A Single Spy
گزارش تخلف
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
February 6, 2017
Alexsi Smirnov, the engaging hero of this impressive spy thriller set in the 1930s and ’40s from Christie (The Warriors of God), grows up in Soviet Azerbaijan, where he becomes a master thief and a master cynic. An orphan, he’s adopted by the Shultzes, a family of German socialists who immigrate to the Soviet Union only to be annihilated in a purge. In 1936, the Russians capture the 16-year-old Alexsi and pack him off to Moscow. Spared Siberia because of his brains and his linguistic talents (Russian, Farsi, German), he becomes a Soviet spy. Alexsi’s mission is to pose as the surviving Shultz son, return to Germany and his well-to-do “uncle” (a high official in the German foreign ministry), then infiltrate Nazi intelligence. Christie deserves credit for making that unlikely scenario remotely believable. The larger plot, somewhat too slow in development, involves the famous meeting of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in Tehran in 1943, but what carries the book is an intelligent understanding of political terrorism and the spy’s tradecraft. Agent: Richard Curtis, Richard Curtis Associates.
Narrator Ari Fliakos crafts unique voices and personas for key Russians and Germans in this pre-WWII spy story. Alexsi Ivanovich Smirnov is not a typical spy. Orphaned as a child, Smirnov uses his superior intellect to develop survival skills that so impress the NKVD Russian spy agency that it recruits him to serve as a double agent in the buildup to WWII. Although the audiobook starts slowly, once it moves from Smirnov's troubled childhood to his teenage years and then to his assignment in Germany, the plot, pace, and dialogue never relent. As characters reappear, listeners will appreciate Fliakos's earlier efforts to define every person. By the novel's unpredictable ending, listeners will be completely hooked on Fliakos's every word. D.J.S. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
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