{"id":5226,"date":"2019-10-29T19:57:24","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T23:57:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=5226"},"modified":"2019-12-13T16:18:48","modified_gmt":"2019-12-13T21:18:48","slug":"the-accomplice-is-a-terrific-spy-thriller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/the-accomplice-is-a-terrific-spy-thriller\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: “The Accomplice” is a Terrific Spy Thriller"},"content":{"rendered":"

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His publisher says that Joseph Kanon writes for adults,\u00a0 and that’s not hyperbole. Kanon’s intense and thrilling spy novels are subtle, sophisticated, and beautifully written.\u00a0 His mastery is evident on every page and reading one of his thrillers you can feel like you’re on one of those luxury river cruises with a master chef, an expert guide, and a stateroom fit for an Egyptian pharaoh.<\/p>\n

I’ve re-read some of his books as well as used excerpts in creative writing workshops, and every contact I have with his work makes me admire him more (and inspires me in my own fiction).<\/p>\n

In The Accomplice<\/em>, danger looms and crackles on every page.\u00a0 The plot is simple, the execution satisfyingly complex.\u00a0 CIA desk analyst Aaron Wiley lost some of his family at Auschwitz and lives in the shadow of their murder.\u00a0 But it’s not until his Nazi hunter uncle recruits him to track down a major war criminal that he becomes an agent in the field.\u00a0 Against his better judgment–at first, anyway–Aaron is soon hunting for one of the insanely sadistic doctors who performed horrific medical experiments on Jewish prisoners.\u00a0 This doctor was personally responsible for the death of his mother and his cousin.<\/p>\n

Wiley is understandably haunted by the specter of that demonic figure his uncle aches to find and hand over to the appropriate authorities.\u00a0 And all seems to be proceeding to plan until life throws Andrew a\u00a0 gigantic curve: He meets the killer’s daughter and becomes enthralled by her.\u00a0 Kanon has made her a perfect femme fatale<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Kannon handles the tangled relationship that develops between them with absolute believability.\u00a0 It’s so twisted, so fraught, so inseparable from the hunt for the woman’s father–and the prose seems to echo those dark emotional realities. Kanon’s writing in this book is replete with sentence fragments and jagged shards of dialogue and memory as the story drives inexorably forward.<\/p>\n

The narrative also raises important questions.<\/p>\n

What do the Holocaust war criminals deserve?\u00a0 Can any punishment possibly be commensurate with their hideous crimes?\u00a0 How did they co-opt prisoners to help them commit their atrocities?\u00a0 What is the burden of being a son or daughter of one of these beasts?<\/p>\n

The form of the book is classic, almost Hitchcockian: an ordinary man is swept up into events he could never have imagined taking over his life, and he struggles to survive and make sense of it all.\u00a0 Wiley is a hero, but he’s no superman.\u00a0 As Kanon notes about him, “Everyone at the agency had been trained to handle a gun, but he’d never shot anyone, had never hunted anything.”<\/p>\n

The action, both dramatic and emotional, is non-stop, the denouement is shocking, and there are two fabulous scenes set in cemeteries that might take your breath away. The second one reminded me of the ending chase in North by Northwest.<\/em>\u00a0 It doesn’t get much better than that.<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael is the author of 26 books in many genres, most recently State University of Murder<\/a>.\u00a0 He currently teaches creative writing online at writewithoutborders.com.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

His publisher says that Joseph Kanon writes for adults,\u00a0 and that’s not hyperbole. Kanon’s intense and thrilling spy novels are subtle, sophisticated, and beautifully written.\u00a0 His mastery is evident on every page and reading one of his thrillers you can feel like you’re on one of those luxury river cruises with a master chef, an … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[126],"tags":[1109,2037,2038,875,518,2044,2036,785,2039,2046,1011,2040,2041,2043,2042,2045,1647,976,501],"class_list":["post-5226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-argentina","tag-auschwitz","tag-auschwitz-doctors","tag-book-review","tag-book-reviews","tag-cia","tag-espionage","tag-germany","tag-historical-thrillers","tag-hitchcock","tag-holocaust","tag-joseph-kanon","tag-juan-peron","tag-mossad","tag-nazi-hunters","tag-north-by-northwest","tag-spying","tag-thriller","tag-thrillers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5226"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5317,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5226\/revisions\/5317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}