Show Me a Hero - Softcover

Allbeury, Ted

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340580879 ISBN 13: 9780340580875

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993

Synopsis

"Certain things are constants and Ted Allbeury is one. In book after book the prolific British writer of espionage tales has maintained a superior level." — New York Times Book Review
"The most consistently inventive of our novelists of espionage, the one that other thriller writers point to as the finest craftsman among them." — Guardian, U.K.
"No one picks through the intelligence maze with more authority or humanity than Allbeury." — Sunday (London) Times
Andrei Aarons cherished the noble ideals of Communism from his earliest childhood. Recognizing his devotion to the Party and his remarkable powers of persuasion, the Soviets dispatch Aarons to Paris in 1930 and eight years later to the United States. In New York City, Aarons poses as a middle-class bookseller, all the while establishing a flourishing espionage network.
But Aarons grows disenchanted over the years, between the reports from Moscow of corruption, greed, and murder and his own increasing concern about the possibility of war between the superpowers. Hoping to keep tensions from bubbling over, Aarons turns double agent, maintaining his Soviet contacts but all the while conducting secret meetings with American presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. Based on a real-life story, this suspenseful novel by a former British Intelligence officer offers a captivating tale of Cold War espionage.

About this title

About the Author

Ted Allbeury (1917–2005) was an intelligence officer with Great Britain's Special Operations Executive during World War II; afterward, he ran agents between East and West Germany. Allbeury's firsthand Cold War experiences enliven his espionage novels, and he was praised by the New York Times Book Review as "a most knowledgeable chronicler of espionage " and by Booklist as "a master of the genre."

From Kirkus Reviews

Prolific thriller specialist Allbeury (A Time Without Shadows, 1991, etc.) backtracks in a rather nostalgic bit of historic fiction about a loyal communist who spent his life in the US spying for a glorious USSR that never existed. ``Based on truth'' and covering a cold war that has ended, leaving no doubt about the outcome, this is more memoir than thriller. Motherless little Andrei Aarons follows his father, a Jewish glove-maker and loyal communist, into Parisian exile in the last days of the Romanovs. Spotted as a comer by the Bolsheviks on their way to power, Andrei gets sent to spy school and a lifetime assignment as the Soviet man on the scene in New York, where, with his loyal communist French wife, he sets up as a bookdealer and political spy. Although he's expected to run the usual nuts-and- bolts espionage and crack the whip over the American communist cells, his specialty is soon seen to be his ability to read the Americans and interpret them for the leaders in Moscow. Admiring the optimistic Americans among whom he lives but steeped from infancy in the purest Communist theory, the keenly analytical Aarons is uniquely able to understand and predict US opinion on and reaction to anything the Muscovites might come up with, including the treaty with Nazi Germany. When WW II ends and Stalin's expansionist madness increases, Aarons, who has never lost the communist vision, becomes concerned for world peace and--thanks to the machinations of a Wall Street lawyer and a Franco-Russian CIA employee--steps into a role as personal interpreter of the Russians for Truman and then, years later, for Kennedy. He seems to have been largely and frequently responsible for the avoidance of WW III. Allbeury, a Briton, never gets American speech nailed down, but his heart's in the right place. This is gentle reading for pensioned cold war soldiers. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0340580879
• ISBN 13: 9780340580875
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464