Liberation Movements

Five actors divide narrative duties in this beautifully produced story, which begins with a plane to Istanbul hijacked by Armenian terrorists. That the plane then explodes in midair surprises many, including the men behind the hijacking. Sorting out what happened and why leads back to a murder in Prague seven years before. Bo Foxworth, Lorna Raver, Robertson Dean, and Jane Jacobs all do wonderful evocative work portraying the investigators of the explosion, their superiors, who seem to know more than they're telling, and assorted loves and spouses of the main players in this fascinating Cold War noir. Only Yuri Rasovsky sounds inappropriately more east Brooklyn than Eastern European, but his part is not large and brackets otherwise absorbing performances of an intriguing and memorable thriller. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Starred review from May 15, 2006
Steinhauer's dazzling fourth book in his series about various police and intelligence agents in an unnamed Communist-era Eastern European country gives a large role to Brano Sev, the seriously conflicted spy who starred in the previous entry, 36 Yalta Boulevard
(2005). Sev sums up the new book's theme when he says to a younger subordinate, "Intelligence work is precisely what it says—it's about intelligence. We are not murderers." There's some irony here: we know that Sev has killed several people himself. But there's also an unexpected note of humanity, as Sev supervises the investigation by two junior agents of a murder in Russian-occupied Prague in 1968 that's later tied to a plane hijacked by Armenian terrorists on its way to Istanbul in 1975. Another new element is the Turkish capital, alive and yeasty compared to the drab, restricted home city of 36 Yalta Boulevard
. And the emergence of a major female character—a homicide investigator looking for personal justice—shows how a skilled writer working at the top of his form can keep a series from faltering.

May 15, 2007
Steinhauer continues his series about crime and political intrigue in a fictional Eastern European country with this fourth entry featuring Brano Sev, the hero from Steinhauer's last book,36 Yalta Boulevard . Brano is now a colonel in the Ministry of State Security and is overseeing the investigation of a hijacking of a plane that exploded in midair en route to Istanbul. The mysterious case gains momentum when the investigating officers learn that the hijacking is connected to a seven-year-old murder. The personal lives of the investigators come into play as Gavras Noukas harbors a secret that could jeopardize his career, and militiawoman Katja Drdova arrives on the scene with a hidden agenda of personal justice. Steinhauer's use of alternating time periods and tenses and events happening out of sequence demand the listener's full attention and make this work, read by Bo Foxworth and others, a complicated, taut, and suspenseful listening experience. For public libraries.Phillip Oliver, Univ. of North Alabama Lib., Florence

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