The Patriot - Hardcover

Read, Piers Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679445447 ISBN 13: 9780679445449

Publisher: Random House, 1996

Synopsis

The author of Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors draws from a palette of love, theft, politics, and murder to create a thrilling new novel. Set in 1991, after the fall of the Wall, and one year later in Moscow, The Patriot tells of a Russian security officer and an American art historian caught up in the investigation of the murder of an emigree Russian couple involved in the export of priceless icons.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Read (Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx) is a fine, sometimes masterful, novelist?but a savvy thriller-writer he's not, as evidenced by this plunge into the genre set amongst spies and revolutionaries in the Berlin and Moscow of the early 1990s. As Berlin police investigate the gruesome torture-murder of a Russian couple dealing in smuggled icons, a KGB agent pursues a maverick former colleague. Meanwhile, Francesca McDermott, an American art historian, arrives in Berlin to organize a huge retrospective exhibition of work by Russian artists who had been suppressed or driven out by Communists. As these plot lines begin to connect, it seems that McDermott is in danger of being used as a pawn in an elaborate scheme by anti-reformist Russian patriots to bankroll a rebellion against their country's pro-West realignment. But none of the characters here displays the life force of some earlier Read protagonists, and the plotting itself is flawed: several key story elements are contrived and the major twists and surprises are telegraphed. Read brings his usual erudition and insight to this book, commenting insightfully on the ideological identity crises at play as anti-Communists discover the flaws of Western capitalism. If only he'd brought the knack for plotting that can render gripping even a thriller as unsophisticated as the typical Ludlum or Higgins, he might have produced a more memorable novel.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

The systematic looting and pillaging of the art treasures of Europe and Russia during World War II is the foundation for this slick, present-day thriller about an unbelievably gutsy art heist. Read, a prolific novelist as well as the author of Alive (1979) and Ablaze (1993), a book about Chernobyl, uses a classic two-strand plot structure. One involves an attractive, ambitious, female American art historian who has been invited to Berlin to curate a groundbreaking exhibition of modern Russian art. Francesca is excited about the project, but there are some curious anomalies. For starters, there's the impossibly tight schedule, and then there's our heroine's "dashing" Russian colleague, who seems too intense, athletic, and mysterious for a scholar. Meanwhile, as this unlikely duo blends work with romance, a Russian agent, formerly of the KGB, conducts a seemingly lackadaisical search for a missing operative believed to be plotting a Communist resurgence bankrolled with a cache of stolen paintings. So it's "art for art's sake" versus socialist power plays in this lively mix of art history, espionage, and doomed love. Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679445447
• ISBN 13: 9780679445449
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 290