The Coldest City

January 16, 2012
An espionage thriller set during the fall of the Berlin Wall paints an elaborate series of crosses and double-crosses that’s too tangled by its end. Lorraine Broughton is a British intelligence agent sent into Berlin to find out who killed British agent James Gascoine and recover a list of the identities of all intelligence officers operating on all sides in Berlin. She arrives in Berlin and discovers her local contact is an older, experienced agent who’s slow to trust the young woman sent to help him. And she finds she may not want to trust him, as he’s implicated in a secret organization of hired killers selling their skills to both sides. The investigation gets chaotic as the wall begins to be torn down, Broughton’s contacts begin turning up dead, and she’s forced to leave Berlin to report back to MI6 and attempt to figure out what went wrong. The conclusion becomes tangled in too many twists, and too many key pieces of information are revealed after the climax. Hart’s b&w art with minimal background details does create tense, character-focused visuals that use shadow well to play up the characters’ suspicions.