The Patriot - Hardcover

Read (Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx) is a fine, sometimes masterful, novelist?but a savvy thriller-writer he's not, as evidenced by this plunge into the genre set amongst spies and revolutionaries in the Berlin and Moscow of the early 1990s. As Berlin police investigate the gruesome torture-murder of a Russian couple dealing in smuggled icons, a KGB agent pursues a maverick former colleague. Meanwhile, Francesca McDermott, an American art historian, arrives in Berlin to organize a huge retrospective exhibition of work by Russian artists who had been suppressed or driven out by Communists. As these plot lines begin to connect, it seems that McDermott is in danger of being used as a pawn in an elaborate scheme by anti-reformist Russian patriots to bankroll a rebellion against their country's pro-West realignment. But none of the characters here displays the life force of some earlier Read protagonists, and the plotting itself is flawed: several key story elements are contrived and the major twists and surprises are telegraphed. Read brings his usual erudition and insight to this book, commenting insightfully on the ideological identity crises at play as anti-Communists discover the flaws of Western capitalism. If only he'd brought the knack for plotting that can render gripping even a thriller as unsophisticated as the typical Ludlum or Higgins, he might have produced a more memorable novel.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The systematic looting and pillaging of the art treasures of Europe and Russia during World War II is the foundation for this slick, present-day thriller about an unbelievably gutsy art heist. Read, a prolific novelist as well as the author of Alive (1979) and Ablaze (1993), a book about Chernobyl, uses a classic two-strand plot structure. One involves an attractive, ambitious, female American art historian who has been invited to Berlin to curate a groundbreaking exhibition of modern Russian art. Francesca is excited about the project, but there are some curious anomalies. For starters, there's the impossibly tight schedule, and then there's our heroine's "dashing" Russian colleague, who seems too intense, athletic, and mysterious for a scholar. Meanwhile, as this unlikely duo blends work with romance, a Russian agent, formerly of the KGB, conducts a seemingly lackadaisical search for a missing operative believed to be plotting a Communist resurgence bankrolled with a cache of stolen paintings. So it's "art for art's sake" versus socialist power plays in this lively mix of art history, espionage, and doomed love. Donna Seaman