... well-paced ... A former foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, with experience in Germany and the Middle East, Fesperman has captured a seedy atmosphere of panic and moral compromise: While young people took pickaxes to the wall, the dinosaurs of the regime retreated to their luxurious gated compounds, fled or tried to leverage their evaporating power .... Fesperman accurately depicts the corrosive effect of life under a surveillance society, debasing both the watchers and the watched ... Most Cold War spy novels focus on the Manichaean ideological struggle between East and West; this one successfully explores a grayer era, when neither side in the conflict understood quite what was happening and the old rules of the game evaporated in a matter of weeks. The trade in truth and lies was booming, and nothing was as it seemed.
The story leads to an exciting conclusion—a thoroughly surprising spin on the typical spies-on-the-run finale—but it is the relationships among the principals that give the novel its depth and power ... Fesperman builds his story around the inner lives of his characters, an approach that transforms typical espionage tropes into universal human drama.
Until the thrilling climax, what’s at stake—what the pitched strategic battles are about—is treated almost as an afterthought. It's the gamesmanship that matters most. Emil's secret meetings with Wolf have the color and bounce of a much finer wine than the one they’re drinking ... An engrossing, deep-in-the-weeds thriller.
Many a Berlin-set spy novel comprises a tale of two cities which plays out during the heated tensions of the Cold War. Dan Fesperman's latest spy thriller, Winter Work, offers a refreshing variant on this by immersing its reader in the murky corners and wooded surroundings of the German capital at a brief yet pivotal stage in the city's history seldom depicted in fiction ... a gripping, tightly plotted old-school spy novel ... Occasionally Fesperman's prose comes across as either lofty or perfunctory. And despite all the dark deeds and cloak-and-dagger intrigue, the book lacks both the subtlety and the complexity of a more nuanced John le Carré work ... However, there is still a great deal to relish, not least a number of precision-tooled set pieces, from a taut safe-breaking scene to an exciting assault on a safe house is vividly rendered, as is a time of convulsive change and the hopes, anxieties and machinations of those caught up in the chaos.
... superb ... Fesperman nicely works historical figures into the complex plot while painting an evocative portrait of East Berlin...as the action builds to a deeply satisfying denouement. Cold War–era spy fiction doesn’t get much better than this.
