Publisher's Weekly Review
This highly charged espionage thriller gets off to a stunning start. On the road from Smolensk to Moscow, an American tourist, Gregory Fisher, is confronted by a man on the run: an Air Force major who was shot down over appears from his hotel and soon turns up dead, the victim of a suspicious car crash. Intelligence officer Sam Hollis, press attache Lisa Rhodes and CIA bureau chief Seth Alevy must discover for themselves what is going on at the Charm School. They must also decide whether public revelation of a horrifying KGB operation during the new era of glasnost might not damage American/Soviet relations. In this exciting, polemic novel, DeMille (Word of Honor) limns an authentic portrait of Russian society. He conveys the claustrophobic life of American Embassy officials impossibly restricted in movement, and he creates spirited American agents who dodge and spar wittily with coarse KGB men. Once DeMille brings readers into the Charm School itself, however, he cannot sustain the magic that has propelled the narrative for two-thirds of its generous length. At this point, the plot becomes predictable, and the finale differs little from standard adventure escapes, with a cruel resolution to boot. Still, it's riveting reading most of the way. 100,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo. (April) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Starred for excellence in set decoration, a thriller whose Moscow backgrounds make up for a pivotal gimmick not far off from The Step ford Wives. Gregory Fisher, a 24-year-old MBA graduate, is driving through Russia in a glorious Pontiac Trans Am roaring with Janis Joplin and Bruce Springsteen when--just outside Borodino--he is accosted by an American fighter pilot (taken in Vietnam) who has escaped after ten years internment in a nearby secret Russian POW camp called The Charm School. The pilot tells Fisher he must warn the defense attachÉ in the American embassy in Moscow that nearly a thousand POWs are in the camp. But when Col. Sam Hollis, a damaged ex-fighter pilot and the Air Force attachÉ, sets out to bring Fisher into the embassy, he finds that Fisher has been kidnapped and murdered by the KGB. Hollis and Lisa Rhodes, a cultural liaison, spiral ever deeper into a KGB plot centered around hiding the Charm School not only from the West but also from peacenik politicians rosy with glasnost and dÉtente. Hollis is slightly at odds also with Seth Alevy, the CIA chief at the embassy, who is Lisa's ex-lover. Both Hollis and Alevy believe the summit and arms talks should be dead and buried. Eventually, Alevy penetrates the Charm School after the KGB kidnaps Hollis and Lisa, and tries to turn them into spy-instructors. . .for what the Charm School does is turn out perfect Russian spies who have been groomed by American POWs: in the past 20 years, over 3,000 flawlessly well-spoken spies have been infiltrated into the States, become sleeper agents, agents in place, agents of influence, whether as computer operators or trash collectors at the CIA, not as conventional spies but something even more insidious: a Fifth Column encased in hyper-real Americanism. DeMille's strong new maturity as a suspense novelist engaged with deep-running themes, first seen in 1985's Word of Honor, has been set aside for highly engaging super-suspense padded with zipteen entertaining yards of Nick & Nora Charles sex banter and the intracultural ironies of spycraft. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The sustained action of this chilling vision of modern Russia starts with a young American tourist phoning the U.S. embassy in Moscow to report an unusual encounter with a U.S. Air Force major in the forest near Borodino. The tourist then vanishes and the officer is identified as a Vietnam MIA. Attaches Sam Hollis and Lisa Rhodes eventually uncover a spy school graduating several hundred ``Americans'' each year and staffed by an unwilling faculty made up of American servicemen missing from Vietnam. The blockbuster ends after a maverick CIA agent pulls off a hair-raising escape to the West, carrying proof of the camp's existence. John North, L.R.C., Ryerson Polytechnical Inst., Toronto (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
