Despite my preferecne of reading a character of series in order I decided to read Red Star Rising without having read any of the previous books.

It turned out to be classic cold war spy fiction even though it was set in post war Europe. Here is the plot summary from the dust jacket:

The body of a murdered, tortured Russian has been found in Moscow, which isn’t unusual in the crime-ridden city. What is different is that this corpse is on the lawn of the British embassy.

Eager to prevent an international incident, London dispatches veteran MI5 agent Charlie Muffin to investigate. Charlie is an old hand who recognizes that little has changed in the post–Soviet Union, most definitely not the espionage enmity between Russia, Britain, and America. The search for the identity of the murdered man enmeshes Charlie in what might be the biggest attempted espionage coup of his career.

Being in Moscow has very personal implications for Charlie, too. It provides the opportunity for a re-union with his Russian wife, Natalia, and their young daughter, whom he had to abandon because of a hurried recall to the UK five years earlier. It’s also the chance to persuade the reluctant Natalia, an officer in Russia’s FSB intelligence service, to return with him to London.

In classic spy fiction fashion Charlie is fighting the bad guys, often his superiors and his own demons/past. On top of this you have a constantly shifting set of puzzle pieces that he has to put together.

On a basic level there is the mystery of the dead body. On another level is the internal-politics and security of the embassy. And over it all is the geopolitical maneuvering motivating it all. And if this is not enough Charlie is attempting to put his family back together.

Freemantle does a good job of weaving all of this threads together and keeping the pace moving. Just when you think you have a handle on what is going on the puzzle pieces move and you have to rethink. And it is never clear, to Charlie or the reader, just exactly what Charlie really wants professionally or personaly.

Booklist has a nice description of Charlie and the book:

Alternately cautious and daring, self-critical, pragmatic, and fatalistically idealistic, the maverick Muffin will appeal to fans of John le Carré’s George Smiley and to readers of classic espionage novels. The USSR is now Russia, and the KGB is now the FSB, but this is still a story of telephone booths and old-school spycraft—old-school quality, too.

If I had one complaint it was that the twists and turns at the end threatened to overwhelm the story. It gets rather complicated and convoluted by the end. Freemantle pulls it off but it is a bit much.

That aside, fans of classic espionage fiction will enjoy this version updated to the post-cold war world.

Cover of The Ghost War

You had to think Alex Berenson felt a little pressure on his second book.  The first won an Edgar Award after all and ended with its hero saving New York City from a biological attack.  How to top that?

In The Ghost War Berenson continues the exploits of John Wells while mixing in a little more geopolitical tension.  Here is how Publishers Weekly describes it:

Having foiled an al-Qaeda plot targeting Times Square in 2006′s The Faithful Spy (which won an Edgar Award for best first novel), maverick CIA agent John Wells confronts a very different threat in this pulse-pounding sequel from New York Times reporter Berenson. When the CIA’s efforts to extract Dr. Sung Kwan, a North Korean scientist and an invaluable source on Kim Jong Il’s nuclear ambitions, result in the deaths of Kwan and the rescue team, Wells’s significant other, Jennifer Exley, searches to identify the person in U.S. intelligence who compromised Kwan’s security. Meanwhile, Wells returns to Afghanistan, the scene of much of the action in The Faithful Spy, to find out what outside country has been helping the Taliban reassert itself. While the mole hunt will be familiar to genre buffs and the characters and the perils they face aren’t as nuanced as those in John le Carré or even David Ignatius, the author’s plausible scenario distinguishes this from most spy thrillers.

If the first book was focused on the character of Wells, the second book is propelled more by the looming conflict between China and the US.  It also introduces the stress and strains involved in the relationship between Wells and Exley.

Berenson continues to give you a variety of perspectives as you see the action through the eyes of multiple characters.  As the plot points touched on by PW above reveal, he builds up a series of seemingly unrelated but ultimately interconnected threats and/or plot threads.  North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, and China all play a part.

But the big picture is China.  The tension builds as Berenson lays out a plausible scenario whereby the US and China could find themselves on the brink of war.

More below.Robert Kaplan notes the strengths and weakness of Berenson well in his NYT review of The Ghost War.  First, the good:

In “The Ghost War,” the New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has fashioned a smart, economically written spy novel that imagines a future clash with the Chinese. As such, it’s a novel for policy wonks, with a very sophisticated vision of how a conflict with China could come about, akin to the kind of war-gaming scenarios that occupy Washington strategists.

[. . .]

The plot moves quickly, in tight, essayistic paragraphs that show Berenson’s command of such disparate worlds as the United States Navy and Chinese migrant workers. I once spent a month aboard a destroyer in the Pacific and can attest to the accuracy of the author’s portrayal of one. His description of a semi-starving Chinese laborer who starts a riot, and whose only memory of home and his dead parents is a baseball hat that a policeman grabs from him, is vivid and moving.

And then the not so good:

Like many novels of this genre, “The Ghost War” is too mechanical in its plot and lacks the baroque character development for which John le Carré is famous. The protagonist, a Central Intelligence Agency officer named John Wells, is a two-dimensional variation of derring-do types common to other spy books. (Much more successful is Berenson’s study of the American mole, Keith Robinson, whose family tragedy leads him in stages to betray his country.) Moreover, the lavish descriptions of military technicalities can sometimes be distracting from the plot and the characters themselves. But Berenson is not trying to be le Carré. Rather, he displays a reporter’s fine awareness of headlines over the horizon.

How much you want to bet Berenson is tired of the le Carre thing?

But Kapaln, and PW, make a valid point.  Berenson’s books are not in the more literary vein of spy fiction.  They are geopolitical; reporting with a fictional thriller twist for entertainment.

John Wells had an interesting start as the first Western spy to infiltrate Al Qaeda, but he isn’t a particularly deep character.  I think Berenson makes up for this with what Kaplan calls “tight, essayistic paragraphs.”  The characters may lack depth but the story has a wide perspective and a pace that limits the harm.  The characters aren’t really the point so much as the larger story.  The fact that the big picture story fits together in a plausible and exciting way is what gives the books their force.

The climatic, twisting and turning ending of the first book set a high bar for its sequel.  And despite any minor quibbles or complaints, The Ghost War clearly cleared that hurdle in my opinion.  It has a unique and plausible plot with plenty of action and suspense.

As Kaplan notes, Berenson takes newspaper headlines and imagines how those tensions and conflict might play out behind the scenes.  The result is entertaining and even thought provoking.  So let’s leave le Carre out of it from now on.