In a city perched between East and West, and with the Cold War growing colder every day, people are still getting killed because of the last war.
Hitler is dead, Germany is dismembered, the entire Western intelligence operation is focused on the growing Soviet threat — and yet, there are people in Istanbul who remain fixated on a war that was supposed to be over. Fixated, and firing away. It is in this maelstrom that Alex Kovacs finds himself in a new thriller by author Richard Wake.
Alex is doing his best to settle into the life he has chosen, or that has chosen him. He is an espionage agent for the Gehlen Organization, a shadowy group of former German military officers who are being funded by the United States because of their ability to gather information about the Soviets in the East. Istanbul, then as now, was a crossroads …
In a city perched between East and West, and with the Cold War growing colder every day, people are still getting killed because of the last war.
Hitler is dead, Germany is dismembered, the entire Western intelligence operation is focused on the growing Soviet threat — and yet, there are people in Istanbul who remain fixated on a war that was supposed to be over. Fixated, and firing away. It is in this maelstrom that Alex Kovacs finds himself in a new thriller by author Richard Wake.
Alex is doing his best to settle into the life he has chosen, or that has chosen him. He is an espionage agent for the Gehlen Organization, a shadowy group of former German military officers who are being funded by the United States because of their ability to gather information about the Soviets in the East. Istanbul, then as now, was a crossroads between civilizations and ideologies, and Alex expected his job to revolve around that East vs West standoff. He never could have expected it would be the place where a continuing blood feud between Nazis and their opponents was still being played out, and that he would be drawn into the middle of it.
And yet, there he was. One day, Alex would negotiate with a Turkish industrialist determined to keep the Nazi cause alive with an underground army he wanted to build. The next day, he would fence with the Turkish secret police, a brutal organization tasked with keeping some sense of balance as the East vs West confrontation played out on its soil. And then, when an acquaintance of his ends up dead in a brutal attack, Alex is forced to confront again all of the emotions that have driven him for years — specifically, the tension between revenge and justice. It is a tension that nearly tore him apart earlier, and now he is forced to confront it again, this time in the ancient city divided by the half in Europe, half in Asia, entirely in the shadows of history.
Adrift in Istanbul is the ninth novel in the Alex Kovacs thriller series. In a relatively short time, author Richard Wake has sold more than 150,000 copies of his works, earning hundreds of 5-star reviews from readers who compare his books to those of a couple of Wake’s writing heroes, Philip Kerr and Alan Furst
One of the cities that have been on my "to see" agenda for a long time but never had to opportunity to concretize.
The novel is reminds one of Philip Kerr but if that was Wake's model he missed the mark by quite a bit. Where Kerr's work reveals a deep knowledge of Berlin and long research on the history of that period, Wake's work remains shallow at best, both in it's description of a city that has the reputation of being one of this planet's jewels and in his depiction of historical circumstances back then.
