The Bookworm

December 11, 2017
Silver follows his well-received debut, 2007’s In Secret Service, with a disappointing conspiracy thriller. In Moscow, Russian scholar Larissa Klimt (the bookworm of the title) is researching documents seized by the Soviets from Hitler’s bunker—which makes her the perfect person to analyze six Dictaphone recordings “of testimony by one of the men who started the Great Patriotic War”: playwright and composer Noel Coward. Coward did spy for the British in real life, but in Silver’s telling he was also part of a disinformation campaign designed to persuade Hitler to focus on Russia and leave the Allies alone. Meanwhile, in London, an odd discovery on the site of a 1944 V-2 rocket strike presents another part of the puzzle for Larissa: the wrist bone of a person who was likely a spy courier, based on the rusty handcuff attached. Anthony Blunt, Ian Fleming, and John F. Kennedy also make cameo appearances, but the use of actual people doesn’t make this misguided rewrite of the history of WWII any more convincing, and it takes a snarky, light tone that doesn’t serve the material well.