Need to Know by Karen Cleveland

Title: Need to Know

Author: Karen Cleveland

Genre: Spy Thriller

Vivian is a CIA analyst. She has been working on the Russia account, trying to find sleeper cells of Russian spies within U.S. communities. When she finds a picture of her husband included in a group of potential spies what should she do? Can she trust him anymore? What will it cost her to do the 'right' thing for her family of four young children? This page-turner will keep you wondering beyond the final page...

- Elizabeth

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HHhH by Laurent Binet

How is it possible to write an entertaining book about Reinhard Heydrich, “Hitler’s Hangman,” “the Blond Beast,” the architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution? Lawrence Binet has done so by writing a Metafiction in which the subject of the book is the actual writing of the book.  HHhH (Himmler’s Hirn Heist Heydrich or Himmler’s Brain is Called Heydrich,) is a fictional recounting of the attempted assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by two Czechoslovakian partisans. By making this story his own story, the author is able to distance the reader from the tension and horror of the actual story, that is, until the end. The bare bones of the plot are that in late 1941, three men parachuted into German-occupied Czechoslovakia for the purpose of assassinating Heydrich and in mid-1942 made their attempt. But by inserting himself into the book, the author has made the story into so much more. In the course of explaining the history of Nazism and the beginnings of World War II, he makes the book an examination of courage, cowardice, wisdom and stupidity.

Pavel and I by Dan Vyleta

Berlin was a grim place to live in 1946. A bitterly cold winter made the post-war shortages of food, shelter, clothing and coal nearly unendurable. Despite these conditions, Pavel Richter, a demobilized American soldier, has inexplicably chosen to remain in Berlin. The Cold War had already begun and Pavel finds himself caught between British and Russian spies as they struggle for power and information. When Pavel agrees to help a fellow American hide the body of a Russian spy, he puts his own life at risk as well as those of his two German friends: Anders, an orphan living with other street urchins, and Sonia, a woman who has turned to prostitution in order to survive. Particularly dangerous to them is the sadistic Colonel Fosko, a British officer who has gone rogue and will stop at nothing to obtain what the Russian spy may have had when he died. As the tension and violence mount, and Pavel becomes trapped in the Colonel’s ever-tightening ring of intrigue, the mysterious “I” of Pavel and I eventually reveals his identity and motive. But Pavel remains a cypher to the end.