From Publishers Weekly
Set mainly among a group of British Army officers in Germany in August 1945, this new thriller by the author of The Labyrinth Maker exemplifies the truism about war: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. Capt. Fred Fattorini of the Royal Engineers, member of a powerful British banking family, wonders why a small English detail breaks the civil war truce in Greece in February 1945. He doesn't find out until he's assigned to that same special unit, called TRR-2, in occupied Germany. Fattorini remains obsessed with the incident, trying to ferret out the truthfrom his "mad" colonel, various fellow majors (his own promotion is a mystery to him) and the boyish, loquacious Capt. Audley. Only after an exercize in lifting a German DP scientist, in which the British double-cross the Americans, does Fattorini discover what is really going on: a British attempt to co-opt high-level German scientists from under the noses of the Russians and uncover a Russian operative in their midst. There are hints of Evelyn Waugh's wartime trilogy and definite tendencies toward Anthony Powell's obliqueness in his A Dance to the Music of Time series. But obliqueness here becomes annoyingly talky, and the tone of anguished cynicism seems stagey. This is not Price's best effort.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
