The Patriot

Read (Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx) is a fine, sometimes masterful, novelist--but a savvy thriller-writer he's not, as evidenced by this plunge into the genre set amongst spies and revolutionaries in the Berlin and Moscow of the early 1990s. As Berlin police investigate the gruesome torture-murder of a Russian couple dealing in smuggled icons, a KGB agent pursues a maverick former colleague. Meanwhile, Francesca McDermott, an American art historian, arrives in Berlin to organize a huge retrospective exhibition of work by Russian artists who had been suppressed or driven out by Communists. As these plot lines begin to connect, it seems that McDermott is in danger of being used as a pawn in an elaborate scheme by anti-reformist Russian patriots to bankroll a rebellion against their country's pro-West realignment. But none of the characters here displays the life force of some earlier Read protagonists, and the plotting itself is flawed: several key story elements are contrived and the major twists and surprises are telegraphed. Read brings his usual erudition and insight to this book, commenting insightfully on the ideological identity crises at play as anti-Communists discover the flaws of Western capitalism. If only he'd brought the knack for plotting that can render gripping even a thriller as unsophisticated as the typical Ludlum or Higgins, he might have produced a more memorable novel. (Feb.)