Edward Wilson has crafted another winner with "SOUTH ATLANTIC REQUIEM."

William Catesby, the redoubtable and resourceful veteran MI-6 agent, polyglot, and ever faithful servant of Her Majesty's Government, takes center stage once more. The time is 1979. A new Conservative government has taken power in Britain and is set on shaking things up. And that entails substantial cuts in the defense budget.

There is also a military dictatorship in Argentina eyeing a group of offshore islands -- the Falklands -- that have been under British sovereignty for close to 150 years. The Argentines have long regarded these islands as theirs - las Malvinas. But they have been reluctant to challenge British power for decades. That is, until the change of government in Whitehall. The Prime Minister - Margaret Thatcher - doesn't regard the Falklands as vital to Britain's strategic interests. There are some low level talks between the British and Argentines that hint at putting into place a gradual turnover of the Falklands to Argentina.

Catesby has been made head of operations in South America. Events between 1979 and early 1982 lead to a simmering crisis between Whitehall and Buenos Aires. After Thatcher has ordered the withdrawal of a Royal Navy ship (HMS Endurance) -- which had been patrolling the waters surrounding the Falklands -- the ruling Junta in Argentina busies itself with making plans to seize the Falklands. Catesby has -- through the use in Buenos Aires of a young, savvy, assertive Cambridge graduate (Fiona Stewart - who also displays a facility for languages) he had hired as a part-time agent to keep tabs on the Junta -- kept his ears alert to subtle changes in the political climate. Miss Stewart for a time provides MI-6 with valuable intelligence -- through contacts she has developed among some members of the Argentine government and military (many of them young officers, one of whom - a naval aviator and champion polo player - she falls in love with; the feelings are mutual). But the situation changes and Catesby's intelligence source fades to black --- for reasons that one can discover as the story progresses.

The novel goes on to provide some very revealing insights into how it was that Argentina and Britain went to war over the Falklands in the Spring of 1982. As someone who lived through that time and has some memory of that conflict, I very much enjoyed the way Wilson showed how events unfolded from a variety of personalities and perspectives in the UK, Europe, South America, and Washington.

All in all, "SOUTH ATLANTIC REQUIEM" was a thoroughly satisfying, exciting, and sobering Cold War novel.

“A HERO IN FRANCE” is a story set during the early months of the German Occupation of France during the Second World War.     It is centered around a Frenchman with the nom de guerre “Mathieu” who has cast off the trappings of his previous life in Paris to join the ranks of the Resistance.   Mathieu is in his early 40s, fairly fit, resourceful, tough, determined, yet not without charm and a knack for making friends in the most interesting places.     Unlike most French people, who at this stage of the war (the novel begins in a wintry, melancholic Paris in March 1941) were largely resigned to the defeat France had suffered at the hands of the Third Reich in June 1940, Mathieu is determined to fight the Germans any way he can.   To this end, he has been part of a network that has formed a pipeline between the Occupied Zone and Vichy France, spiriting downed RAF (Royal Air Force) flyers out of France into Spain, where they would be repatriated back to the UK.  

Resistance activities had started off on a very small scale from late 1940.   But as the months wore on, the Germans began to show their impatience and frustration from their efforts to discourage random acts of vandalism, the occasional murder of a German officer, and sabotage.   Thus, a police inspector from Hamburg was enlisted by Berlin to go to Paris (as a temporary major in the Feldgendarmerie, the German Army Military Police) and see what he could do to break up the Resistance pipeline of which Mathieu is an instrumental part.  

What I like about an Alan Furst novel is his knack for evoking the atmosphere of German-occupied Europe and creating a set of characters who struggle to survive, endure, and fight the Nazi yoke.   Anyone who wants to lose him/herself in a taut, well-told story rich with cinematic overtones, look no further.   “A HERO IN FRANCE” is the novel for you.

Edward Wilson has again crafted an engaging, well-paced, and thrilling novel that brings back William Catesby, a sentimental yet coldly efficient agent in Britain's MI-6. Shuttling from West Germany to London, to Havana, and onward to Washington between October 1960 and the final week of October 1962 (when the world was on the brink of nuclear war), Catesby is given a thankless, yet vital task. That is, to make clandestine contacts and "offer Moscow a secret deal to break the deadlock" between it and Washington. One of the observations he makes during his service in Havana is the following: "The most interesting aspect of international relations wasn’t the conflict between enemies, but the conflicts between allies. You only had to go to an embassy cocktail party to see those conflicts in the flesh. It was easier for Western diplos to talk to the Russians than to talk to each other."

Cross, double-cross, love, the clear and present threat of war balanced against the preciousness of peace . Taken together, all these elements faithfully evoke the spirit of the early 1960s. Wilson has this uncanny skill for blending in fiction with history that will have the reader wondering how much more there may have been to the Cold War beyond what is the common narrative surrounding it today. Read "THE MIDNIGHT SWIMMER" and be amazed.

I finished reading "THE WHITEHALL MANDARIN" this afternoon. What can I say? The ending was totally unexpected and yet, strangely appropriate given the deceit and treachery carried out by some of the main characters in the novel. One of whom was from the upper-crust of British society and occupied a very powerful position in the British government of that time. (We are talking about the mid to late 1960s.)

Again the author Edward Wilson mixed in both fiction and historical facts so well that it was sometimes hard for me to distinguish between what was historically true and what was fictional. Events like the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s, China's "Great Leap Forward" program - which led to the deaths of 35 million people between 1958 and 1963, the Cuban Missile Crisis (in which brief mention was made by the author of the role played in diffusing that crisis by the British MI-6 agent and polyglot William Catesby, one of the most interesting fictional spies I've ever read about who figures in most of Wilson's spy novels), a major sex/espionage scandal in the UK in the early 1960s that was kept under wraps - a direct parallel to the Profumo Scandal, China getting both the A-bomb and the hydrogen bomb in less time than it took for the U.S. and the Soviet Union to develop them), and the Vietnam War.

"THE WHITEHALL MANDARIN" is a novel that, once read, you'll want to return to again and again because it has so many fascinating layers that will make the reader want to re-examine what the Cold War was all about.