Olen Steinhauer's 36 Yalta Boulevard is the third book in his series chronicling an unnamed Soviet buffer state. Each one is set almost a decade later than the one before; in this way, Steinhauer will bring us close to the present in the fifth book.
The first two books were murder mysteries tinged with the politics of living in a statist regime, but this one is a flat-out espionage novel taking place in 1967. The protagonist is Brano Sev, who was a state security officer in the earlier novels. As the security officer watching over the men in his office, Sev was not a sympathetic character, and Steinhauer makes the bold decision not to make Sev more appealing, even as he stars in his own book. Instead, we see Sev as a believer in the promise of socialism, even as he knows about the awful things done in its name. He has been alienated from his family since driving his father out of the country 20 years ago.
The plot is as slow and byzantine as anything from the pen of John LeCarre, but it's better than anything LeCarre's written in the last 15 years. Steinhauer deals in the same moral ambiguities, the same questions about ends and means, but manages the further trick of writing it from the perspective of the "wrong" side.
Beat the Reaper, by contrast, is a breezy, showy novel, with no real depth at all. Maybe the contrast with 36 Yalta Boulevard made me more willing to go with it than I might otherwise, but whatever the reason, I loved this book. Author Josh Bazell has a very funny authorial voice with an edge to it. The climax is a real show-stopper, and it'll be interesting to see how Bazell tops it in his next book, or if he even tries. It's probably the most over-the-top macho thing I've read in a long time.
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