Escape from Estonia by Richard Wake (Alex Kovacs #11)
English | 2023 | Mystery & Thriller | 886 KB
THE WAR IS OVER, BUT THE FIGHT CONTINUES.
In the latest book in the Alex Kovacs thriller series, the site is a new one but the problems are old. Alex finds himself in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, doing the kind of Cold War espionage work — chronicling train arrivals and shipments and the like — that is mundane on the one hand but viewed as vital in the struggle against Soviet oppression. The complications are numerous, though, because of Estonia’s recent history: taken over by the Soviets, and then by the Nazis, and then by the Soviets again, all in the space of a few years. The result is a kind of national dizziness, as people who cozied up to the Soviets, and then the Nazis, and then the Soviets again, attempt to look their neighbors in the eye without tumbling over. And even years after the end of World War II, the fight against Nazism seemingly won, the Hitler-lovers remain as unkill-able as cockroaches.
In the midst of all of that, Alex is torn by his view of right and wrong, and his duty to the Gehlen Organization, his anti-Communist-at-all-costs employer in the espionage business. This pushing and pulling leads him to dilemmas unique to Estonia but universal in their understanding — such as his attempt to work with farmers and vodka bootleggers being strangled by the Soviet takeover of the country, and his determination to assist a man who finds himself trapped by the Soviet secret police. And then there are the Forest Brothers — thousands of Nazi sympathizers who spent years hidden in the woods, running hit-and-run sabotage operations against the occupying Red Army. Alex gets tangled up with them, too, and tangled up with his beliefs and his emotions along the way.
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