Masaryk Station

July 15, 2013
Downing's anticlimactic sixth and final John Russell thriller (after 2012's Lehrter Station) opens with a horrific scene: one night in the winter of 1948, two Russians abduct two German sisters and drive them to a grand house outside Berlin, where one sister is shot dead, the other raped. Meanwhile, Russell is in Trieste, helping the Americans interrogate possible war criminals, while his wife, Effi, is in Berlin, working as an actress and raising their 11-year-old adopted daughter, Rosa, whose parents were killed during the war. Their parallel stories unfold with Downing's characteristically solid prose and exhaustive knowledge of post-WWII Europe. There's plenty of intrigue, but not nearly enough action until Russell interviews a Russian, a self-described technician with cinematic expertise, who claims to have a film of the German girl's murder. The pace of the book accelerates and generates some palpable suspense that features the Prague railway station of the title. Agent: Charlie Viney, Viney Agency.

September 15, 2013
Downing returns with another taut tale of espionage as World War II shades deeper into the Cold War and good guys get harder to tell from bad. Named, as with the five books preceding in his series, for a continental European train station, Downing's latest finds hero--or antihero, for he's of a John Le Carre cast of dubious servant--John Russell struggling to keep from being found out. He's a double agent, you see, working for both Joseph Stalin and Harry S. Truman in the fraught year of 1948, and there are plenty of people gunning for him. Ostensibly a journalist, Russell has a talent for getting people to open up to him, a talent that may prove his undoing. The station in question is in Prague on the way to the Balkans, where some particularly unpleasant opponents of the rising Tito regime ("they had routinely committed atrocities the Nazis would have shrunk from") are doing particularly unpleasant things. Of course, the Soviets are intriguing against Tito, too, as is the CIA, which makes for some particularly unlikely bedfellows as the story progresses. Russell isn't necessarily likable, but he's certainly believable, as are his motives--chief among them keeping his beloved Effi, a German actress, and their child alive and well. Downing writes with a sure grasp of the way bad situations become worse ("Oh, shit, Russell thought, a psychopath with an identity crisis"); he's a master of heightened tension and the sweat-bedewed upper lip, and he shares with Le Carre a cynical sense that no matter how things turn out, the wrong people will have carried the day. The local color and cigarette smoke are thick, and so is the plot, with fine MacGuffins, a truly red herring or two, and even a man in the boot to keep things interesting. Will Russell want to face another narrow scrape? By every evidence, this ends the series--but Downing seems to leave room for another adventure. Stay tuned.

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Starred review from March 15, 2013

The sixth novel in the John Russell series (after Lehrter Station) opens in 1948 with postwar Berlin and Eastern Europe in disarray. The Soviets are trying to force the three Allied powers out of Berlin, seize power in Prague, and control Marshall Tito in Yugoslavia. John Russell's situation is just as complex: The Brits and the Americans think he's their double agent, working against the Soviets while pretending otherwise, and the Soviets think the reverse. But Russell is working only for himself and family. Posing as a journalist, he carries out missions in Trieste, Belgrade, and Prague, where a film of a top Soviet official killing a young girl promises to liberate both Russell and his Soviet control, Yevgeny Shchepkin, from their masters. Meanwhile, Russell's wife, Effi, an actress, faces her own challenges. VERDICT Downing's outstanding evocation of the times (as masterly as that found in Alan Furst's novels or Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series), thematic complexity (as rich as that of John le Carre), and the wide assortment of fully rendered characters provide as much or more pleasure than the plot, where disparate threads are tied together in satisfying and unexpected ways.--Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

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