NYC — Germany — Austria — Russia Setting
Enjoyed this chapters back + forth today / past — Little Spy intrigue
who is a spy for who? End is quick + tidies up many things — abruptly — leaves you wondering what next — 2 grand children together?!

Thomas Danforth has lived a fortunate life. The son of a wealthy importer, he traveled the world in his youth, and now, in his twenties, he lives in New York City and runs the family business. It is 1939, and the world is on the brink of war, but Danforth’s life is untroubled, his future assured. Then, on a snowy evening walk along Gramercy Park, a friend poses a fateful question.

4.5 stars... and I'll tell you why at the end.

If you are going to read Thomas H cook, bring your A-game. These are not books you can bluff your way through, skimming over some descriptive paragraphs, looking for "the action." Every word counts. You might have gotten away with that with some of his earlier works, sure. But those days are gone; Cook gets tighter and tighter with each tale.

If you pick up this book, settle in: this story is best read with no other distractions, in a couple short stints. You need to keep the tension, but you'll also need time to digest a bit, to mull over what you think of each character. They're plotting to assassinate Hitler in 1939. Yet some in their midst are playing games; no one is known enough to be trusted.

This story is an homage to things that seem lost to a bygone age: honor; loyalty; single-minded determination; commitment; the passion of true vengeance; a quest; and a love tested by the most brutal forces. It is a grand tale, told across 4 continents and almost 100 years, encompassing the horrors of the Armenian genocide up to September 11th. The characters Cook introduces us to are by all means extraordinary in their experiences and accomplishments. But he holds true by sharing their scars, not extolling them only as virtuous creatures or innocents or hapless victims.

The only flaw comes in the last couple paragraphs. The narrator (and thus the reader) finally learns the truth underpinning and tying together everything that makes Anna Klein, and thus what drives this story. But it refers back to a person mentioned once on page 166. If you do not remember this story, the impact of the reveal will be lost until you go back and find it. As much as I respect Cook for tying the story up so well, it was so deftly hidden that even a reader expecting a trick like that wasn't quite ready for it. Perhaps a second mention, even just in passing, to remind the reader of this presence, would have helped. Tom Danforth is circling back throughout his story, and this is the ultimate circling back. But while I caught every other one, this one eluded me. I had to find it, re-read that passage, and then re-read the last page to get the full impact.

I still highly recommend this novel, and any other book by Thomas H Cook. I have yet to be disappointed. He is an American treasure, and books like this should be read by everyone. It is one of the finest, purest examples of true literature I've come across in the past 5 years, up there with The Goldfinch. ( )

Thomas Danforth has spent much of his ninety-plus years seeking his own brand of vengeance. His tale begins in 1939, when he's recruited to provide cover for a fledgling American intelligence operation that will lead to the attempted assassination of a menacing tyrant named Adolf Hitler.

The younger Danforth figures to stand squarely with the good guys, but the real world of espionage seems beyond him until he meets a secretive and beautiful young spy-in-training, Anna Klein. The mystery of Anna lures Danforth to break from his pampered life and join her on the dangerous mission within Germany to kill Hitler. It’s a thrilling time for Danforth, alone with the girl he believes will give him a more dangerous but fulfilling love and life. Then the attempt fails and Danforth must flee, leaving Anna behind.

Danforth must find her. Throughout the war and beyond he embarks on a rabid and marathon quest that costs him nearly all. Anna might have been a double or even triple agent, he learns, and his pursuit takes him to postwar Europe and points East, a grim survey of the tragedies of twentieth-century Europe.

As more cruel questions confront Danforth, his search descends into an obsession with extracting vengeance at all costs. People have betrayed him. Could Anna have been at the heart of it all?

The best espionage and mystery novels are not about spies and plots and murders but about conflicted souls and the sorry truths they discover about the human condition. Quest offers fine glimpses of that, though the story may stall some readers looking for a fast-paced spy tale. The framed narrative creates many switches in time, the first third can be slow going as Danforth sets up his story, and it carries waves of foreboding and foreshadowing.

Sticking with Danforth will reward the reader. The last third moves faster and approaches the quality of espionage masters Le Carré, Furst and McCarry, yet with a profound style all its own. Author Thomas H. Cook knows when it’s time to unleash the raw story. He gives you no choice but to follow Danforth as he hurtles on through dark times that threaten to make him far from a savior and just another hopeless victim.

This is Cook’s first go at an espionage novel. It seems a unique angle for a spy story to have Danforth plow onward like a dogged and self-appointed detective, but it’s not unfamiliar territory for Cook, who has had a long and successful career writing crime and mystery novels.

The way the story’s told might split some opinions, but few can deny the novel’s thoughtful and compelling lesson about vengeance.

*A longer version of this review ran originally in the Noir Journal blog.* ( )

Disappointing ending. Took a long time to get there. ( )

In the aftermath of 9/11, a young security analyst is sent, as he writes, “from one stricken city to another” to interview Thomas Jefferson Danforth, an elderly man who claims that his experiences may help young Mr. Crane’s department keep the country safe in the face of new enemies. Crane is dubious but Danforth asked for him, so, on a snowy night in NYC, the men meet.
"But in the still-settling dust of the Towers' collapse, every corner was being searched, every source, no matter how remote and seemingly irrelevant, gleaned for information. The gyroscope at the center of our expertise had been struck by those planes - so the thinking went - and it had wobbled, and now all its movements had to be recalibrated."
The story swivels from their present to Danforth’s past as he relates his involvement with a group of ‘agents’ in the days before Europe is engulfed in WWII. One of these agents is Anna Klein who is being trained to be sent to Europe to help build the resistance to the Nazis. Danforth is a true novice to all of this, even with his extensive background of travel and an ease with languages. But he's impelled to be involved in the intrigue and to be closer to Anna, a mysterious, quiet and assured young woman. He is unprepared for his emotions: "It was a feeling he found curiously new and faintly alarming, like the first sensation of a narcotic one knew one must henceforth avoid." Ah, but he can't and won't avoid it and it will rule the rest of his life, his quest..”
As Danforth relates the events of six decades in the past, it becomes clear that Crane (and we) are in for a heady evening of philosophizing on love, death, duty, responsibility and, ultimately, revenge. How does an individual stand up to treachery – how does a country? In Danforth's case, by never giving up the search, never giving up his quest.
Tom Cook is a fluid and mesmerizing writer, as an Edgar-winner should be. He’s woven a dazzling narrative that moves through the decades toward events no one – not Danforth, not Crane and not us – can predict. As with the finest fiction, the story and the characters evolve during the course of the book, adapting and growing to fit the events and the story, even young Mr. Crane who is little more than a recorder of the story until…well, let me leave it at ‘until’.
"I had learned by then that Danforth strolled in and out of his story rather fluidly, as a man might drift from one room to another in a sprawling house. There was no fanfare attached to these transitions, nothing to signal a new chapter save a sudden play in his eyes, a tiny light going on or off. Anna seemed always a lingering presence in everything he said, a ghost that followed him no matter where he went. Or was he following the ghost, shifting here or there whenever she beckoned him with some gesture only he could see?”
We're all guided by our ghosts - as individuals, as a nation - all of us. Thomas Cook has given us a breathtakingly rewarding and cautionary story of the benefits, demands and costs of following our quests. ( )