Olen's Steinhauer's acclaimed first two novels, The Bridge of Sighs and The Confession, have garnered thus far an Edgar nomination, an Anthony nomination, a Macavity nomination, a Historical Dagger nomination, and starred reviews everywhere. Now he takes this superb literary series set in a nameless Eastern European country into the 1960s.
State Security Officer Brano Sev is the secretive member of the homicide department of the capital's people's militia. No one else quite trusts him, but it is part of his job to do what the authorities ask, no matter what. So when he gets an order to travel to the village of his birth in order to interrogate a potential defector, he goes. When a man turns up dead shortly after he arrives and Brano is framed for the murder, he assumes this is part of the plan and allows it to run its course. But when the plan leads him into exile in Vienna, he finally begins to ask questions.
In fact, Comrade Brano Sev learns that loyalty to the cause might be the biggest crime of all.
After being framed for murder, convicted, and sent to work in a factory, Brano Sev, agent for an unnamed Eastern Bloc state, begins to question what his bosses at the Ministry of State Security are up to. Yuri Rasovsky's performance meticulously develops the existential plight of the middle-aged spy, using an imaginative collection of personalities to build the double-dealings and betrayals inherent in the business. Rasovsky's character voices range from wheezy to gravelly, from high-pitched to dark and sinister as Sev slips in and out of the perils of paranoia in this tightly plotted thriller. Rasovsky's intelligent grasp of the convoluted material places both a complex puzzle and its solution within reach. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
Olen Steinhauer was raised in Virginia and Texas and attended Emerson College. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship that enabled him to live in Romania for ten months and provided the impetus for a lifelong fascination with Eastern Europe. He currently lives in Hungary.
