Boris Starling, Visibility

Visibility

Boris Starling

Dutton, Mar 2007, $25.95

ISBN: 0525949968

In 1952 former M15 operative, Herbert Smith works as a homicide detective with the Metropolitan Police's Murder Squad. His current case seems like a no-brainer accident caused by the thick fog; a man drowned in a Kensington Gardens pond.

However instead of closing the book, Smith tries to at least uncover the identity of the dead floater. He succeeds as the deceased is King's College graduate student Max Stensness. The sleuth also learns that Max was gay and an active member of the Communist Party. Smith finds a tie to his former M15 boss, odious Richard de Vere Green. Hating Green whose treachery cost him his MI5 position, Smith keeps digging, hoping to destroy his sneaky, deceitful supervisor. Smith begins to find a connection to the Russians and the Americans as Stensness was apparently selling top-secret DNA information to the highest bidder, but the detective wonders if Green was the silent partner.

Using real people like double Nobel Prize winner Pauling and incognito Nazi criminal Mengele to anchor the 1950s anti-Communist fervor that swept America (McCarthy-era sounds similar to today's official scares) and somewhat England, Boris Starling provides readers with an exciting, deep-espionage thriller. The storyline looks at the salad days of DNA research combining it with the Red scare and the WWII aftermath still devastatingly visible in foggy London. Readers will appreciate this fast-paced period piece that grips the audience with a whodunit spy thriller.

Harriet Klausner