WINTHROP KNOWLTON

Winthrop Knowlton's books for July and August: "a summer of espionage and thriller reading."

DAILY: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Post
WEEKLY: Economist, New Yorker, New York, Bloomberg Business Week
BI-WEEKLY: Fortune, Forbes, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, New York Review of Books
MONTHLY: Scientific American, Gloom, Doom, Boom Report, High-Tech Strategist

TITLE	AUTHOR	COMMENT
The Kill Artist, The English Assassin, The Secret Servant, The Fallen Angel	Daniel Silva	All four of these feature the appealing Israeli art restorer/assassin Gabriel Allon. The first two are the earliest in the series and explain the devastating fate met by Allon’s son and first wife. The last has just been published and is the weakest of the four.
The Unlikely Spy, The Marching Season		Also by Silva, The Unlikely Spy is about British efforts to prevent details of the Normandy invasion from falling into German hands, while The Marching Season, featuring an American hero, is the beginning of a series that doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere.
A Foreign Country, The Trinity Six, A Spy by Nature	Charles Cumming	Charles Cumming’s A Foreign Country stars the first female head of MI6, who turns out to have a grownup illegitimate son in France. Or does she? The Trinity Six is about an alleged sixth Cambridge spy who emerges from the woodwork after half a century, determined to cause Her Majesty’s government as much embarrassment as possible. Both of these are ingeniously plotted and lots of fun. A Spy by Nature, Cumming’s first, is much less satisfactory.
Vengeance	Benjamin Black	Another delightful Dublin procedural by Black (aka John Banville) featuring the alcoholic pathologist Quirke. Although the heroes could not be more different, these books are to Dublin what Donna Leone’s are to Venice, both chronicling troubled and corrupt societies.
Polar Star	Martin Cruz Smith	Some remarkably vivid writing in this thriller set aboard a Russian fishing trawler operating in perilous Arctic waters.
The Girl in Berlin	Elizabeth Wilson	Pretty good espionage caper about moles in you-know-where after World War II.
The Broken Shore	Peter Temple	I enjoyed this procedural, set in the Australian outback.
Broken Harbor	Tanya French	This highly touted new Irish murder mystery has its merits but is overlong and didactic.
Skios	Michael Frayn	I love this writer, but this one just isn’t funny enough.
Capital	John Lanchester	Best novel of the summer, by a talented and versatile writer (he covers finance for the New Yorker), who chronicles the impact of the recent recession on a disparate but sharply drawn group of neighbors on a suburban London street.
Rogues Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum	Michael Gross	Some moderately entertaining gossip, but not many secrets or surprises here, except perhaps how excruciatingly boring rich people are (especially collectors). Gross doesn’t really explain how a bunch of characters he so clearly disdains have created what is arguably the greatest museum in the world.
The Victorians	A.N. Wilson	Although occasionally (for me) a little difficult to follow, especially on religious matters, this is on the whole a wonderfully rich, feisty, provocative survey of 19th-century England, covering politics, science, economics, arts, the church, the monarchy, manners, dress and cultural values with verve and erudition.

Click here for more Reading List articles.

Comments are closed