy to spot, but Wilson does a fine job of evoking the creepy paranoia of the early Cold War yearssubtexts humming under every exchange, duplicity seeming to breed in the rubble. A must for fans of the superb BBC drama The Hour.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)