The Berlin Game (Mass Market Paperback)

Samson worries about all of the things all of us do. His passion for his wife Fiona is often visited by equal doses of lust and insecurity. His car is shot; when is going to be able to pick up his new set of wheels? His boredom with the job and his immediate superiors are both frustrating and funny. One thing is clear, though, Bernard Samson holds loyalty above all. When he was much younger and the East German Police were closing in on him, a planted agent whom we know now only as "Brahms Four" comes back to get him, and saves Bernard's life. Now years later, that anonymous agent wants out and he wants Bernard to bring him out.

Carrying all the boredom of a careful precise job where to err is not human but terminal, Samson plots and plods to regain the mettle to cross the line into East Berlin and extract his friend. Bernard is of course in his own right, an excellent spy.

Bernard Samson is like Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File, the antithesis of the sleek, flashy James Bond. The normal man or woman caught up in the spy game, not necessarily of their own choosing, trying to get through another dreary, scary day.

The writing is excellent. Double crosses, infidelities, triple crosses, humor and lies frequent this is a trip into the past where authors like Deighton, LeCarre and DeMille cut their teeth, in the evil Russian Empire post WWII spy network.

If you liked Charm School or other works set in the shadow of the Berlin Wall when Russia was the reincarnation of the Nazi Empire, you'll thoroughly enjoy this trip back to the early '80s, and the first of Deighton's Bernard Samson trilogy.
Five stars. Larry Scantlebury

'Brahms Four' wants out of Berlin, and Bernard, who grew up in Berlin and knows it like the back of his hand, is sent to get him. He takes the mission against the objection of his wife and even though he's at the age where his best field days are in the past. The real danger to him and the mission though is that someone in London is leaking information to the KGB. I'm not revealing too much in telling you that the book concludes with Bernard succeeding in getting 'Brahms Four' and his secret out and at the same time exposing who the mole in MI6 is.

Good stuff, and certainly worth a sequel.