Dead Ground - Softcover

Seymour, Gerald

3.8

317 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671025295 ISBN 13: 9780671025298

Publisher: Pocket, 2000

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A woman's difficult quest to hunt down the people who had killed her boyfriend in East Germany more than a decade earlier threatens to shake up the highest levels of government. Reprint.

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Review:

Gerald Seymour is the smartest writer of international thrillers in the business. His books might not have all the literary trappings of a le Carr� or the pretensions noir of a Deighton, but they are much more real and immediate. They read like stories ripped from foreign newspapers and fleshed out by a reporter with brains and a heart.

Dead Ground begins with a frightening incident at a British military base, when a female corporal savagely attacks a visiting German dignitary and accuses him of murdering her East German lover nine years before. The German, Dieter Krause, a former officer of the notoriously evil East German intelligence service called the Stasi, is close to the new chief of the Russian Army. Any scandal surrounding the two men could endanger relations among Russia, England, and America. The new, united Germany very much wants the whole incident to go away. As a marvelously pragmatic British agent named Perkins sums it up:

They're the power and the glory. We bend the knee to them. We grovel rather than offend 'greater' Germany. We slobber at the ankles of their chancellor, their Central Bank, their foreign ministry, their industrialists....

But the enraged British corporal, Tracy Barnes, doesn't know how to grovel. She heads off to the former East Germany to find evidence of Krause's crimes, trailed by a legal clerk named Josh Mantle who specializes in lost causes. They find a country still living through its own version of the cold war, a place where victims of Stasi brutality are afraid to rake over the ashes of the past. In scene after harrowing scene, Barnes and Mantle encounter the walking dead, people whose lives have not been improved by being part of a new Germany.

With Dead Ground, Gerald Seymour has found an innovative way to resurface the resentments and atrocities of the cold war. --Dick Adler

About the Author:

Gerald Seymour spent fifteen years as an international television news reporter and is the author of sixteen novels, many of them United Kingdom bestsellers. Several have been made into television movies in the United Kingdom and the United States. He lives in Bath, England.

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