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Review by John Messer
Like Ken Follett, Len Deighton, and Robert Harris, veteran journalist and CNN producer Daniel Silva has drawn back the curtain of secrecy surrounding espionage during World War II and used the facts as the basis for a gripping spy thriller. The Unlikely Spy deals with the Allies' effort to protect one of the war's greatest secrets -- the artificial harbors, code named Operation Mulberry, that made the D-Day landings in Normandy possible. Silva's story combines extensive research and arresting characters in an ingenious plot shaped by trust and betrayal, love and hate, patriotism and treason, life and death. The stakes are high: a successful invasion does not assure victory, but defeat on the beaches will prolong the war and, very possibly, lose it.
As the story opens, it's 1943. Britain's counter-intelligence service, MI5, has identified and captured virtually all of the German spies who had been the vanguard of Hitler's earlier invasion plans. Captured spies were either hanged outright or turned into double agents feeding back carefully crafted misinformation to their controllers in Germany.
The British case officers who controlled these double agents were often professionals and academics drafted into the service. Alfred Vicary, Silva's unlikely spy, is a mild-mannered former professor who still carries emotional and physical scars from his experiences behind the enemy lines in the First World War. Vicary is assigned to head MI5's effort to counter the Germans' attempt to penetrate the Allies' security covering the coming invasion of Europe. What he can hardly anticipate is the wiliness of a German mole.
She is Catherine Blake, a beautiful and seductive agent who began her entry into Britain with the cold-blooded killing of a young female painter. Blake has made no contact with her controller in years and, with her cover as a volunteer serving in the emergency wards during the Blitz, has eluded detection. As she heads closer and closer toward penetrating Operation Mulberry, the action accelerates. Will the invasion plan succeed with such a brilliant agent at work?
Silva's painstaking research adds to our appreciation for the scale and complexity of the West's greatest campaign. In action that takes place from Hitler's alpine lair to the streets of London and Churchill's bathtub, The Unlikely Spy's seamless blending of fact and fiction reinforces Churchill's early admonition to Vicary that he "must set aside whatever morals you still possess, set aside whatever feelings of human kindness you still possess and do whatever it takes to win."
It is encouraging to learn that Silva is already at work on his second novel. Based on this, his first, it is bound to be worth the wait.
John Messer is a freelance writer in Ludington, Michigan.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.