36 Yalta Boulevard

After being framed for murder, convicted, and sent to work in a factory, Brano Sev, agent for an unnamed Eastern Bloc state, begins to question what his bosses at the Ministry of State Security are up to. Yuri Rasovsky's performance meticulously develops the existential plight of the middle-aged spy, using an imaginative collection of personalities to build the double-dealings and betrayals inherent in the business. Rasovsky's character voices range from wheezy to gravelly, from high-pitched to dark and sinister as Sev slips in and out of the perils of paranoia in this tightly plotted thriller. Rasovsky's intelligent grasp of the convoluted material places both a complex puzzle and its solution within reach. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

March 28, 2005
Did Brano Sev, an agent of an unnamed Eastern European country, kill Bertrand Richter in Vienna in the 1960s? Or was he set up by his superiors at the Ministry of State Security, the headquarters of his service located at the address that gives Edgar-finalist Steinhauer's uneven third novel its title? And why does he have a slip of paper with the name Dijana Frankovic on it when he wakes up, bewildered, in a Vienna park? Even Sev doesn't know—amnesia!—but the consequences are all too clear: he's demoted to a dead-end factory job, "fitting electrical wires into gauges so that the machines of socialist agriculture would never fail." (The author ably captures socialist rhetoric.) Sev gets a chance at redemption, and the opportunity to find out what really happened, when the ministry sends him home, to the provincial town of Bóbrka, to investigate a possible double agent, Jan Soroka. While the details of life behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War ring true, some readers may find the flawed Sev too undeveloped a character to care about his fate. The real story involves Sev's father, who left the country under suspicion of collaboration after WWII, but the plot's Byzantine complexity, more confusing than intriguing, clouds that classic father-son drama. Agent, Matt Williams at the Gernert Company. Author tour.