The Prodigal Spy - Hardcover

Joseph-kanon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316646474 ISBN 13: 9780316646475

Publisher: Little Brown, 1999

Synopsis

Performance by Boyd Gaines
4 Cassettes: 0-553-52523-9
5 CDs:  0-553-45636-9
6 Hours

Washington, 1950.  The trouble with history, Nick Kotlar's father tells him, is that you have to live through it before you know how it'll come out.  And for Walter Kotlar, a high-level State Department official, the stakes couldn't be higher: an ambitious Congressman has accused him of treason.  As nick watches helplessly, his family's privileged world is turned upside down in a frenzy of klieg lights and banging gavels.  Then one snowy night the chief witness against his father plunges to her death and his father flees, leaving only an endless mystery and the stain of his defection.  It would be better, Nick is told, to think of him as dead.

But twenty years later Walter Kotlar is still alive, and he enlists Molly, a young journalist, to bring Nick a disturbing message.  He badly wants to see his son; after two decades of silence and isolation, he is desperate to end his own Cold War.  Resentful but intrigued, Nick agrees to accompany Molly to Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia for the painful reunion.

Once in Prague, Nick finds a clandestine world where nothing is what it seems--not the beautiful city, shadowy with menace; not the woman with whom he falls in love; and most of all not the man he thinks he no longer knows, yet still knows better than anyone.  For Walter Kotlar has an impossible request: he wants to come home and he wants Nick to help.  He also has a valuable secret about what really happened the night he walked out of Nick's life--and about the deadly conspiracy that still threatens them.

The Prodigal Spy is a story of fathers and sons and the loyalties that transcend borders, and of a young man's search for the truth buried in his own past, when a national drama was made personal and history itself became a crime story.  Like Los Alamos, this is at once an ingenious mystery, a love story, and a masterly recreation of an era whose
legacy haunts our own.

About this title

Review:

Boyd Gaines (The Heidi Chronicles, She Loves Me) reads The Prodigal Spy in a smooth, even baritone, spouting off sentences with the ease and charm of television game-show host. What's more, his renditions of a McCarthyesque congressman, a sassy young journalist, and a Czech American defector--to name a few--are a treat to hear; not to mention his female impersonations, which would make Terence Stamp from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert envious. A master storyteller and consummate ham, Gaines's award-winning acting shines through, making this edition highly entertaining. (Running time: 6 hours, 5 CDs) --Rebecca Warren

From the Back Cover:

Acclaim for Los Alamos:

"Compelling. . . . [Kanon] pulls the reader into a historical drama of excitement and high moral seriousness."
--The New York Times

"A terrific mystery."
--Newsweek

"A well-plotted novel that effortlessly dissolves real people and events into an elegant and moving thriller."
--The San Francisco Chronicle

"Genuinely thrilling. . . . A serious novel with profound implications."
--The Washington Post Book World

"The suspense novel for all others to beat. . . . [A] must-read."
--The Denver Post

"Read this book. . . . It's a love story inside a murder mystery inside perhaps the most significant story of the 20th century: the making of the atomic bomb. . . . A stunning achievement."
--The Boston Globe

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0316646474
• ISBN 13: 9780316646475
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448